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.”