1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Sculpture
SCULPTURE (Lat. sculptura, from sculpere, to carve, cognate with Gr. γλύφειν), a general term for the plastic art of carving, especially in stone and marble, but also in such materials as wood (see Wood-carving), ivory (see Ivory), metal (see Metal-work) and gems (see Gem).
The production of bronze statues by the cire perdue (anglice,
“lost wax”) process is described in the article Metal-work;
until (since its revival) recent times but little practised
in Europe outside of Paris, it has now invaded most
countries where fine casting Technical methods
of the
sculptor.is appreciated, and where sculptor.
naturalistic rendering is desired. There are signs,
however, of its being ousted for a certain class of handling by the “galvanoplastic” method—a system of copper deposit
by an electrical process—whereby “going over” the work
after it has been reproduced in metal is avoided.
For the execution of a marble statue the sculptor first models
a finished preliminary sketch on a small scale in clay or wax.
He then in the case of a life-size or colossal statue
has a sort of iron skeleton set up, with stout bars for
the arms and legs, fixed Clay
model.in the pose of the future figure.
This is called the “armature.” It is placed on a stand, called
a chassis, with a revolving top, so that the sculptor can easily
turn the whole model round and thus work with the light on any
side of it. Over this iron skeleton well-tempered modelling-clay
is laid and is modelled into shape by the help of wood and bone
tools; without the sustaining assistance of the ironwork a soft
clay figure, if more than a few inches high, would collapse with
its own weight and squeeze the lower part out of shape. While
the modelling is in progress it is necessary to keep the clay moist
and plastic by squirting water on to it with a sort of garden
syringe capped with a finely perforated rose. When the sculptor
is not at work the whole figure is kept wrapped up in damp
cloths. A modern improvement is to mix the modelling-clay,
not with water, but with stearin and glycerin; this, while
keeping the clay soft and plastic, has the great advantage of
not being wet, and so the sculptor avoids the chill and consequent
risk of rheumatism which follow from a constant manipulation
of wet clay. This method, however, has not been very extensively
adopted. When the clay model is finished it is cast in
plaster. A “piece-mould”[1] is formed by applying patches
of wet plaster of Paris all over the clay statue in such a way
that they can be removed piecemeal from the model, and then
be fitted together again, forming a complete hollow mould.
The inside is then rinsed out with plaster and water mixed to
the consistency of cream till a skin of plaster is formed all over
the inner surface of the mould, and thus a hollow cast is made
of the whole figure. The “piece-mould” is then taken to pieces
and the casting set free. If skilfully done by a good formatore
or moulder the plaster cast is a perfect facsimile of the original
clay, very slightly disfigured by a series of lines showing the
joints in the piece-mould, the sections of which cannot be made
to fit together with absolute precision. Many sculptors have
their clay model cast in plaster before the modelling is quite finished, as they prefer to put the finishing touches on the
plaster cast—good plaster being a very easy and pleasant
substance to work on.
The next stage is to copy the plaster model in marble. The
model is set on a large block called a “scale stone,” while the
marble for the future statue is set upon another similar block.
The plaster model is then covered with a series of marks, placed
on all the most salient parts of the body, and the front
of each “scale stone” is covered with another series of Pointing
the
marble.
points, exactly the same on both stones. An ingenious
instrument called a pointing machine, which has
arms ending in metal points or “needles” that move in ball-socket
joints, is placed between the model and the marble block. Two
of its arms are then applied to the model, one touching a point
on the scale stone while the other touches a mark on the figure.
The arms are fixed by screws in this position, and the machine
is then revolved to the marble block, and set with its lower needle
touching the corresponding point on the scale stone. The upper
needle, which is arranged to slide back on its own axis, cannot
reach the corresponding point on the statue because the marble
block is in the way; a hole is then drilled into the block at the
place and in the direction indicated by the needle, till the latter
can slide forward so as to reach a point sunk in the marble block
exactly corresponding to the point it touched on the plaster
mould. This process is repeated both on the model and on
the marble block till the latter is drilled with a number of holes,
the bottoms of which correspond in position to the number of
marks made on the surface of the model. A comparatively
unskilled scarpellino or “chisel-man” then sets to work and cuts
away the marble till he has reached the bottoms of all the holes,
beyond which he must not cut. The statue is thus roughly
blocked out, and a more skilled scarpellino begins
to work. Partly by eye and partly with the constant The scar-pellino.
help of the pointing machine, which is used to give
any required measurements, the workman almost completes
the marble statue, leaving only the finishing touches to be
done by the sculptor. In the opinion of many artists the use
of the mechanical pointing-machine is responsible in a great
measure for the loss of life and fire in much of modern
sculpture.
Among the ancient Greeks and Romans and in the medieval period it was the custom to give the nude parts of a marble statue a considerable degree of polish, which really suggests Polish on the somewhat glossy surface of the human skin very much better than the full loaf-sugar-like surface which Polish on marble. is left on the marble by most modern sculptors. This high polish still remains in parts of the pedimental figures from the Parthenon, where, at the back, they have been specially protected from the weather. The Hermes of the Vatican Belvidere is a remarkable instance of the preservation of this polish. Michelangelo carried the practice further still, and gave certain parts of some of his statues, such as the Moses, the highest possible polish in order to produce high lights just where he wanted them; the artistic legitimacy of this may perhaps be doubted, and in weak hands it might degenerate into mere trickery. It is, however, much to be desired that modern sculptors should to some extent at least adopt the classical practice, and by a slight but uniform polish remove the disagreeable crystalline grain from all the nude parts of the marble.
A rougher method of obtaining fixed points to measure from was occasionally employed by Michelangelo and earlier sculptors. They immersed the model in a tank of water, the water being gradually allowed to run out, and thus by its sinking level it gave a series of contour lines on any required number of planes. In some cases Michelangelo appears to have cut his statue out of the marble without previously making a model—a marvellous feat of skill.
In modelling bas-reliefs the modern sculptor usually applies the clay to a slab of slate on which the design is sketched; the slate forms the background of the figures, and thus keeps the relief absolutely true to one plane. This method is one of the causes of the dulness and want Relief sculpture. of spirit so conspicuous in most modern sculptured reliefs. In the best Greek examples there is no absolutely fixed plane surface for the backgrounds. In one place, to gain an effective shadow, the Greek sculptor would cut below the average surface; in another he would leave the ground at a higher plane, exactly as happened to suit each portion of his design. Other differences from the modern mechanical rules can easily be seen by a careful examination of the Parthenon frieze and other Greek reliefs. Though the word “bas-relief” is now often applied to reliefs of all degrees of projection from the ground, it should, of course, only be used for those in which the projection is slight; “basso,” “mezzo” and “alto rilievo” express three different degrees of salience. Very low relief is but little used by modern sculptors, mainly because it is much easier to obtain striking effects with the help of more projection. Donatello and other 1 5th-century Italian artists showed the most wonderful skill in their treatment of very low relief. One not altogether legitimate method of gaining effect was practised by some medieval sculptors: the relief itself was kept very low, but was “stilted” or projected from the ground, and then undercut all round the outline. A 15th-century tabernacle for the host in the Brera at Milan is a very beautiful example of this method, which as a rule is not pleasing in effect, since it looks rather as if the figures were cut out in cardboard and then stuck on (see Relief).
