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