ART.
SCULPTURE.
THE English sculptor pursues a mournful and harassing trade, and must be endowed with a rare stoutness or levity of heart. It is his, at the bidding of private or public compunc- tion, to reverse the decent offices of the undertaker, to sum- mon back on a reckless and monstrous scale the buried features of the great and good, and to fit them with inordinate coats and trousers. The great and good, while they lived, avoided him like the plague ; few men have ever been known of so swelling a mind as to have a colossal likeness cut in their life- time ; none that survived the outrage long. In an over- weening, a fond or impatient moment, perhaps, they allowed a bust to be executed ; this could afterwards be hid in a cupboard, or dissembled as a hatstand, or given to a reformatory. The memorial statue is a sin of committee; of that horrible temerity of men who singly would have turned cowards at the thought, but who, mar- shalled round a table to dispose somehow of a subscription, are seized upon by the instincts of sport to check any stirrings of invention on the part of the sculptor by gay amendments to his scheme, till he, as well as they; forgets the awful nature of the project so irresponsibly fathered. Thus does the modest statesman come to flaunt it in the cold, lugubrious parody of a gigantic sugarloaf ; or the shy philanthropist bulges to the astonished winds in bloated brass. Consider what the sculptor is asked to do. He has never, perhaps, seen his subject in life, and is poorly provided with a east of his features in death, and a photograph or two. From these he makes his sketch, and submits it to the criticism of the committee; and one will think the nose very well, but the chin wanting in repose, another pronounce the forehead exalted, but mis 3 a wistful something
about the cheek, till over all passes the obliterated character, the strenuous pleasantness, of the retouched photograph. An then the body A model must be procured as nearly aa possible of the subject's build, but all individual character must be suppressed and smoothed out of him, since his really vital characters are not those of the dead; he must be "generalised," "idealised," forsooth, which means in this connection omitting all the life of modern dress and retaining only its vulgarity. For the same thing happens usually in the treatment of the dress as in the treatment of the face. The face is a compromise that halts between the man he was, and his friends' conception of the angel he is ; whereas the ideal in this matter for the sculptor is to seize on the indi- vidual facets and furrows that Nature and Time have engraved on the flesh, and catch the signature of life, whether noble or grotesque. So with clothes. To timidly make-believe that a frock-coat is a toga, or to apologise for its form by " generalising " it into a flabby evasion, is a hopelessly wrong treatment ; the right is to watch for the lines and planes that reveal bodily structure and habit, to give- the coat as half a vesture that conceals, half a gesture that follows the bodily action of the moment. Sculp- ture of this kind needs study from the life, and waits. for the artist with the daring and the tact to invent its- formula. Not marble or bronze, perhaps, would be the material; painted wood, or terra-cotta, or alabaster, more- likely. Donatello's Niccolo da Uzanno shows what can be done in busts; and if Donatello were working to-day, it is not boots- and trousers that would baulk him. A memorial emblem in trousers is out of place, a living figure is not ; and the tempta- tion should be resolutely refused by our sculptors to mix these- incompatibles.
But if the evasion of the essential notes of life makes dull and tedious work, and still more the attempt to give life- under impossible conditions, there is something more actively irritating in the sculpture that attempts realism in the wrong place, that spends itself on small effects of texture that the- material of the art naturally rejects. The tact and sensibility and invention of a sculptor are thus tested in nothing better- than in the treatment of hair, for its superficial intricacies can never be rendered in marble or bronze so as to be really like. These superficial facts, however, are all that the inartistic sculptor, the sculptor who does not feel the control and check of his material, attends to ; he worries his marble into an ineffective account of trifles, when he should have spent his- study on the larger facts of mass and direction and move- ment, and his invention in producing the kind of image of hair that marble or bronze consents to furnish. Sculpture, like- painting, ought to be a translation, not a copy ; to be and not to be is the paradoxical essence of the artistic image. There- fore are those timid semi-realistic whiskers distressing, and therefore are those moustaches a fault that is contrived by dipping a real moustache in plaster, and imitating that. The hairs are thickened, and cease to be hair, so that they have not even the poor excuse of realism.
