The next lecture will be on Sculpture by Mr. George Simonds, and if it is half so good as Mr. Morris it will well repay a visit to the lecture-room. Mr. Crane deserves great credit for his exertions in making this exhibition what it should be, and there is no doubt but that it will exercise an important and a good influence on all the handicrafts of our country.
SCULPTURE AT THE ARTS AND CRAFTS
(Pall Mall Gazette, November 9, 1888.)
The most satisfactory thing in Mr. Simonds’ lecture last night was the peroration, in which he told the audience that ‘an artist cannot be made.’ But for this well-timed warning some deluded people might have gone away under the impression that sculpture was a sort of mechanical process within the reach of the meanest capabilities. For it must be confessed that Mr. Simonds’ lecture was at once too elementary and too elaborately technical. The ordinary art student, even the ordinary studio-loafer, could not have learned anything from it, while the ‘cultured person,’ of whom there were many specimens present, could not but have felt a little bored at the careful and painfully clear descriptions given by the lecturer of very well-known and uninteresting methods of work. However, Mr. Simonds did his best. He described modelling in clay and wax; casting in plaster and in metal; how to enlarge and how to diminish to scale; bas-reliefs and working in the round; the various kinds of marble, their qualities and characteristics; how to reproduce in marble the plaster or clay bust; how to use the point, the drill, the wire and the chisel; and the various difficulties attending each process. He exhibited a clay bust of Mr. Walter Crane on which he did some elementary work; a bust of Mr. Parsons; a small statuette; several moulds, and an interesting diagram of the furnace used by Balthasar Keller for casting a great equestrian statue of Louis XIV. in 1697-8.
What his lecture lacked were ideas. Of the artistic value of each material; of the correspondence between material or method and the imaginative faculty seeking to find expression; of the capacities for realism and idealism that reside in each material; of the historical and human side of the art—he said nothing. He showed the various instruments and how they are used, but he treated them entirely as instruments for the hand. He never once brought his subject into any relation either with art or with life. He explained forms of labour and forms of saving labour. He showed the various methods as they might be used by an artisan. Mr. Morris, last week, while explaining the technical processes of weaving, never forgot that he was lecturing on an art. He not merely taught his audience, but he charmed them. However, the audience gathered together last night at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition seemed very much interested; at least, they were very attentive; and Mr. Walter Crane made a short speech at the conclusion, in which he expressed his satisfaction that in spite of modern machinery sculpture had hardly altered one of its tools. For our own part we cannot help regretting the extremely commonplace character of the lecture. If a man lectures on poets he should not confine his remarks purely to grammar.
Next week Mr. Emery Walker lectures on Printing. We hope—indeed we are sure, that he will not forget that it is an art, or rather it was an art once, and can be made so again.
PRINTING AND PRINTERS
(Pall Mall Gazette, November 16, 1888.)
Nothing could have been better than Mr. Emery Walker’s lecture on Letterpress Printing and Illustration, delivered last night at the Arts and Crafts. A series of most interesting specimens of old printed books and manuscripts was displayed on the screen by means of the magic-lantern, and Mr. Walker’s explanations were as clear and simple as his suggestions were admirable. He began by explaining the different kinds of type and how they are made, and showed specimens of the old block-printing which preceded the movable type and is still used in China. He pointed out the intimate connection between printing and handwriting—as long as the latter was good the printers had a living model to go by, but when it decayed printing decayed also. He showed on the screen a page from Gutenberg’s Bible (the first printed book, date about 1450-5) and a manuscript of Columella; a printed Livy of 1469, with the abbreviations of handwriting, and a manuscript of the History of Pompeius by Justin of 1451. The latter he regarded as an example of the beginning of the Roman type. The resemblance between the manuscripts and the printed books was most curious and suggestive. He then showed a page out of John of Spier’s edition of Cicero’s Letters, the first book printed at Venice, an edition of the same book by Nicholas Jansen in 1470, and a wonderful manuscript Petrarch of the sixteenth century. He told the audience about Aldus, who was the first publisher to start cheap books, who dropped abbreviations and had his type cut by Francia pictor et aurifex, who was said to have taken it from Petrarch’s handwriting. He exhibited a page of the copy-book of Vicentino, the great Venetian writing-master, which was greeted with a spontaneous round of applause, and made some excellent suggestions about improving modern copy-books and avoiding slanting writing.
A superb Plautus printed at Florence in 1514 for Lorenzo di Medici, Polydore Virgil’s History with the fine Holbein designs, printed at Basle in 1556, and other interesting books, were also exhibited on the screen, the size, of course, being very much enlarged. He spoke of Elzevir in the seventeenth century when handwriting began to fall off, and of the English printer Caslon, and of Baskerville whose type was possibly designed by Hogarth, but is not very good. Latin, he remarked, was a better language to print than English, as the tails of the letters did not so often fall below the line. The wide spacing between lines, occasioned by the use of a lead, he pointed out, left the page in stripes and made the blanks as important as the lines. Margins should, of course, be wide except the inner margins, and the headlines often robbed the page of its beauty of design. The type used by the Pall Mall was, we are glad to say, rightly approved of.