PAN
By George Grey Barnard
THE HEWER
By George Grey Barnard
the intervening years he had shunned the influence of modern Paris, drawing nutriment in the museums from Phidias and Michelangelo, from the divine repose of the one and from the other’s conflict of soul, conscious of great strivings within himself that craved utterance.
All his early works were so completely in response to an impulse from within, that they seem to me to reveal themselves as confessions of his soul, as manifestations not only of his artistic but of his spiritual development.
The earliest was “The Boy”: a nude figure seated, asleep, with arched back and with head drooping on the breast; a supple form, with that mingling of firmness and languor which a child presents in sound, healthy sleep; a composition, very fresh in conception and beautiful in its rhythmical compactness; expressive, moreover, in every part, of the character of profound slumber. This single theme of feeling flows through the whole figure in measured bars of melodious movement. I like to think of it as an artist’s expression, not of a boy, but of boyhood; his own boyhood, in its unalloyed purity and freshness, which even in his manhood is “not dead but sleepeth”; abiding with him in its beautiful quiescence, perpetual testimony to the living on of the child in the artist’s soul.