Of the work at the Academy this year that rises out of the dead level, Mr. Gilbert's bust of Baron Huddleston has- already been singled out for praise. The artist's tact has. triumphed over all the difficulties of his task. The portrait is- posthumous ; but the faze is given in a grave, set moment of thought, which the death-mask might nearly reproduce, and the Judge's wig and robes are taken advantage of to complete a very noble design. Mr. Gilbert's other bust, that of Sir George Birdwood, looking away from a little Indian god in his hands, is also an expressive work. Mr. George Frampton's. Children of the Wolf is strong, picturesque, and energetic. The little dangling arboreal forms of small children are well rendered, and the new foster-father completes a composition that is not a bad sequel to the old one with the gaunt she- wolf. Of animal-sculpture, there are several good examples- besides Mr. Swan's ; Mr. John Purse's cat, for instance, which admirably suggests the action of the beast, and at the same time has a touch of decorative convention in the frill-like treatment of the fur on the throat. Mr. Christie and Mr.. -McGill deserve mention in the same connection, and the latter shows a relief of Hero and Leander of considerable merit.
The monumental sculptor has an obvious restraint imposed upon him as compared with the free sculptor, who has only his own design to consider,—the restraint of architecture ; and it is the weakness of some of our best sculptors that they appear to have very little architectural sense or training. It is really, however, the old defect of design in a special and snore tangible form. So many men are able to produce a figure of a certain picturesqueness and lifelikeness, but are caught out when they come to a pedestal; and the fact that they are so caught out is only a plainer betrayal of the quality we miss in the figure itself. Mr. Onslow Ford's Shelley monu- ment has many fine qualities ; the figures are graceful, pictu- resque from changing points of view, and modelled with a good deal of tenderness. But about the whole composition there is a want of compelling unity; one looks at the recumbent figure and the seated Muse and the winged lions separately,—at each -of them with interest, but still singly ; they do not seem necessary to one another, to spring from the same mood; they have an air of collection, of having been added one by one. How different, to take one particular, is the designing mood to which the severe lions belong, to that from which the straggling tree springs. It is difficult, in expressing a lack of this kind, to avoid over-insistance ; but there is an absence of the supreme composing power in those living forms of the design and their relation to one another, that comes out more crudely and obviously in the poor architecture of the base : its ungainly mouldings, the awkward swelling of it to make a seat for the Muse, and the mean -effect of the pinned-up scroll for the inscription. A deeper -study of architecture, with its demands on the designer and its inspiration for him, ought to do much to improve sculpture like this, where the artist has already at his fingers' ends a skill in modelling after Nature. The hope, indeed, for the future of the art, is that sculptors should descend a little from the emptier heights, and become the designers of grave- stones, of chimney-pieces, of doorways, of panels and friezes, in subordination to architecture. To what a mean degrada- tion our common funeral monuments have come, and how salutary a school for the sculptor would be the placing of inscriptions, and the designing of the modest enrichments a tombstone admits of ! Mr. Bates is on the right track, but it is impossible to praise his chimney-piece panel of this year. It is incoherent and ill-adapted in arrangement and balance to the space it has to fill. His tombstone is better- -conceived. Mr. Pegram's work for the Imperial Institute, again, is of the sort one would like to see sculptors more generally engaged upon, and shows in its massive treatment an allowance for the effect of sculpture seen at some distance. Mr. Gilbert's Jubilee chain for the Corporation of Preston is another welcome example of decorative work in a craft that has long been given up to degradation. The spring and life -of the whole is excellent, and the delicate treatment of the tags charming. It is a pity that the damascening and lettering are of poorer quality, and the reds and blues of the jewel- work cheap. Finally, there is some medallion work that shows intelligence ; in particular, Mr. Page's design for the
Previous page
