Might of the Ages
Oil painting, completed in 1900
"One of the most heart-rending so-called defeats I have ever experienced was in my youth. At twenty-eight years of age I had painted an extremely ambitious allegory entitled ‘The Might of the Ages’ to symbolize the power of thought in the making of civilisation. I had visioned great things arising from its exhibition at the National Academy. Much to my consternation the Academy rejected it, whereupon the plenipotentiaries of the King of Italy accidentally saw it at my dealers and invited it exempt from jury as a representative American picture at the Turin International Exposition of Art to be held in 1900 in commemoration of the Twentieth Century. This aroused nation-wide criticism of the National Academy for not encouraging its own. The picture was exhibited in other European cities and gave me several honourable mentions, a membership to the Spanish Academy of Arts and Letters, a decoration (one of those scarlet ribbon things which I have lost long ago) and the pleasure of a personal visit from King Albert of Belgium to my studio in New York to again see that picture.”
“How can one call that a defeat? There is not such a thing.”
“How can one call that a defeat? There is not such a thing.”
The Man Who Tapped the Universe, p. 42)