A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

CHAPTER XV

THE MODERN BRITISH SCHOOL
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

This is an English book. It is written for men and women who look upon the world from the distinctive standpoint arising from the use of a common language. At the head of a chapter devoted to sculpture in modern England, let it be said, definitely and defiantly, that there is an English school.

The proposition is by no means as sure of general acceptance as it should be. There are many critics who appear to doubt the existence of English sculpture. They seem to regard Paris as the only source of modern work and the English school as a mere branch of the French. The real truth is that, apart from technique, the English sculptor has little to learn from his Continental neighbour. We are not writing of clay-thumbers or marble-chippers, who work for the promise of a measure of material prosperity. We have in mind earnest craftsmen who turn to sculpture naturally—joying in an art which enables them to give form to the thoughts and feelings astir around them. Great Britain has no cause to fear a comparison between the number of such men working in England and France. Owing to the lack of a gallery like the Luxembourg and the absence of the magnificent facilities offered by the Salons, the quality and the quantity of the work produced by the English school is hard to gauge. Nevertheless, it exists. When the English National Gallery is rebuilt according to Barry’s design and the two glazed loggie, flanking the main entrance and each running for 300 feet by 15 along the face of the building, are filled with British sculpture, doubt will be impossible.

Nor is this all. English sculpture is, in a very true sense, a national art. Not as we should apply the term to the art of seventeenth-century Holland or Ancient Athens, but in the sense that modern French sculpture is national. In both England and France, a body of sculptors has arisen, able and anxious to express to the full individualities which have been moulded by the influences among which it works.

As we have seen, this became possible in France about the middle of the last century. In England the growth of a similar movement may be traced back some thirty years. A convenient date is 1877, when Sir Frederic Leighton exhibited his epoch-making bronze “[Athlete struggling with a Python].”

After the death of Flaxman, the English sculptors drifted into the same blind alley in which most of the Frenchmen found themselves. For fifty years they made little or no effort to rid themselves of the false canons of Canova and the philo-Hellenes. Westmacott, MacDowell, and Wyatt, to mention three English sculptors, all based their style upon that of the Venetian master. Arguing from the supreme achievements of the Greeks, they chose to imitate the classic manner as closely as possible. Their technique was Greek; their subjects were Greek; everything was Greek except their habits of thought and feeling. To Canova and Thorvaldsen, the ideas of Winckelmann and Lessing had come with the freshness of a newly discovered truth. They had the stimulating force of novelty. During the following fifty years, however, the pseudo-Greek canon was merely accepted as a convenient form which at least had the merit of sparing the artist the trouble of fresh invention.

The consequences, as far as English sculpture is concerned, can best be realized from a visit to the Gibson Gallery at Burlington House, London.

Gibson, who was born in 1790, was, perhaps, the most popular of Canova’s English pupils—assuming that he did not forfeit all claim to be regarded as an Englishman during his twenty-seven years’ stay in Rome. Upon his death, in 1866, he bequeathed the contents of his studio to the British public, and they are now housed in the Diploma Gallery at the Royal Academy. Gibson is perhaps best known through his “Venus.” It created a stir at the time of its first exhibition, owing to the sculptor’s attempt to popularize “tinted” sculpture, in imitation of the classical fashion. The statue was designed to stand in a pale purple-blue niche. The hair and eyes of the goddess were decidedly coloured, the body being stained a rose tint. Gibson, however, failed to persuade the public and the sculptors of his age that any departure from an absolute dependence upon pure form was desirable. The “Tinted Venus” was the first and the last of its race.