The practice of most modern sculptors is to do very little to the marble with their own hands; some, in fact, have never really learnt how to carve, and thus the finished statue is often very dull and lifeless in comparison with the clay model. Most of the great sculptorsSculptor’s assistants. of the middle ages left little or nothing to be done by an assistant; Michelangelo especially did the whole of the carving with his own hands, and when beginning on a block of marble attacked it with such vigorous strokes of the hammer that large pieces of marble flew about in every direction. But skill as a carver, though very desirable, is not absolutely necessary for a sculptor. If he casts in bronze by the cire perdue process he may produce the most perfect plastic works without touching anything harder than the modelling-wax. The sculptor in marble, however, must be able to carve a hard substance if he is to be master of his art. Unhappily some modern sculptors not only leave all manipulation of the marble to their workmen, but they also employ men to do their modelling, colloquially termed “ghosts,” the supposed sculptor supplying little or nothing but his sketch and his name to the work. The practice, however, is less common nowadays than formerly, owing mainly to one or two exposures which brought the matter sharply before the public. In some cases sculptors of ability who suffer under an excess of popularity are induced to employ aid of this kind on account of their undertaking more work than any one man could possibly accomplish—a state of things which is necessarily very hostile to the interests of true art. As a rule, however, the sculptor’s scarpellino, though he may and often does attain the highest skill as a Carver and can copy almost anything with wonderful fidelity, seldom develops into an original artist. The popular admiration for pieces of clever trickery in sculpture, such as the carving of the open meshes of a, fisherman’s net, or a chain with each link free and movable, or a veil over and half revealing the features of the face, would perhaps be diminished if it were known that such work as this is invariably done, not by the sculptor, but by the scarpellino. Unhappily at the present day there is, especially in England, little, appreciation of what is valuable in plastic art; there is probably no other civilized country where the State does so little to give practical support to the advancement of monumental and decorative sculpture on a large scale—the most important branch of the art—which it is hardly in the power of private persons to further.
It may here be well to say a few words on the technical methods
employed in the execution of medieval sculpture, which in the
main were very similar in England, France and Germany.
When bronze was used—in England as a rule only for
the effigies of royal persons or the richer nobles—the metalMedieval methods
and
materials.
was cast by the delicate cire perdue process, and the whole
surface of the figure was then thickly gilded. At Limoges
in France a large number of sepulchral effigies were produced, especially
between 1300 and 1400, and exported to distant places. These
were not cast, but were made of hammered (repoussé—q.v.) plates of
copper, nailed on a wooden core and richly decorated with champlevé
enamels in various bright colours. Westminster Abbey possesses a
fine example, executed about 1300, in the effigy of William of Valence
(d. 1296).[2] The ground on which the figure lies, the shield, the border
of the tunic, the pillow, and other parts are decorated with these
enamels very minutely treated. The rest of the copper was ilt, and
the helmet was surrounded with a coronet set with jewels, winch are
now missing. One royal effigy of later date at Westminster, that of
Henry V. (d. 1422), was formed of beaten silver fixed to an oak core,
with the exception of the head, which appears to have been cast.
The whole of the silver disappeared in the time of Henry VIII., and
nothing now remains but the rough wooden core; hence it is
doubtful whether the silver was decorated with enamel or not; it
was probably of English workmanship.
In most cases stone was used for all sorts of sculpture, being decorated in a very minute and elaborate way with gold, silver and colours applied over the whole surface. In order to give additional richness to this colouring the surface of the stone, often even in the case of external sculpture, was covered with a thin skin of gesso or fine plaster mixed with size; on this, while still soft, and over the drapery and other accessories, very delicate and minute patterns were stamped with wooden dies, and upon this the gold and colours were applied; thus the gaudiness and monotony of fiat smooth surfaces covered with gilding or bright colours were avoided.[3] In addition to this the borders of drapery and other arts of stone statues, were frequently ornamented with crystals and false jewels, or, in a more laborious way, with holes and sinkings filled with polished metallic foil, on which very minute patterns were painted in transparent varnish colours; the whole was then protected from the air by small pieces of transparent glass, carefully shaped to the right size and fixed over the foil in the cavity cut in the stone. It is difficult now to realize the extreme splendour of this gilt, painted and jewelled sculpture, as no perfect example exists, though in many cases traces remain of all these processes, and show that they were once very widely applied.[4] The architectural surroundings of the figures were treated in the same elaborate way. In the 14th century in England alabaster came into frequent use for monumental sculpture; it too was decorated with gold and colour, though in some cases the whole surface does not appear to have been so treated. In his wide use of coloured decoration, as in other respects, the medieval sculptor came far nearer to the ancient Greek than do any modern artists. Even the use of inlay of coloured glass was common at, Athens during the 5th century B.C.—as, for example, in the plait-band of some of the marble bases of the Erechtheum—and five or six centuries earlier at Tiryns and Mycenae,
Another material much used by medieval sculptors was wood, though, from its perishable nature, comparatively few early examples survive;[5] the best specimen is the figure of George de Cantelupe (d. 1273) in Abergavenny church. This was decorated with gesso reliefs, gilt and coloured in the same way as the stone. The tomb of Prince flohn of Eltham (d. 1334) at Westminster is a very fine example o the early use of alabaster, both for the recumbent effigy and also for a number of small figures of mourners all round the arcading of the tomb. These little figures, well preserved on the side which is protected by the screen, are of very great beauty and are executed with the most delicate minuteness some of the heads are equal to the best contemporary work of the son and pupils of Niccola Pisano. The tomb once had a high stone canopy of open work—arches, canopies and pinnacles—a class of architectural sculpture of which many extremely rich examples exist, as, for instance, the tomb of Edward II. at Gloucester, the de Spencer tomb at Tewkesbury, and, of rather later style, the tomb of Lady Eleanor Fitzalan de Percy at Beverley. This last is remarkable for the great richness and beauty of its sculptured foliage, which is of the finest Decorated period and stands unrivalled by any Continental example. The condition of this shrine (erected about 1335 to 1340) is almost perfect.
On technical methods, see (specially for the explanation of modelling, &c.) Edward Lantéri, Modelling (London, vol. 1, 1903, vol. 2, 1904, vol. 3, 1910), and Albert Toft, Modelling and Sculpture (London, 1910). These volumes give in detail every process and method of the sculptor’s craft with a fulness to be found in no other works of their class in the English language.
History
The following general sketch of the history of sculpture is confined mainly to that of the middle ages and modern times. The philosophy and aesthetics of the subject—the relation of sculpture to the other arts and the nature of its appeal to the emotions—are treated in the article Fine Arts. What is known as “classical” sculpture is dealt with under Greek Art and Roman Art; see also, for other allied aspects, China, Art; Japan, Art; Egypt, Art; Byzantine Art, and articles on Metal-work, Ivory, Wood-Carving, &c.; the article Architecture and allied articles (e.g. Capital); and the articles on the several individual artists.
In the 4th century A.D., under the rule of Constantine’s successors, the plastic arts in the Roman world reached the Bury lowest point of degradation to which they ever fell. Coarse in workmanship, intensely feeble in design, and utterly without expression or life, the paganEarly Christian. sculpture of that time is merely a dull and ignorant imitation of the work of previous centuries. The old faith was dead, and the art which had sprung from it died with it. In the same century a large amount of sculpture was produced by Christian workmen, which, though it reached no very high standard of merit, was at least far superior to the pagan work. Although it shows no increase of technical skill or knowledge of the human form, yet the mere fact that it was inspired and its subjects supplied by a real living, faith was quite sufficient to give it a vigour and a dramatic force, which raise it aesthetically far above the expiring efforts of paganism. Apart from ivories (see Ivory), a number of large marble sarcophagi are the chief existing specimens of this early Christian sculpture. In general design they are close copies of pagan tombs, and are richly decorated outside with reliefs. The subjects of these are usually scenes from the Old and New Testaments. From the former those subjects were selected which were supposed to have some typical reference to the life of Christ: the Meeting of Abraham and Melchisedec, the Sacrifice of Isaac, Daniel among the Lions, Jonah and the Whale, are those which most frequently occur. Among the New Testament scenes no representations occur of Christ’s sufferings;[6] the subjects chosen illustrate his power and beneficence: the Sermon on the Mount, the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, and many of his miracles are frequently repeated. The Vatican and Lateran museums are rich in examples of this sort. One of the finest in the former collection was taken from the crypt of the old basilica of St Peter; it contained the body of a certain Junius Bassus, and dates from the year 359.[7] Many other similar sarcophagi were made in the provinces of Rome, especially Gaul; and fine specimens exist in the museums of Arles, Marseilles and Aix; those found in Britain are of very inferior workmanship. Sculpture in the round, with its suggestion of idol worship which was offensive to the Christian spirit, was practically non-existent during this and the succeeding centuries, although there are a few notable exceptions, like the large bronze statue of St Peter[8] in the nave of St Peter’s in Rome, which is probably of 5th-century workmanship and has much of the repose, dignity and force of antique sculpture.
