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.