JOHN GIBSON

HYLAS AND THE NYMPHS

Tate Gallery, London

An equally illuminating example of Gibson’s style can be seen at the Tate Gallery. This is the group, “[Hylas and the Nymphs],” modelled in 1826. The technical industry of the sculptor and his feeling for sculptural form are obvious at once. But no one, comparing the “[Hylas]” with the modern works of the British school which surround it, can fail to see the sickly conventionalism with which it is imbued. Notice, for instance, the modelling of the limbs of the two nymphs, and compare them with those of the boy. Surely any imaginative sculptor of the modern school would insist, above all, upon the obvious contrast between the male and the female form, seeing that the story of Hylas itself depends upon this very point. Gibson, however, practically models the male and the female limbs, the male and the female flesh, alike. Hylas has not the legs of a youth, nor have the nymphs, who have been smitten by his beauty, the legs of women. Gibson has chosen to adopt a conventional compromise, unrelated to anything in nature, and selected for no other reason than a fancied resemblance to the Greek style. The three figures are graceful enough. But they are unsatisfying in the last degree to all who have felt the far more potent emotions arising from a rigid adherence to nature. Hence “[Hylas and the Nymphs]” and the works in the Gibson Gallery remain as perpetual memorials of all that the artists of our own day had to rid themselves before the rebirth of English sculpture was possible.

Matters improved very little during the thirty years following the production of Gibson’s “[Hylas].” What can we learn from the exhibitions of 1851 and 1862, which may be fairly taken to represent the apotheosis of mid-Victorian artistic taste?

In his official guide to the Fine Art Section of 1862 the editor, F. T. Palgrave—of “Golden Treasury” fame—refers to sculpture as “the forlorn hope of modern art,” and proceeds to answer the question “whence this deathly decline?” The exhibition contained examples of all that was best in English sculpture to that time. “The Falling Titan,” by Banks, now in the Diploma Gallery; the “Thetis and Achilles” relief, now in the Tate Gallery; Nollekens’ “[Cupid and Psyche]” Joseph’s ”Wilberforce” (Westminster Abbey), and works by Flaxman, Westmacott, Chantrey, Wyatt, Watson and Park represented the earlier masters. Sculptures by Armstead, Baily, Foley, Gibson, MacDowell, Marshall, Woolner and the younger Westmacott witnessed to the achievements of the living. Yet Palgrave could only grieve over the decline in natural taste and the entire absence of that healthy severity and earnestness of spirit in which sculpture flourishes. “Serious as the subject claims to be,” says Palgrave, “I confess it is difficult to think of Nollekens’ ‘Venus,’ Canova’s ‘Venus,’ Thorvaldsen’s ‘[Venus],’ Gibson’s ‘Venus,’ everybody’s ‘Venus’ with due decorum. One fancies one healthy, modern laugh would clear the air of these idle images—one agrees with the honest old woman in the play who preferred a roast duck to all the birds in the heathen mythology.”

In the “Albert Memorial” erected in Kensington Gardens, London, “by the Queen and people of a grateful country,” we have a concrete example of what was in Palgrave’s mind when he wrote.

Prince Consort was himself a man of real artistic perception. By his magnificent work in connection with the 1851 Exhibition he had done an immense amount to raise the standard of taste in England. Funds were not wanting. £50,000 was subscribed by the nation and at least another £60,000 was raised by public subscription. The Eleanor Cross was designed by Sir Gilbert Scott and all the leading sculptors were invited to co-operate. If the mid-Victorians had had it in them to produce a noble work, surely we should have seen the result in the “Albert Memorial.” An examination only confirms the general impression which every Londoner has about the monument. The “Asia” by Foley, for instance; the “Africa” by Theed; the “Agriculture” by the elder Thornycroft—in none of these can we see any clear evidence that the sculptors had yet rid themselves of the conventions which had been hampering them for at least fifty years.

THE RISE OF NATURALISM

Nevertheless, among those engaged upon the Albert Memorial were men who were to see the advent of a new spirit. Foley himself, who died in 1874, lived to carve the fine equestrian statue of Sir James Outram. This was one of the earliest works to show a clear trace of the return to the observation of nature, which was necessary if the English sculptors were to follow the lead given by Carpeaux in France. Even in H. H. Armstead’s work upon the frieze running round the podium of the Albert Memorial there are traces of a largeness and vigour of treatment indicative of better things. Both, however, were born too early to give English sculptors a decisive lead.

Strangely enough at the very time the sculptors of England were working upon the Albert Memorial, one of the greatest geniuses in the history of English sculpture was working upon another national monument. We mean Alfred Stevens, the sculptor of the “Wellington Memorial” in St. Paul’s Cathedral—the most complete piece of decorative sculpture ever set up in this country.