Italian plastic art in the 5th century continued to create in the spirit of the 4th century, especially reliefs in ivory (to a certain extent imitations of the later consular diptychs), which were used to decorate episcopal thrones or the bindings of MSS. of the Gospels. The so-called chair of St Peter, still preserved (though hidden from sight) in his great basilica, is the finest example of the former class; of less purely classical style, dating from about 550, is the ivory throne of Bishop Maximianus in Ravenna cathedral. Another very remarkable work of the 5th century is the series of small panel reliefs on the doors of S. Sabina on the Aventine Hill at Rome. There are scenes from Bible history carved in wood, and in them much of the old classic style survives.[9]
In the 6th century, under the Byzantine influence of Justinian, a new class of decorative sculpture was produced, especially at Ravenna. Subject reliefs do not often occur, but large slabs of marble, forming screens, altars, pulpits and the like, were ornamented in a very skilful and original way with low reliefs of graceful vine-plants, with peacocks and other birds drinking out of chalices, all treated in a very able and highly decorative manner. Byzantium, however, in the main, became the birthplace and seat of all the medieval arts soon after the transference thither of the headquarters of the empire (see Byzantine Art). It was natural that love of splendour and sumptuousness in the Eastern capital found expression in colour and richness of material rather than in monumental impressiveness. The school of sculpture which arose at Byzantium in the 5th or 6th century was therefore essentially decorative, and not monumental; and the skill of the sculptors was most successfully applied to work in metals and ivory, and the carving of foliage on capitals and bands of ornament, possessed of the very highest decorative power and executed with unrivalled spirit and vigour. The early Byzantine treatment of the acanthus or thistle, as seen in the capitals of S. Sophia at Constantinople, the Golden Gate at Jerusalem, and many other buildings in the East, has never since been surpassed in any purely decorative sculpture; and it is interesting to note how it grew out of the dull and lifeless ornamentation which covers the degraded Corinthian capital used so largely in Roman buildings of the time of Constantine and his sons.
Till about the 12th century, and in some places much later the art of Byzantium dominated that of the whole Christian world in a very remarkable way. The spread of this art was to a great extent due to the iconoclast riots which not only led to the destruction of images andInfluence of Byzantine art. works of art, but threatened the very life of the artists and craftsmen, who thereupon sought refuge in foreign countries, especially at the court of Charlemagne, and for several centuries determined the course of European art. From Russia to Ireland and from Norway to Spain any given work of art in one of the countries of Europe might almost equally well have been designed in any other. Few or no local characteristics or peculiarities can be detected, except of course in the methods of execution, and even these were wonderfully similar everywhere. The dogmatic unity of the Catholic Church and its great monastic system, with constant interchange of monkish craftsmen between one country and another, were the chief causes of this widespread monotony of style. An additional reason was the unrivalled technical skill of the early Byzantines, which made their city widely resorted to by the artist-craftsmen of all Europe—the great school for learning any branch of the arts.
The extensive use of the precious metals for the chief works of plastic art in this early period is one of the reasons why so few examples still remain—their great intrinsic value naturally causing their destruction. One of the most important existing examples, dating from the 8th century, is a series of colossal wall reliefs executed in hard stucco in the church of Cividale (Friuli) not far from Trieste. These represent rows of female saints bearing jewelled crosses, crowns and wreaths, and closely resembling in costume, attitude and arrangement the gift-bearing mosaic figures of Theodora and her ladies in S. Vitale at Ravenna. It is a striking instance of the almost petrified state of Byzantine art that so close a similarity should be possible between works executed at an interval of fully two hundred years. Some very interesting small plaques of ivory in the library of St Gall show a still later survival of early forms. The central relief is a figure of Christ in Majesty, closely resembling those in the colossal apse mosaic of S. Apollinare in Classe and other churches of Ravenna; while the figures below the Christ are survivals of a still older time, dating back from the best eras of classic art. A river-god is represented as an old man holding an urn, from which a stream issues, and a reclining female figure with an infant and a cornucopia is the old Roman Tellus or Earth-goddess with her ancient attributes.[10]
While the countries of the north could not altogether resist
the rising tide of Byzantinism, in Scandinavia, and to a great
extent in England, the autochthonous art was not
altogether obliterated during the early middle ages. In
England, during the Saxon period, when stone buildings
were rare and even large cathedrals were built of
Norse and Celtic influences
in England.
wood, the plastic arts were mostly confined to the use of
gold, silver, and gilt copper. The earliest existing specimens
of sculpture in stone are a number of tall churchyard crosses,
mostly in the northern provinces and apparently the work of
Scandinavian sculptors. One very remarkable example is a
tall monolithic cross, cut in sandstone, in the churchyard of
Gosforth in Cumberland. It is covered with rudely carved
reliefs, small in scale, which are of special interest as showing
a transitional state from the worship of Odin to that of Christ.
Some of the old Norse symbols and myths sculptured on it
occur modified and altered into a semi-Christian form. Though
rich in decorative effect and with a graceful outline, this sculptured
cross shows a very primitive state of artistic development,
as do the other crosses of this class in Cornwall, Ireland and
Scotland, which are mainly ornamented with those ingeniously
intricate patterns of interlacing knotwork designed so skilfully
by both the early Norse and the Celtic races.[11] They belong
to a class of art which is not Christian in its origin, though it
was afterwards largely used for Christian purposes, and so is
thoroughly national in style, quite free from the usual widespread
Byzantine influence. Of special interest from their early date—probably
the 11th century—are two large stone reliefs now in
Chichester cathedral, which are traditionally said to have come
from the pre-Norman church at Selsey. They are thoroughly
Byzantine in style, but evidently the work of some very ignorant
sculptor; they represent two scenes in the Raising of Lazarus;
the figures are stiff, attenuated and ugly, the pose very awkward,
and the drapery of exaggerated Byzantine character, with long
thin folds. To represent the eyes pieces of glass or coloured
enamel were inserted; the treatment of the hair in long ropelike
twists suggests a metal rather than a stone design.
The Romanesque period in art was essentially one of architectural activity. The spirit of the time did not encourage that individual thought which alone can produce a great development of sculpture and painting. Thus the plastic art of the 11th and 12th centuries, which was still entirely at the service and under the rule of Romanesque sculpture. the Church, was strictly confined to conventional symbols, ideas and forms. It is based, not on the study of nature, but on the late Roman reliefs. The treatment of the figures, though often rude and clumsy, and sometimes influenced by Byzantine stiffness, is on the whole dignified, solemn and serious, and bent upon the expression of the typical, and not of the individual. The tympana of the porches, the capitals of columns and the pulpits and choir-screens of the Romanesque churches, and, on a smaller scale, the ivory carvings for book-covers and portable miniature altars, provided the field for the Romanesque sculptors activity.
