DIANA
By Frederick Macmonnies
By permission of Theodore B. Starr, New York
BACCHANTE
By Frederick Macmonnies
can modify the facts of the figure by elimination or accentuation and invest his rendering of them with that intangible something which does not exist in the model, but in the impression which the latter has made upon his imagination, the result will scarcely fail to bear the earmark of being a copy. Doubtless the artist will lessen the probability of this, indeed, may entirely remove it, by his absorption in the technical subtleties of obtaining an illusion of actual facts out of his inert material; but this, after all, is one of the active forms of his artistic imagination. If he exercises it with enthusiasm he is still maintaining his ascendency over the objectivity of the model. This is the kind of realism in which the Japanese carver indulges on his sword hilt. The facts are for him merely an excuse for revelling in the enjoyment of his skill—the closer his rendering of them the greater his triumph over the medium—and we ourselves in examining his work lose cognisance of the facts in our wonder at the skill of craftsmanship.
This is a very different kind of realism from that exhibited in the statue which crowned the principal entrance of the recent Paris Exposition. The figure presumably was to symbolise modern Paris. Perhaps it was in a spirit of mischief, certainly without much sense of humour and with no imagination, that the sculptor sought his model in a well-known magazin des modes, selecting the most famous of the young ladies, on whose beautiful figure the mantles and cloaks are set, that the patronesses of the establishment may see by a supreme effort of the imagination how they will set upon themselves. He represented her in a costume à la mode. The statue stood against the sky, a monument of commonplace, trivial and ridiculous.