Born in 1817, Stevens went to Italy in 1833. He spent a portion of the nine years he lived there in Thorvaldsen’s studio, but his first study was painting. On his return to England he became a teacher of architectural drawing at Somerset House and then started a career as a decorative designer. Helped by such followers as Godfrey Sykes and Moody, who carried his principles into the Government art school, Stevens founded a school of domestic decorators which influenced decorative art in England through the remainder of the nineteenth century. A brilliant example of this side of Stevens’s genius is furnished by the magnificent “[Fireplace]” at Dorchester House.

Stevens’s great chance as a sculptor came in 1856 when he secured the commission for the Wellington Memorial. Such a group as the “Truth tearing out the tongue of Falsehood” is alone sufficient to prove how far Stevens was ahead of the English sculptors of his time in originality of treatment and breadth of design. It is true that the sculptor’s indebtedness to Michael Angelo is obvious, but the work of Stevens does not show any slavish copying of the great Florentine. The English sculptor has merely solved his problem by the light of Angelo’s experience. He has sought to reach the boldness of mass and line which he found in the master’s sculpture. A certain naturalism, also derived from his study of Renaissance art, together with its magnificently bold design and architectural fitness, gives the Wellington Memorial a unique place in the history of English sculpture. Nevertheless, Alfred Stevens was the Baptist of English Naturalism. He died—a voice crying in the wilderness. So little was his work esteemed that the Wellington Memorial itself was not brought up from the crypt and placed in the nave of the Cathedral, where it could be seen, until long after the sculptor’s death in 1875.

ALFRED STEVENS

FIGURE FROM THE FIREPLACE,

DORCHESTER HOUSE, LONDON

In spite of Stevens’s apparent failure, the elements of a regenerated school of English sculpture existed. It only needed a man of real artistic influence and established reputation to focus attention upon the possibility of better things. In view of the position which the sister art of painting held in England, it is not surprising that the lead came from two painters. Both were men of commanding personality, and both were in the very prime of their artistic careers. The one was G. F. Watts, the other, of course, was Frederic Leighton.

Watts’s bronze bust, “Clytie,” was modelled some years before Leighton’s “[Athlete Struggling with a Python],” and never aroused the enthusiastic admiration which fell to the later work. Nevertheless, the “Clytie”—it can be seen at the Tate Gallery—was a work of real beauty and power. Moreover, it displayed a naturalism which distinguished it from almost all the plastic art produced in England earlier in the century. This alone entitles G. F. Watts to an honourable place in the history of the renascence of English sculpture.

Leighton’s “[Athlete and Python]” was a far more ambitious work than Watts’s “Clytie.” It began as a small study, and the story goes that Dalou—some say Legros—persuaded Leighton to carry out the design in life-size. Three years later it was ready.

Probably sheer beauty of formal design was Leighton’s chief aim. But what struck his contemporaries was the finely vigorous pose, the splendid rendering of energetic movement and the magnificent naturalism with which an unfamiliar subject was rendered. The man holds the creature at arm’s-length, striving to prevent the thrust of the ugly jaws, which threaten death if once they can bring the full weight of the crushing coils to bear. The reception accorded to Leighton’s “[Athlete and Python]” was such that it is no exaggeration to date the model school of English sculpture from its exhibition. Appropriately enough, it became the first purchase under the bequest of the sculptor, Chantrey.

But all great artistic revivals are two-sided. There must be a spiritual stimulus as well as a technical. If the first may be credited to Leighton as far as the revival of English sculpture is concerned, the improvement in technique is undoubtedly traceable to Jules Dalou, the French sculptor. Our readers will remember how Dalou fled from Paris, on account of his connection with the Commune. During his stay in England he was persuaded to conduct the modelling class at South Kensington. The influence of his technical example and forceful personality began to show itself at once. Dalou made South Kensington one of the first centres of sculptural training in the world. When he returned to Paris, he was succeeded by Professor Lanteri—the sculptor of the virile “Head of a Peasant,” in the Tate Gallery—whose influence has since rivalled that of Dalou. Both were magnificently facile workers in clay. By continued practical demonstration they proved to the younger English sculptors the inestimable value of ease in modelling. The English school, as a whole, is still behind the French in facility of execution, but Dalou and Lanteri have done very much to remedy the defect.

