Trousers in Sculpture.
By Ronald Graham.
Who will deliver us from the modern trouser?" once publicly asked a Royal Academician. It has been a question repeatedly propounded since the beginning of the last century, when this much-mooted garment came into fashionable vogue.
Trousers have at length passed permanently into Art. They have been depicted in glowing pigments and embodied in enduring bronze and marble. They have become classical. They have exacted the patience of the greatest painters and most talented sculptors for a full century in portraying them, as well as taxed the ingenuity of the noblest tailors in constructing them.
The time has arrived, we opine, for trousers to be considered as public and not merely as private embellishments. We shall leave other hands to write the history of the two long cylindrical bags which are at once the pride of the swell mobsman and, as we shall show, the dire despair of the sculptor, who can no longer emulate the example of Phidias, and represent his patrons in the superlatively light clothing of the annexed illustration—a corner in a well-known sculptor's studio.
Assuming that the modern trouser is a necessity—and we believe it is regarded as such, at least primarily—the point arises, how is the modern trouser to be made picturesque in Art?
The tailor's notion of the ideal in trousers and that entertained by the sculptor are separated by a wide gulf, which very few of the latter fraternity show any disposition to bridge.
It will never be known how many exponents of the sartorial art, who have in their time fitted masterpieces to the limbs of Lord Derby, Lord Palmerston, Lord Beaconsfield, Sir Robert Peel, and other statesmen, have sighed to see their art transmitted at the sculptor's hands to posterity mutilated by folds, deformed by creases, gifted with impossible falls over the boot, and endowed with plies at the knee which not ten years of incessant wear could be supposed to produce.