In Italy the strong current of hierarchal Byzantinism had never altogether supplanted the antique tradition, though the works based upon the latter, before Niccola Pisano revived for a short while the true spirit of the antique, are of almost barbaric rudeness, like the bronze gates of S. Zeno at Verona, and the stone-carving of The Last Supper on the pulpit of Italy. S. Ambrogio, in Milan. The real home of Romanesque sculpture was beyond the Alps, in Germany and France, and much of the work done in Italy during the 12th century was actually due to northern sculptors—as, for example, the very rude sculpture on the façade of S. Andrea at Pistoia, executed about 1186 by Gruamons and his brother Adeodatus,[12] or the relief by Benedetto Antelami for the pulpit of Parma cathedral of the year 1178. Unlike the sculpture of the Pisani and later artists, these early figures are thoroughly secondary to the architecture they are designed to decorate; they are evidently the work of men who were architects first and sculptors in a secondary degree. After the 13th century the reverse was usually the case, and, as at the west end of Orvieto cathedral, the sculptured decorations are treated as being of primary importance—not that the Italian sculptor-architect ever allowed his statues or reliefs to weaken or damage their architectural surroundings, as is unfortunately the case with much modern sculpture. In southern Italy, during the 13th century, there existed a school of sculpture resembling that of France, owing probably to the Norman occupation. The pulpit in the cathedral of Ravello, executed by Nicolo di Bartolommeo di Foggia in 1272, is an important work of this class; it is enriched with very noble sculpture, especially a large female head crowned with a richly foliated Coronet, and combining lifelike vigour with largeness of style in a very remarkable way. The bronze doors at Monreale (by Barisanus of Trani), Pisa and elsewhere are among the chief works of plastic art in Italy during the 12th century. The history of Italian sculpture of the best period is given to a great extent in the separate articles on the Pisani and other Italian artists. Here it suffices to say that sculpture never became as completely subservient to architecture, as it did in the north, and that with Giovanni Pisano the almost classic repose and dignity of his father Niccola’s style gave way—probably owing to northern influences—to an increased sense of life and freedom and dramatic expression. Niccola stands at the close of the Romanesque, and Giovanni on the threshold of the Gothic period. During the 13th century Rome and the central provinces of Italy produced very few sculptors of ability, almost the only men of note being the Cosmati.
The power acquired by Germany under the Saxon emperors; upon whom had descended the mantle of the Roman Caesars was the chief reason that led to the great development of Romanesque art in Germany. It is true that, in the 11th century, Byzantine influences stifled the spontaneous naïveté of the earlier work; but about the German bronze work. end of the 12th century a new free and vital art arose, based upon a better understanding of the antique, and fostered by the rise of feudalism and the prosperity of the cities. Next in importance to the numerous examples of German Romanesque ivory carvings are the works in bronze, in the technique of which the German craftsmen of the pre-Gothic period stand unrivalled. This is seen in the bronze pillar reliefs and other works, notably the bronze gates of Hildesheim Cathedral, produced by Bishop Bernward (d. 1022) after his visit to Rome. Hildesheim, Cologne and the whole of the Rhine provinces were the most active seats of German sculpture, especially in metal, till the rzth century. Many remarkable pieces of bronze sculpture were produced at the end of that period, of which several specimens exist. The bronze font at Liége, with figure-subjects in relief of various baptismal scenes from the New Testament, by Lambert Patras of Dinant, cast about 1112, is a work of most wonderful beauty and perfection for its time; other fonts in Osnabrück, by Master Gerhard, and Hildesheim cathedrals are surrounded by spirited reliefs, fine in conception, but inferior in beauty to those on the Liége font. Fine bronze candelabra exist in the abbey church of Combourg and at Aix-la-Chapelle, the latter of about 1165. Merseburg cathedral has a strange realistic sepulchral figure of Rudolf of Swabia, executed about 1100; and at Magdeburg is a fine effigy, also in bronze, of Bishop Frederick (d. 1152), treated in a more graceful way. The last figure has a peculiarity which is not uncommon in the older bronze reliefs of Germany: the body is treated as a relief, while the head sticks out and is quite detached from the ground in a very awkward way. One of the finest plastic works of this century is the choir screen of Hildesheim cathedral, executed in hard stucco, one rich with gold and colours; on its lower part is a series of large reliefs of saints modelled with almost classical breadth and nobility, with drapery of especial excellence. In the 13th century German sculpture had made considerable artistic progress, but it did not reach the high standard of France. One of the best examples of the transition period from German Romanesque to Gothic is the “golden gate” of Freiburg cathedral, with sculptured figures on the jambs after the French fashion. The statues of the apostles on the nave pillars, and especially one of the Madonna at the east end (1260–1270), possess great beauty and sculpturesque breadth. Of the same period, and kindred in style and feeling, are the reliefs on the eastern choir-screen in Bamberg cathedral.
France is comparatively poor in characteristic examples of Romanesque sculpture, as the time of the greatest activity coincides with the beginnings of the Gothic style, so that in many cases, as for instance on the porches of Bourges and Chartres cathedrals, Romanesque and Gothic features occur side by side and make it impossible to establish a France. clear demarcation between the two. Among the most important Romanesque monuments of the early 12th century are the sculptures on the porch of the abbey church of Conques, representing the Last Judgment; the somewhat barbaric tympanum of Autun cathedral (c. 1130); and that of the church of Moissac.
During the 12th and 13th centuries the prodigious activity of the cathedral builders of France and their rivalry to outshine each other in the richness of the sculptured decorations, led to the glorious development that culminated in the full flower of Gothic art. The façades of large cathedrals were completely covered with sculptured reliefs and thick-set rows of statues in niches. The whole of the front was frequently one huge composition of statuary, with only sufficient purely architectural work to form a background and frame for the sculptured figures. A west end treated like that of Wells cathedral, which is almost unique in England, is not uncommon in France. Even the shafts of the doorways and other architectural accessories were covered with minute sculptured decoration,—the motives of which were often, especially during the 12th century, obviously derived from the metal-work of shrines and reliquaries studded with rows of jewels. The west façade of Poitiers cathedral is one of the richest examples; it has large surfaces covered with foliated carving and rows of colossal statues, both seated and standing, reaching high up the front of the church. Of the same century (the 12th), but rather later in date, is the very noble sculpture on the three western doors of Chartres cathedral, with fine tympanum reliefs and colossal statues (all once covered with painting and gold) attached to the jamb-shafts of the openings. These latter figures, with their exaggerated height and the long straight folds of their drapery, are designed with great skill to assist and not to break the main upward lines of the doorways. The sculptors have willingly sacrificed the beauty and proportion of each separate statue for the sake of the architectonic effect of the whole façade. The heads, however, are full of nobility, beauty, and even grace, especially those that are softened by the addition of long wavy curls, which give relief to the general stiffness of the form. The sculptured doors of the north and south aisles of Bourges cathedral are fine examples of the end of the 12th century, and so were the west doors of Notre Dame in Paris till they were hopelessly injured by “restoration.” The early sculpture at Bourges is specially interesting from the existence in many parts of its original coloured decoration.