The Dalou influence was continued in the second great training school of London—the Lambeth School of Art—by his pupil, W. S. Frith. The success of Mr. Sparks’ school may be judged from the fact that Alfred Gilbert, Frampton, Goscombe John, Harry Bates, Pomeroy and Roscoe Mullins all graduated there. Indeed, at one time, studentship at Lambeth seemed a necessary preliminary for all sculptors of ambition. Year after year, the gold medal at the Royal Academy and the £200 travelling scholarship were taken by Lambeth students.

LORD LEIGHTON

ATHLETE STRUGGLING WITH PYTHON

Tate Gallery, London

If South Kensington and Lambeth have shared the honour of laying the foundations of the art education of the younger English sculptors, there are few cases in which the Academy schools cannot claim to have completed the task. The fact is often forgotten by the Academy’s many detractors. Under the present system, any sculptor of real promise can practically command a complete art education. The schools are free, the professors being the members of the Academy, who take monthly turns in the schools. Admission is by examination—that for a sculptor entailing the presentation of an anatomical drawing, showing bones and muscles, a model in the round of an undraped antique, and a life-sized medallion from the living model.

In many respects the Academy system is superior to that of the École des Beaux Arts. Such a judge as Mr. Edwin Abbey has even recommended American art students to choose London in preference to Paris on this account. “In Paris,” he says, “all the personality is rubbed out of a student. French methods and technique are hammered into him so unceasingly that he departs a mere reflection of the movement of the latest school. In London there is more catholicity in art matters; originality is strongly encouraged, and the student, particularly at the Royal Academy, is given every chance to develop along individual lines.”

This is proved by the fact that almost all the foremost English sculptors have been trained in the Academy schools. In France, men of pronounced originality like Rodin and Dalou become anti-Academic by instinct. In England, some men leave the beaten track which every academic course must follow, more readily than others. But even the most pronounced innovators seem able to benefit from the influence of the Academicians during their studentship.

Still the distinction between the sculptors who preserve the academic spirit throughout their careers and those who prefer to rely upon their native individuality does exist. It furnishes a convenient method for dividing the modern English school into two distinct parts. Among the first may be reckoned Thomas Brock and Hamo Thornycroft, while the second, and more important class, is headed by Alfred Gilbert, and includes Onslow Ford, Harry Bates, Frampton and Swan.

Thomas Brock was born in 1847. He was a pupil of Foley and, therefore, came sufficiently under the influence of the mid-Victorian school to mark a transition rather than a break from the older traditions. To-day he is pre-eminently the “safe” man in English sculpture—a fact which accounts for his receiving the commission for the Queen Victoria Memorial to be erected in front of Buckingham Palace. But Brock’s “safeness” does not prevent him executing work of real beauty. The “[Eve],” in the Tate Gallery, is a work which any school of sculpture would be proud to claim. It shows the Mother of Men as a frail girl. She realizes for the first time what the loss of primal innocence entails and, with bowed head, moves slowly from the garden. The design is one of the most beautiful in English sculpture. The grace of line displayed in the treatment of the abdomen—so beautiful in womanhood—and the pose of the lower limbs are beyond criticism. If the “[Eve]” has a fault it is that the subject is clearly susceptible of highly dramatic treatment. In Mr. Brock’s statue there is no attempt to express the intensity of passion which a sculptor of the temper of Rodin would have regarded as the one thing worth rendering.

THOMAS BROCK

EVE

Tate Gallery, London

W. HAMO THORNYCROFT

THE MOWER

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

If Thomas Brock stands for the English academic ideal on its romantic side, Hamo Thornycroft represents the more naturalistic side of the same movement.

W. Hamo Thornycroft—who must be distinguished from his father, the sculptor of a group on the Albert Memorial—was born in 1850. His first exhibited work dates from 1871. A year later, he entered the Academy schools, gaining the gold medal in 1874, with his group “A warrior bearing his Wounded Son from Battle,” one of the very finest works which ever gained a studentship. It was no empty triumph. The young Thornycroft defeated no less an opponent than Alfred Gilbert, and his design challenged attention against such an exhibit as Stevens’s model for the Wellington Memorial. A man capable of such work in his student days was bound to go far.

