Cathedral

Art Historical Context

Cathedral is a 1919 drawing by American artist Solon H. Borglum, now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection as a gift from Mr. and Mrs. A. Mervyn Davies. Associated with church imagery, the work shows the artist turning to architectural subjects through the intimate medium of drawing, which allowed sculptors of the era to study form, light, and structure with immediacy. Borglum (1868–1922) is best remembered as a sculptor of the American West, creating dynamic bronzes of cowboys, horses, and Native American figures that blended academic training with a sense of movement. Educated in the United States and Paris, he brought Beaux-Arts precision to his subjects. This drawing reveals another side of his practice, demonstrating how even a three-dimensional artist used paper to explore volume and atmosphere. Produced just after World War I, the piece sits at a moment when many American artists revisited enduring symbols of faith and permanence. Drawings like this one served both as independent expressions and as records of an artist’s thinking. In the museum’s holdings, Cathedral enriches our view of Borglum’s range and of early twentieth-century American art’s dialogue between sculpture and graphic media.