Romanesque sculpture in England, during the Norman period, was of a very rude sort and generally used for the tympanum reliefs over the doors of churches. Christ in Majesty, the Harrowing of Hell and St George and the Dragon occur very frequently. Reliefs of the zodiacal signs were a common decoration of the Norman period in England. richly sculptured arches of the 12th century, and are frequently carved with much power. The later Norman sculptured ornaments are very rich and spirited, though the treatment of the human figure is still very weak.[13]
The best-preserved examples of monumental sculpture of the 12th century are a number of effigies of knights-templars in the round Temple church in London.[14] They are laboriously cut in hard Purbeck marble, and much resemble bronze in their treatment; the faces are clumsy, and the whole figures stiff and heavy in modelling; but they are valuable examples of the military costume of the time, the armour being purely chain-mail. Another effigy in the same church cut in stone, once decorated with painting, is a much finer piece of sculpture of about a century later. The head, treated in an ideal way with wavy curls, has much simple beauty, showing a great artistic advance. Another of the most remarkable effigies of this period is that of Robert, duke of Normandy (d. 1134), in Gloucester cathedral, carved with much spirit in oak, and decorated with painting. The realistic trait of the crossed legs, which occurs in many of these effigies, heralds the near advent of Gothic art. Most rapid progress in all the arts, especially that of sculpture, was made in England in the second half of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century, largely under the patronage of Henry III., who employed and handsomely rewarded a large number of English artists, and also imported others from Italy and Spain, though these foreigners took only a secondary position among the painters and sculptors of England. The end of the 13th century was in fact the culminating period of English art, and at this time a very high degree of excellence was reached by purely national means, quite equalling and even surpassing the general average of art on the Continent, except perhaps in France. Even Niccola Pisano could not have surpassed the beauty and technical excellence of the two bronze effigies in Westminster Abbey modelled and cast by William Torell, a goldsmith and citizen of London, shortly before the year 1300. These are on the tombs of Henry III. and Queen Eleanor (wife of Edward I.), and, though the tomb itself of the former is an Italian work of the Cosmati school, there is no trace of foreign influence in the figures. At this time portrait effigies had not come into general use, and both figures are treated in an ideal way.[15] The crowned head of Henry III., with noble well-modelled features and crisp wavy curls, resembles the conventional royal head on English coins of this and the following century, while the head of Eleanor is of remarkable, almost classic, beauty, and of great interest as showing the ideal type of the 13th century. In both cases the drapery is well conceived in broad sculpturesque folds, graceful and yet simple in treatment. The casting of these figures, which was effected by the cire perdue process, is technically very perfect. The gold employed for the gilding was got from Lucca in the shape of the current Horins of that time, which were famed for their purity. Torell was highly paid for this, as well as for two other bronze statues of Queen Eleanor, probably of the same design.
Although the difference between fully developed Gothic sculpture and Romanesque sculpture is almost as clearly marked as the difference between Gothic and Romanesque architecture— indeed, the evolution of the two arts proceeded in parallel stages—the change from the earlier to the later style is so gradual and almost imperceptible, that it is all but impossible to follow it step by step, and to illustrate it by examples. What distinguishes the Gothic from the Romanesque in sculpture is the striving to achieve individual in the place of typical expression. This striving is as apparent in the more flexible and emotional treatment of the human figure, as it is in the substitution of naturalistic plant and animal forms for the more conventional ornamentation of the earlier centuries. Statuesque architectonic dignity and calmness are replaced by slender grace and soulful expression. The drapery, instead of being arranged in heavy folds, clings to the body and accentuates rather than conceals the form. At the same time, the subjects treated by the Gothic sculptor do not depart to any marked degree from those which fell to the task of the Romanesque workers, though they are brought more within the range of human emotions.
It is only natural that in France, which was the birthplace of Gothic architecture, the sister art of sculpture should have attained its earliest and most striking development. During the 13th century, the imagiers, or stone sculptors, worked hand in hand with the great cathedral builders. This century may indeed Gothic sculp-ture in France.be called the golden age of Gothic sculpture.
While still keeping its early dignity and subordination to its architectural setting, the sculpture reached a very high degree of graceful inish and even sensuous beauty. Nothing could surpass the loveliness of the angel statues round the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, and even the earlier work on the façade of Laon cathedral is full of grace and delicacy. Amiens cathedral is especially rich in sculpture of this date,—as, for example, the noble and majestic statues of Christ and the Apostles at the west end; the sculpture on the south transept of about 1260–1270, of more developed style, is remarkable for dignity combined with soft beauty.[16] The noble row of kings on the west end of Notre Dame at Paris has, like the earlier sculpture, been ruined by “restoration,” which has robbed the statues of both their spirit and their vigour. To the latter years of the 13th century belong the magnificent series of statues and reliefs round the three great western doorways of the same church, among which are no fewer than thirty-four life-sized figures. On the whole, the single statues throughout this period are finer than the reliefs with many figures. Some of the statues of the Virgin and Child are of extraordinary beauty, in spite of their being often treated with a certain mannerism—a curved pose of the body, which appears to have been copied from ivory statuettes, in which the figure followed the curve of the elephant's tusk. The north transept at Rheims is no less rich: the central statue of Christ is a work of much grace and nobility of form; and some nude figures—for example, that of St Sebastian show a knowledge of the human body which was very unusual at that early date. Many of these Reims statues, like those by Torell at Westminster, are quite equal to the best work of Niccola Pisano. The abbey church of St Denis possesses the largest collection of French 13th-century monumental effigies, a large number of which, with supposed portraits of the early kings, were made during the rebuilding of the church in 1264; some of them appear to be “archaistic” copies of older contemporary statues.[17]
In the 14th century French sculpture began to decline, though much beautiful plastic work was still produced. Some of the reliefs on the choir screen of Notre Dame at Paris belong to this period, as does also much fine sculpture on the transepts of Rouen cathedral and the west end of Lyons. At the end of this century an able sculptor from the Netherlands, Claus Sluter (who followed the tradition of the 14th-century school of Tournai, which is marked by the exquisite study of the details of nature and led to the brilliant development of Flemish realism), executed much fine work, especially at Dijon, under the patronage of Philip the Bold, for whose newly founded Carthusian monastery in 1399 he sculptured the great “Moses fountain” in the cloister, with six life-sized statues of prophets in stone, painted and gilt in the usual medieval fashion. Not long before his death in 1411 Sluter completed a very magnificent altar tomb for Philip the Bold, now in the museum at Dijon. It is of white marble, surrounded with arcading, which contains about forty small alabaster figures representing mourners of all classes, executed with much dramatic power. The recumbent portrait effigy of Philip in his ducal mantle with folded hands is a work of great power and delicacy of treatment.[18]
Whilst in France there was a distinct slackening in building activity in the 14th century, which led to a corresponding decline in sculpture, Germany experienced a reawakening of artistic creative energy and power. That the style had taken root on German soil in the preceding century, is proved by the fresh, mobile German 13th-century Gothic sculpture. treatment of the statues on the south porch of the east façade of Bamberg cathedral, and even more by the equestrian statue of Conrad III. in the market-place at Bamberg, which supported by a foliated corbel, exhibits startling vigour and originality, and is designed with wonderful largeness of effect, though small in scale. The statues of Henry the Lion and Queen Matilda at Brunswick, of about the same period, are of the highest beauty and dignity of expression. Strassburg cathedral, though sadly damaged by restoration, still possesses a large quantity of the finest sculpture of the 13th century. One tympanum relief of the Death of the Virgin, surrounded by the sorrowing Apostles, is a work of the very highest beauty, worthy to rank with the best Italian sculpture of even a later period. Of its class nothing can surpass the purely decorative carving at Strassburg, with varied realistic foliage studied from nature, evidently with the keenest interest and enjoyment.
But such works were only isolated manifestations of German artistic genius, until, in the next century, sculpture rose to new and splendid life, though it found expression not so much in the composition of extensive groups, as in the neighbouring France, but in the carving of isolated figures of rare and subtle beauty.