“[The Mower]” (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) shows to what the virile naturalism of Thornycroft led. There is no sculpture which contains more of the thoroughly British spirit. Englishmen have little natural affection for the Whistler method of dashing off a “Harmony” in a couple of days and charging 300 guineas for it. They like to detect some definite proof of high thinking and strenuous workmanship in their art as in everything else. A sculpture of Thornycroft always leaves this impression. Added to that we feel that the artist is working towards a definite end, sufficiently ideal to demand effort, yet near enough to earth to come within his powers.

In the original sketch model of “[The Mower],” the upper part of the figure was draped. Thornycroft, however, finally discarded the shirt. He evidently felt that the subject could be treated in a thoroughly modern manner without departing altogether from the classical method. He succeeded in producing a statue which is neither conventional nor iconoclastic.

Whether this is to be counted a virtue or a vice depends upon the critic’s temperament, but the question is, perhaps, worthy of examination.

Meunier, the Belgian sculptor, has modelled a bronze “[Mower],” which Thornycroft’s statue irresistibly recalls. A comparison of the two works not only throws a searching light upon the whole school of sculpture which the Englishman represents, but, incidentally, brings into relief the leading characteristics of Meunier’s own work. No excuse is, therefore, necessary for interrupting our general survey of British sculpture with a reference to a sister school which really merits a chapter to itself.

Meunier is a man who has devoted himself to themes suggested by the colliery and artizan life of his country.

Brought up in the Belgian Black Country, the sombre gloom of the life there became part of his very being. After a period of continuous struggle against poverty and sickness, he turned to sculpture at the age of fifty, under the influence of the achievements of Rodin. As a result, we see in Meunier’s “[Mower]” the thought and emotion of a man who feels the beautiful misery of labour in the depths of his soul. The intense human pathos enshrined in the bronze is something which the English sculptor neither feels nor seeks to express.

MEUNIER (BELGIAN SCHOOL)

THE MOWER

In saying this we are in no sense disparaging Mr. Thornycroft’s work. True, he makes no attempt to suggest the vague poetry with which Meunier invests his Flemish or Walloon labourers. But, at any rate, the classic severity with which he has treated an essentially modern theme strikes us as thoroughly honest. There is no trace of a pose. Thornycroft has set down what he saw and what he felt. The hint of the Greek manner in the representation of the English labourer only reminds us that the sculptor who would express the beauty of the male form to-day is faced with the very task which the Athenian essayed 2000 years ago.

Leighton’s “[Athlete and Python],” Brock’s “[Eve]” and Thornycroft’s “[Mower]” must, then, be compared with the works of such Frenchmen as Chapu, Idrac and Dubois. From the three Englishmen we turn naturally enough to the sculptors who represent the movement in English art corresponding to the anti-academic revolt in France. The characteristic common to Leighton, Brock, and Thornycroft is a certain emotional restraint. They seem to content themselves with the truthful representation of natural beauty. From none of the three do we gain the impression of a forceful individuality striving after self-expression. Nevertheless, there is a movement in English art comparable with the anti-academic revolt in France.

THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM

Alfred Gilbert is the Carpeaux and the Rodin of English sculpture. The analogy must not be pressed too closely. But, as the first sculptor to widen the bounds of his art by arousing his fellows to a sense of fresh technical possibilities, the influence of Alfred Gilbert may rightly be compared with that of Carpeaux. Through the constancy and power with which he has asseverated his belief in sculpture as a means of emotional expression, Gilbert ranks as the English Rodin.

Unlike Rodin, Gilbert has never severed his connection with the academic school. Indeed, the Professorship of Sculpture at the Royal Academy was actually revived in his favour in 1901. But Gilbert’s artistic creed is essentially Rodinesque. Again and again he has preached from the text:

“Be your own star.”

Again and again he has impressed upon the sculptors of to-morrow the vital truth—that the future lies with men who will dare to put themselves into marble and bronze. He has never tired of reiterating his belief that for the sculptor:

“Strength is from within, and one against the world will always win.”

Born in 1854, Alfred Gilbert realized his vocation in early youth. As a boy it is said that he carved heads of walking sticks for his schoolmates. He confesses himself that he hired a small room near Aldenham School at 1s. a week as a studio. Coming up to London, he finally entered the Royal Academy schools and joined Sir Edgar Boehm—Queen Victoria’s sculptor in ordinary—as an “improver.” After losing the R.A. Gold Medal to Thornycroft, he crossed to Paris, studying at the École des Beaux Arts.

