Lorado Taft | The Solitude of the Soul, 1914

The Solitude of the Soul is a masterpiece by American sculptor Lorado Taft (1860-1936).

It is widely considered one of his most significant "ideal" works, reflecting his transition toward a style influenced by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.

In stone, four life-sized figures, two male and two female, posed around and halfway emerging from, or captured by, an indistinct central volume.

In the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Neoclassicism of the sculptors Harriet Hosmer and Randolph Rogers was replaced in the second half of the 19th century by the more realistic naturalism of French-trained sculptors such as American sculptor Lorado Zadoc Taf (1860-1936).

An instructor in modeling at the School of the Art Institute for 20 years, Taft created public monuments for Chicago that made the city a center for sculpture.

The figures in this work are only partly freed from the marble, a technique that emphasizes the mass and outline of the stone.

Explaining The Solitude of the Soul, Taft wrote:

"The thought is the eternally present fact that however closely we may be thrown together by circumstances . . . we are unknown to each other".

Midwestern poet Jared Carter pays tribute to Taft's "The Solitude of the Soul" in his contemporary sonnet of the same name:

Silence made tangible, serenely caught

In bounded space. Pure form revealed, stripped bare,

Bereft of guises and disguises. Ought

Matters not, nor might have been. They wear

Each other’s presence like a flower, yet find

No comfort in the vine of outstretched hands

That draws them close. No mortal sleep could bind

Such distances. In dreams, we understand

But cannot have. Awake, we strive to know

But still must journey on. Yet here, a flame

Moves warily among these polished forms,

Seeking through art what life cannot bestow-

The moment come again, the touch, the name.

As lightning’s torch is herald to the storm.