Nuremberg is rich in good sculpture of the 14th century. The church of St Sebald, the Frauenkirche, and the west façade of St Lawrence are lavishly decorated with reliefs and statues, very rich in effect, but showing the germs of that mannerism which grew so strong in Germany during the 15th century. Of special beauty are the statuettes which adorn the “beautiful fountain,” which was formerly erroneously attributed to the probably mythical sculptor Sebald Schonhofer, and is decorated with gold and colour by the painter Rudolf.[19] Of considerable importance are the statues of Christ, the Virgin, and the Apostles on the piers in the choir of Cologne cathedral, which were completed after 1350. They are particularly notable for their admirable polychromatic treatment. The reliefs on the high altar, which are of later date, are wrought in white marble on a background of black marble. Augsburg produced several sculptors of ability about this time; the museum possesses some very noble wooden statues of this school, large in scale and dignified in treatment. On the exterior of the choir of the church of Marienburg castle is a very remarkable colossal figure of the Virgin of about 1340–1350. Like the Hildesheim choir screen, it is made of hard stucco and is decorated with glass mosaics. The equestrian bronze group of St George and the Dragon in the market-place at Prague is excellent in workmanship and full of vigour, though much wanting dignity of style. Another fine work in bronze of about the same date is the effigy of Archbishop Conrad (d. 1261) in Cologne cathedral, executed many years after his death. The portrait appeals truthful and the whole figure is noble in style. The military effigies of this time in Germany as elsewhere were almost unavoidably stiff and lifeless from the necessity of representing them in plate armour. The ecclesiastical chasuble, in which priestly efligies nearly always appear, is also a thoroughly unsculpturesque form of drapery, both from its awkward shape and its absence of folds. The Günther of Schwarzburg (d. 1349) in Frankfort cathedral is a characteristic example of these sepulchral effigies in slight relief.
In England, much of the fine 13th-century sculpture was used to decorate the façades of churches, though, on the whole, English cathedral architecture did not offer such great opportunities to the imagier as did that of France. A notable exception is Wells cathedral, the west end of which, dating from about the middle of the century, Architectural sculpture in England. is covered with more than 600 figures in the round or in relief, arranged in tiers, and of varying sizes. The tympana of the doorways are filled with reliefs, and above them stand rows of colossal statues of kings and queens, bishops and knights, and saints both male and female, all treated very skilfully with nobly arranged drapery, and graceful heads designed in a thoroughly architectonic way, with due regard to the main lines of the building they are meant to decorate. In this respect the early medieval sculptor inherited one of the great merits of the Greeks of the best period: his figures or reliefs form an essential part of the design of the building to which they are affixed, and are treated in a subordinate manner to their architectural surroundings-very different from most of the sculpture on modern buildings, which frequently looks as if it had been stuck up as an afterthought, and frequently by its violent and incongruous lines is rather an impertinent excrescence than an ornament.[20] Peterborough, Lichfield and Salisbury cathedrals have hue examples of the sculpture of the 13th century: in the chapter-house of the last the spandrels of the wall-arcade are filled with sixty reliefs of subjects from Bible history, all treated with much grace and refinement. To the end of the same century belong the celebrated reliefs of angels in the spandrels of the choir arches at Lincoln, carved in a large massive way with great strength of decorative effect. Other fine reliefs of angels, executed about 1260, exist in the transepts of Westminster Abbey; being high from the ground, they are broadly treated without any high finish in the details.[21]
Purely decorative carving in stone reached its highest point of excellence about the middle of the 14th century-rather later, that is, than the best period of figure sculpture. Wood-carving (q.v.), on the other hand, reached its artistic climax a full century later under the influence of the fully developed Perpendicular style.
The most important effigies of the 14th century are those in gilt bronze of Edward III. (d. 1377) and of Richard II. and his queen (made in 1395), all at Westminster. They are all portraits, but are decidedly inferior to the earlier work of William Torell. The effigies of Richard II. and Anne of Bohemia were the work of Nicolas Broker and Godfred Prest, goldsmith citizens of London. Another fine bronze effigy is at Canterbury on the tomb of the Black Prince (d. 1376); though well cast and with carefully modelled armour, it is treated in a somewhat dull and conventional way. The recumbent stone figure of Lady Arundel, with two angels at her head, in Chichester cathedral is remarkable for its calm peaceful pose and the beauty of the drapery. Among the most perfect works of this description is the alabaster tomb of Ralph Nevill, first earl of Westmorland, with figures of himself and his two wives, in Staindrop church, county Durham (1426), removed, 1908, from a dark corner of the church into full light, a few feet away, where its beauty may now be examined. A very fine but more realistic work is the tomb figure of William of Wykeham (d. 1404) in the cathedral at Winchester. The cathedrals at Rochester, Lichfield, York, Lincoln, Exeter and many other ecclesiastical buildings in England are rich in examples of 14th-century sculpture, used occasionally with great profusion and richness of effect, but treated in strict subordination to the architectural background.
The finest piece of bronze sculpture of the 15th-century is the effigy of Richard Beauchamp (d. 1439) in his family chapel at Warwick—a noble portrait figure, richly decorated with engraved ornaments. The modelling and casting were done by William Austen of London, and the gilding and engraving by a Netherlands goldsmith who had settled in London, named Bartholomew Lambespring, assisted by several other skilful artists.
The first Spanish sculptor of real eminence who need be considered is Aparicio, who lived and worked in the 11th century. His shrine of St Millan, executed to the order of Don Sancho the Great is in the monastery of Yuso, and is a composition excellent, in its way, in design, grace and proportion. In the early medieval period the sculpture of northern Spain. Spain was much influenced by contemporary art in France. From the 12th to the 14th century many French architects and sculptors visited and worked in Spain. The cathedral of Santiago de Compostella possesses one of the grandest existing specimens in the world of late 12th-century architectonic sculpture; this, though the work of a native artist, Mastei Mateo,[22] is thoroughly French in style; as recorded by an inscription on the front, it was completed in 1188. The whole of the western portal with its three doorways is covered with statues and reliefs, all richly decorated with colour, part of which still remains. Round the central arch are figures of the twenty-four elders, and in the tympanum a very noble relief of Christ in Majesty between Saints and Angels. As at Chartres, the jamb shafts of the doorways are decorated with standing statues of saints—St James the elder, the patron of the church, being attached to the central pillar. These noble figures, though treated in a somewhat rigid manner, are thoroughly subordinate to the main lines of the building. Their heads, with pointed beards and a fixed mechanical smile, together with the stiff drapery arranged in long narrow folds, recall the Aeginetan pediment sculpture of about 500 B.c. This appears strange at first sight, but the fact is that the 'works of the early Greek and the medieval Spaniard were both produced at a somewhat similar stage in two far distant periods of artistic development. In both cases plastic art was freeing itself from the bonds of -a. hieratic archaism, and had reached one of the last steps in a development which in the one case culminated in the perfection of the Phidian age, and in the other led to the exquisitely beautiful yet simple and reserved art of the end of the 13th and early part of the 14th century-the golden age of sculpture in France and England. In the cathedral of Tarragona are nine statues, in stone, executed by Bartolomé in 1278 for the gate.
In the 14th century the silversmiths of Spain produced many works of sculpture of great size and technical power. One of the finest, by a Valencian called Peter Bernec, is the great silver retable at Gerona cathedral. It is divided into three tiers of statuettes and reliefs, richly framed in canopied niches, all of silver, partly cast and partly hammered.