Gilbert has put on record his reasons for leaving France. They are thoroughly typical of the sculptor. Finding the influences at work were too potent to allow of the due assertion of his own personality, he determined to go to Italy—a stronghold of individualism. “In Florence,” he tells us, “I saw, for the first time in my life, the works of the fathers of the Renaissance, and I was struck by the absolute independence and freedom of thought and truthful representation of the ideas they possessed. So impressed was I with the fact that their representations were not mere photographs and yet so true to nature, that they seemed to reveal to me what I then understood as style, but which I have since learnt to regard as the expression of an individuality.”

This is the essence of the artistic philosophy of Alfred Gilbert. It adumbrates a high ideal, but allied with sane craftsmanship, it is one which has always served the sculptor who honestly strove to put its precepts into practice. What has been the outcome in Gilbert’s case?

There is a strain of pathos in the answer. No sculptor of our day has had more abundant opportunities. Yet, somehow, Fortune has proved a fickle jade to Gilbert. This is particularly the case with his larger works.

The Shaftesbury Memorial, in Piccadilly Circus, should be regarded by every Londoner as an epoch-making work. It compares with Stevens’s monument to the Duke of Wellington in the wealth, imagination and craftsmanship lavished upon it. In point of fact, it is held in universal disregard. Not one Londoner in a thousand even troubles to remember the name of the sculptor.

The Shaftesbury Memorial was conceived under an unlucky star. Alfred Gilbert was about thirty years of age when the commission reached him. He accepted it as the chance of a lifetime. The design has always been admitted to be a masterpiece, but throughout its erection, the Memorial was dogged by misfortune, until, as it stands to-day it can hardly be said to represent the sculptor’s idea at all. This is due to causes largely outside his control. It is true that the aluminium figure of the archer which surmounts it has darkened and has lost its first silvery lightness. It may be alleged that Gilbert should have foreseen the eventuality. But in several material respects the Memorial differs entirely from what he proposed. At the very last moment a new base was added at the request of a party of humanitarians who were anxious that the thirsty Londoner might not be disappointed. Alfred Gilbert’s design did not contemplate this, but the London County Council held that, since the monument had taken the form of a fountain, it was only logical—logical, forsooth!—that water should be there for man and beast. Later the design was shorn of its ground-floor—which was to have been a bronze basin. This space is now occupied by the steps. The sculptor contemplated the water from the fountain playing into the basin. The change actually reduced the structure by six feet. Finally, the cry of a too large water bill was raised, and the jets of all shapes and forms, which were to have played among the fishes that form the principal part of the decorative scheme, were reduced to the present trickle.

Our readers may remember how the artists of Florence turned out to debate what site the “[David]” of the youthful Michael Angelo was to occupy. A less tragic note would sound through the story of the Shaftesbury Memorial if the sculptor had had to deal with a similar body of men, instead of a committee chosen for its ability to collect subscriptions and a soulless corporation like the London County Council.

ALFRED GILBERT

SAINT GEORGE

From the Clarence Memorial,
Windsor

In the nature of things it is hard to illustrate the whole of a full and vigorous personality from one or two of his works. Perhaps Gilbert, in his double capacity of craftsman and imaginative designer, can best be judged from the Tomb of the late Duke of Clarence, in the Memorial Chapel, Windsor. It has a double interest, inasmuch as it reveals at once the strength and the weakness of his method.

Directly after the sad death of the Prince in 1892, the sculptor was called to Sandringham. He arrived on the Saturday and learnt the wishes of the present King and Queen. During the Sunday night Gilbert conceived and designed the whole monument. Three days later he submitted the completed sketch.

He knew the Wolsey Chapel in which the tomb was to be placed to be of Gothic design and, consequently, determined upon a sarcophagus, surrounded by an open-work grille, such as Peter Vischer might have chosen. As it is to be seen to-day, the recumbent figure of the Prince lies upon the bier. Two angels kneel, the one at the head, the other at the feet. With beautiful fancy, Gilbert has carved the first holding a crown above the dead man’s head—the crown of immortality, which prince, peer and peasant can earn. The angel at the base of the sarcophagus places a broken wreath on the feet—in memory of a death upon the eve of marriage.

The figure of the “[Saint George]” is one of a series of Patron Saints introduced into the grille. St. Nicholas, St. Edward the Confessor, St. Barbara, and St. George are included, the selection depending upon some legendary connection with the Royal House of Britain.

The “[Saint George]” was exhibited in the form of a statuette at the Royal Academy. The poetical design and fine craftsmanship aroused general enthusiasm. What could be more charming, for example, than the grace with which Gilbert has played with his pretty fancy of basing the armour of the Saint upon forms suggested by the sea-shells? Yet there is nothing oppressive in the sculptor’s use of this idea. It is never permitted to interfere with the main lines of the figure. The insistence upon the shell-like forms has, rather, a fugal charm, the fancy being treated now in one part of the design, now in another, a slightly varying form here, answering a similar one there, until all have been interwoven into one beautiful complexity.

Unfortunately, the praise that is due to a work as beautiful as the “[Saint George]” cannot be given to the Clarence Memorial as a whole. Indeed, in its place, the effect of the statuette, instead of being heightened, is diminished. The instance is typical of the impression left by the complete work. Brilliantly imaginative as the general conception was, the original ideas have not fused into that grand unity which is the last test of the greatest works of art. Between the first conception of a great memorial—say the Medici Chapel, the Tomb of Maximilian, or the Clarence Memorial—and the final result, there is a great gulf fixed. More than imaginative craftsmanship is required to bridge this. The task calls for unswerving patience and not a little business tact. In one or another of these faculties, Gilbert seems to be lacking. The imagination and craftsmanship which produce a work like the “[Saint George]” flag before a commission of the first magnitude is completed. An artistic creed like Alfred Gilbert’s is a magnificent thing. But it needs to be allied with strength of character and a rigid self-criticism. Had the English sculptor added a measure of the nature of Michael Angelo to the strain of rich poetry and high artistic ideality with which he has been endowed, England would have been able to boast a genius of the first order. As things are, it can be grateful for—an Alfred Gilbert.

ONSLOW FORD

EGYPTIAN SINGER

Tate Gallery, London

The sculptor who shared with Alfred Gilbert the honour of having been the earliest Englishman to express through marble and bronze the whole of a rich poetical philosophy was Onslow Ford. Born in 1852 and sending his first work of sculpture to the Academy in 1875, Onslow Ford received his early training as a painter. Indeed, he never had any systematic instruction as a sculptor. He came into notice by winning the “Rowland Hill” competition, the result being the statue which stands behind the Royal Exchange, within a stone’s-throw of Dalou’s charming bronze fountain, “Maternity.”

Very shortly after he carved the magnificent marble “Henry Irving as Hamlet,” now at the Guildhall, the property of the Corporation of London. The “Henry Irving” is one of the most complete efforts in English art. The beauty of the design and the powerful modelling of the face and hands, place the statue in the very forefront of modern English sculpture. Added to this is the magnificent realism with which the sculptor has preserved the sense of theatrical portraiture. The figure is not Henry Irving; nor is it Hamlet. The imaginative insight of the artist has been able to reach an absolute fusion of the two ideas. It really is “Henry Irving as Hamlet.”

No reference to the genius of Onslow Ford would be complete without a word as to his statuettes, particularly as “sculpture in little” may well prove to be the means whereby the English sculptor will regain the attention of the art-buyer in the near future.

One of Onslow Ford’s most charming efforts in this direction is the delightfully whimsical “Folly.” It represents a figure with the adolescent charms of budding womanhood balancing herself on the edge of a precipitous rock. Toes clutching at the slippery edge—a fancy which is characteristic of Onslow Ford—“Folly” is calling to the foolish to follow the dream picture she can see in the distance. The charm of the little work lies in the freshness of the conception, the perfect balance of the figure and the beautiful realism with which form and flesh have been rendered. “[The Egyptian Singer]” (Tate Gallery) is an equally charming example of the sculptor’s art.