In the 15th century an infusion of German influence was mixed with that of France, as may be seen in the very rich sculptural decorations which adorn the main door of Salamanca cathedral, the façade of S. Juan at Valladolid, and the church and cloisters of S. Juan de los Reyes at Toledo, perhaps the most gorgeous examples of architectural sculpture in the world. These were executed between 1418 and 1425 by a group of clever sculptors, among whom A. and F. Diaz, A. F. de Sahagun, A. Rodriguez and A. Gonzales were perhaps the chief. The marble altar-piece of the grand altar at Tarragona was begun
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| (Photo, Brogi.) | (Photo, Anderson.) |
| JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA—Tomb, Ilaria del Carretto, Lucca. | DONATELLO—Equestrian Statue, General Gattamelata, Padua. |
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| (Photo, Alinari.) | (Photo, Alinari.) | (Photo, Anderson.) |
| ANDREA PISANO—The first bronze door of the Baptistery, Florence. |
DONATELLO—Statue of St George, Florence. |
MICHELANGELO—Head of Colossal David, Florence. |
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| (Photo, Anderson.) | (Photo, Anderson.) |
| VERROCCHIO & LEOPARDI—Bronze Colossal Statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni, Venice. |
LUCA DELLA ROBBIA—Girls and boys playing on musical instruments and dancing (Museo dell' Opera, Florence). |
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| (Photo, Alinari.) | (Photo, Wurthle & Sohn.) | (Photo, Anderson.) |
| BENVENUTO CELLINI—Bronze Statue of Perseus and Medusa, in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence. |
PETER VISCHER—Gilt Bronze Statue of King Arthur, Florence. |
BERNINI—Apollo and Daphne (Borghese Gallery). |
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| (Photo, Giraudon.) | (Photo, Löwy.) |
| JEAN GOUJON—Diane de Poitiers (as Huntress), in the Louvre. | CANOVA—Colossal Marble Group of Theseus and Centaur, Vienna. |
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| (Photo, Giraudon.) | (Photo, Giraudon.) |
| HOUDON—Voltaire (Théàtre Français, Paris). | COYSEVOX—Bust of himself, in the Louvre. |
by P. Juan in 1426 and completed by G. De La Mota. The carved foliage of this period is of especial beauty and spirited execution; realistic forms of plant-growth are mingled with other more conventional foliage in the most masterly manner. The very noble bronze monument of Archdeacon Pelayo (d. 1490) in Burgos cathedral was probably the work of Simon of Cologne, who was also architect of the Certosa at Miraflores, 2 m. from Burgos. The church of this monastery contains two of the most magnificently rich monuments in the world, especially the altar-tomb of King John II. and his queen by Gil de Siloe—a perfect marvel of rich alabaster canopy-work and intricate under-cutting. The effigies have little merit. From the 16th century onwards wood was a favourite material with Spanish sculptors, who employed it for devotional and historical groups realistically treated, such as the “Scene from Taking of Granada” by El Maestre Rodrigo, and even for portraiture, as in the Bust of Turiano by Alonzo Berruguete (1480–1561).
During the 14th century Florence and the neighbouring
cities were the chief centres of Italian sculpture, and there
numerous sculptors of successively increasing artistic
power lived and worked, till in the 15th century the
city had become the aesthetic capital of the world.Gothic sculpture
in Italy.
But the Gothic sculptor’s activity was by no means
confined to Tuscany, for in northern Italy various schools
of sculpture existed in the 14th century, especially at Verona
and Venice, whose art differed widely from the contemporary
art of Tuscany; but Milan and Pavia, on the other hand, possessed
sculptors who followed closely the style of the Pisani. The chief
examples of the latter class are the magnificent shrine of St
Augustine in the cathedral of Pavia, dated 1362, and the somewhat
similar shrine of Peter the Martyr (1339), by Balduccio
of Pisa, in the church of S. Eustorgio at Milan, both of white
marble, decorated in the most lavish way with statuettes and
subject reliefs. Many other fine pieces of the Pisan school exist
in Milan. The well-known tombs of the Scaliger family at
Verona show a more native style of design, and in general form,
though not in detail, suggest the influence of trans alpine Gothic.
In Venice the northern and almost French character of much
of the early 15th-century sculpture is more strongly marked,
especially in the noble figures in high relief which decorate
the lower story and angles of the doge’s palace;[23] these are.
mostly the work of a Venetian named Bartolomeo Bon. A
magnificent marble tympanum relief by Bon can be seen at the
Victoria and Albert Museum; it has a noble colossal figure
of the Madonna, who shelters under her mantle a number of
kneeling worshippers; the background is enriched with foliage
and heads, forming a “lesse tree,” designed with great decorative
skill. The cathedral of Como, built at the very end of the 15th
century, is decorated with good sculpture of almost Gothic
style, but on the whole rather dull and mechanical in detail,
like much of the sculpture in the extreme north of Italy. A
large quantity of rich sculpture was produced in Naples during
the 14th century, but of no great merit either in design or in
execution. The lofty monument of King Robert (1350), behind
the high altar of S. Chiara, and other tombs in the same church
are the most conspicuous works of this period. The extraordinary
poverty in the production of sculpture in Rome during the 14th
century was remarkable. The clumsy effigies at the north-east
of S. Maria in Trastevere are striking examples of the degradation
of the plastic art there about the year 1400; and it was not
till nearly the middle of the century that the arrival of able
Florentine sculptors, such as Filarete, Mino da Fiesole, and the
Pollaiuoli, initiated a brilliant era of artistic activity, which,
however, for about a century continued to depend on the presence
of sculptors from Tuscany and other northern provinces. It
was not, in fact, till the period of full decadence had begun that
Rome itself produced any notable artists.