Onslow Ford died in 1901. A sculptor of almost equal genius, though of less prolific accomplishment, was lost to English sculpture at an equally early age. We are referring to Harry Bates (1847-1899). There are two fine examples of his work at the Tate Gallery, London. Note the grace with which the artist’s imagination has given a new turn to so hackneyed a theme as the myth of Pandora: Bates’s “[Pandora]” is less an illustration of the Greek story than it is of an episode in the life-history of a woman of to-day. A sweet, virginal figure, she is opening the box in which Fate has hidden the unknown, without a premonition of the sorrows which must attend the revelation of the secret.

The equally well-known “Hounds in Leash,” was sculptured by Bates to prove that he was as much at home in treating a subject requiring the expression of vigorous action as he was in the treatment of figures at rest.

HARRY BATES

PANDORA

Tate Gallery, London

J. M. SWAN

“ORPHEUS”

There are many sculptors in England at the present time who would claim attention were our survey an exhaustive one. This, of course, is not our purpose. It will therefore suffice to recall two other works in proof of the intense individualism of latter-day sculpture in Great Britain.

The first is J. M. Swan’s charming statuette “[Orpheus],” exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1895.

J. M. Swan is, of course, the painter. He studied first at Lambeth, then at the Academy and finally at Paris, where he came under the influence of Frémiet, the animal sculptor. It is as a sculptor of animals that Swan has made his reputation. Indeed he may be roughly labelled as the English Barye.

Note how delightfully the sinuousness of the lithe figure of the “[Orpheus]” is rendered. Here we have the spirit, not the echo, of the Greek myth. Like Barye, Swan is a realist, though his method is the reverse of realistic, since he is more concerned with the masses than the details. Swan’s supreme gift lies in his power to detect character in the whole of the human and animal form. His charm depends on the delightfully individualistic methods by which he expresses his insight. None of his statuettes ever strike us as coming from another man’s studio.

An equally strong individualistic note is struck in George Frampton’s “[Mysteriarch].”

This beautiful marble was exhibited in the Academy of 1893. It affords a fine example of the sculptor’s art at its best. The bust is set in front of a gilded disc supported upon an architecturally treated screen, the figure being cut, Florentine fashion, just below the shoulders. The treatment of the subject is in a high degree imaginative, while the subtlety with which the serene severity of the face is rendered proves the possession of fine technical powers.

George Frampton was born in 1860. He studied, like Harry Bates, under Mr. Frith at Lambeth, passed on to the Academy school, and finished by gaining the Gold Medal in 1887. He has since acted as an art adviser to the Technical Education Board of the London County Council, a position which has enabled him to give a wide currency to very definite artistic ideals. He is one of the men with whom the future of English sculpture rests.

This brief sketch of modern British sculpture completes our task. Our aim has been to map out the entire history of the art. In our view the study of the development of sculpture in terms of isolated craftsmen would have involved a basic fallacy. The individual is no more than the crest of a wave in the sea of mental, emotional and physical energy, whence art arises. We have, therefore, been content to note the various forms in which a common temper has found expression.

Doubtless it would have been possible to trace an international traffic in thought and emotion. Its main channels might have been correlated with the manifestations of an international art spirit. We have preferred to avoid the standpoint of cosmopolitanism and individualism alike, choosing the middle position—that of nationalism. The proposition that every great art is essentially a national art may be disputed. But it has the merit of not requiring actual demonstration. Most of us feel that the artist must draw the greater part of his inspiration from the men and women with whom he lives and to whom he appeals. The only thing to avoid is a too narrow use of the word. “National” does not connote a merely territorial or a supposed racial bond. Coleridge defined the term for all time when he wrote: “I, for one, do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language, religion, laws, government, blood, identity in these make men of one country.”

GEORGE FRAMPTON

“MYSTERIARCH”

That art alone is truly living which is a record and an interpretation of national life—an epitome of the loves and the hates, the sorrows and the joys, the caprices and the enthusiasms, of men like ourselves.

We have demonstrated that the marbles and the bronzes of the greater schools of sculpture of the past answer to this supreme test. Surely this justifies the proposition with which we started—“that they are not dead things which may be left to gather dust in unfrequented museums and galleries.”

One further claim upon the affection and regard of this restless century may be made. Much of the greatest sculpture speaks of other days than ours. It tells of times

“Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife.”

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