In Florence, the centre of artistic activity during the 15th as well as the 14th century, Giotto not only inaugurated the modern era of painting, but in his relief sculpture, and more particularly by the influence he exercised upon Andrea Pisano, carried the art of sculpture beyond the point where it had been left by Giovanni Pisano. In Andrea we find something of Niccola’s classic dignity grafted on to Giovanni’s close observation of nature. His greatest works are the bronze south gate of the Baptistery, and some of the reliefs on Giotto’s Campanile. The last great master of the Gothic period is Andrea di Cione, better known as Orcagna (1308? to 1368), who, like Giotto, achieved fame in the three sister arts of painting, sculpture and architecture. His wonderful tabernacle at Or San Michele is a noble testimony to his efficiency in the three arts and to his early training as a goldsmith. Very beautiful sepulchral effigies in low relief were produced in many parts of Italy, especially at Florence. The tomb of Lorenzo Acciaioli, in the Certosa near Florence, is a fine example of about the year 1400, which has absurdly been attributed to Donatello. The similarity between the plastic arts of Athens in the 5th or 4th century B.C. and of Florence in the 15th century is not one of analogy only. Though free from any touch of copyism, there are many points in the works of such men as Donatello, Luca della Robbia, and Antonio Pisano which strongly recall the sculpture of ancient Greece, and suggest that, if a sculptor of the later Fhidian school had been surrounded by the same types of face and costume as those among which the Italians lived, he would have produced plastic works closely resembling those of the great Florentine masters. Lorenzo Ghiberti may be called the first of the great sculptors of the Renaissance. But between him and Orcagna stands another master, the Sienese, Jacopo della Quercia[24] (1371–1438) who, although in some minor traits connected with the Gothic school, heralds at this early date the boldest and most vigorous and original achievements of two generations hence. Indeed, Jacopo, whose chief works are the Fonte Gaja at Siena (now reconstructed) and the reliefs on the gate of S. Petronio at Bologna, stands in his strong muscular treatment of the human figure nearer to Michelangelo than to his Gothic precursors and contemporaries. Contemporaneously with Ghiberti, the sculptor of the world-famed baptistery gates, and with Donatello, and to a certain extent influenced by them, worked some men who, like Ciuffagni, were still essentially Gothic in their style, or, like Nanni di Banco, retained unmistakable traces of the earlier manner. Luca della Robbia, the founder of a whole dynasty of sculptors in glazed terra-cotta, with his classic purity of style and sweetness of expression, came next in order. Unsensual beauty elevated by religious spirit was attained in the highest degree by Mino da Fiesole, the two Rossellini, Benedetto da Maiano, Desiderio da Settignano and other sculptors more or less directly influenced by Donatello. Through them the tomb monument received the definite form which it retained throughout the Renaissance period. Two of the noblest equestrian statues the world has probably ever seen are the Gattamelata statue at Padua by Donatello and the statue of Colleoni at Venice by Verrocchio and Leopardi. A third, which was probably of equal beauty, was modelled in clay by Leonardo da Vinci, but it no longer exists. Among other sculptors who flourished in Italy about the middle of the 15th century, are the Lucchese Matteo Civitali; Agostino di Duccio (1418–c. 1481), whose principal works are to be found at Rimini and Perugia; the bronze-worker Bertoldo di Giovanni (1420–1491); Antonio del Pollaiuolo, the author of the tombs of popes Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII. at St Peter’s in Rome; and Francesco Laurana (1424–1501?), a Dalmatian who worked under Brunelleschi and left many traces of his activity in Naples (Triumphal Arch), Sicily and southern France. Finally came Michelangelo, who raised the sculpture of the modern world to its highest pitch of magnificence, and at the same time sowed the seeds of its rapidly approaching decline; the head of his David at Florence is a work of unrivalled force and dignity. His rivals and imitators, Baccio Bandinelli, Giacomo della Porta, Montelupo, Ammanati and Vincenzo de’ Rossi (pupils of Bandinelli) and others, copied and exaggerated his faults without possessing a touch of his gigantic genius. In other parts of Italy, such as Pavia, the traditions of the 15th century lasted longer, though gradually fading. The Statuary and reliefs which make the Certosa near Pavia one of the most gorgeous buildings in the world are free from the influence of Michelangelo, which at Florence and Rome was overwhelming. Though much of the sculpture was begun in the second half of the 15th century, the greater part was not executed till much later. The magnificent tomb of the founder, Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, was not completed till about 1560, and is a gorgeous example of the style of the Renaissance grown weak from excess of richness and from loss of the simple purity of the art of the 15th century. Everywhere in this wonderful building the fault is the same; and the growing love of luxury and display, which was the curse of the time, is reflected in the plastic decorations of the whole church. The old religious spirit had died out and was succeeded by unbelief or by an affected revival of paganism. Monuments to ancient Romans, such as those to the two Plinys on the façade of Como cathedral, or “heroa” to unsaintly mortals, such as that erected at Rimini by Sigismondo Pandolfo in honour of Isotta,[25] grew up side by side with shrines and churches dedicated to the saints. We have seen how the youthful vigour of the Christian faith vivified for a time the dry bones of expiring classic art, and now the decay of this same belief brought with it the destruction of all that was most valuable in medieval sculpture. Sculpture, like the other arts, became the bond-slave of the rich, and ceased to be the natural expression of a whole people. Though for a long time in Italy great technical skill continued to exist, the vivifying spirit was dead, and at last a dull scholasticism or a riotous extravagance of design became the leading characteristics.
The 16th century was one of transition to this state of degradation, but nevertheless produced many sculptors of great ability who were not wholly crushed by the declining taste of their time. John of Douai (1524–1608), usually known as Giovanni da Bologna, one of the ablest, lived and worked almost entirely in Italy. His bronze statue of Mercury flying upwards, in the Uffizi, one of his finest works, is full of life and movement. By him also is the “Carrying off of a Sabine Woman” in the Loggia de’ Lanzi. His great fountain at Bologna, with two tiers of boys and mei-maids, surmounted by a colossal statue of Neptune, a very noble work, is composed of architectural features combined with sculpture, and is remarkable for beauty of proportion. He also cast the fine bronze equestrian statue of Cosimo de Medici at Florence and the very richly decorated west door of Pisa cathedral, the latter notable for the overcrowding of its ornaments and the want of sculpturesque dignity in the figures; it is a feeble imitation of Ghiberti’s noble production. One of Giovanni’s best works, a group of two nude figures fighting, is now lost. A fine copy in lead existed till recently in the front quadrangle of Brasenose College, Oxford, of which it was the chief ornament. In 1881 it was sold for old lead by the principal and fellows of the college, and was immediately melted down by the plumber who bought it—an irreparable loss, as the only other existing copy is very inferior; the destruction was an utterly inexcusable act of vandalism. The sculpture on the western façade of the church at Loreto and the elaborate bronze gates of the Santa Casa are works of great technical merit by Girolamo Lombardo and his sons, about the middle of the 16th century. Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1569), though in the main greater as goldsmith than as sculptor, produced one work of great beauty and dignity—the bronze Perseus in the Loggia de' Lanzi at Florence. His large bust of Cosimo de’ Medici in the Bargello is mean and petty in style. A number of very clever statues and groups in terra-cotta were modelled by Antonio Begarelli of Modena (d. 1565), and were enthusiastically admired by Michelangelo; the finest are a “Pieta” in S. Maria Pomposa and a large “Descent from the Cross” in S. Francesco, both at Modena. The colossal bronze seated statue of Julius III. at Perugia, cast in 1555 by Vincenzio Danti, is one of the best portrait-figures of the time.
The latter part of the 15th century in France was a time of transition from the medieval style, which had gradually been deteriorating, to the more fiorid and realistic taste of the Renaissance. To this period belong a number of rich reliefs and statues on the choir-screen of Chartres cathedral. Those on The Renaissance in France.the screen at Amiens are later still, and exhibit the rapid advance of the new style.
The transition from the Gothic to the Renaissance is to be noted in many tomb monuments of the second half of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries, notably in Rouland de Roux’s magnificent tomb of the cardinals of Amboise at Rouen cathedral. Italian motifs are paramount in the great tomb of Louis XII. and his wife Anne of Bretagne, at St Denis, by Jean Iuste of Tours.
The influx of Italian artists into France in the reign of Francis I., who, with Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, Rosso, and Primaticcio, had summoned Benvenuto Cellini and other Italian sculptors to his court, naturally led to the practical extinction of the Gothic style, though isolated examples of medievalism still occur about the The Italian influence. middle of the 16th century. Such are the “Entombment” in the crypt of Bourges cathedral, and the tomb of René of Chalons in the church of St Etienne at Bar-le-Duc. But the main current of artistic thought followed the direction indicated by the founding of the italianizing school of Fontainebleau. lean Goujon, (d. 1572) was the, ablest French sculptor of the time; he combined great technical skill and refinement of modelling with the florid and affected style of the age. His nude figure of “Diana reclining by a Stag,” now in the Louvre, is a graceful and vigorous piece of work, superior in sculpturesque breadth to the somewhat similar bronze relief of a nymph by Cellini. Between 1540 and 1552 Goujon executed the fine monument at Rouen to Duke Louis de Brézé, and from 1555 to 1562 was mainly occupied in decorating the Louvre with sculpture. One of the most pleasing and graceful works of this period, thoroughly Italian in style, is the marble group of the “Three Graces” bearing on their heads an urn containing the heart of Henry II., executed in 1560 by Germain Pilon for Catherine de Médicis. The monument of Catherine and Henry II. at St Denis, by the same sculptor, is an inferior and coarser work. Maître Ponce, probably the same as the Italian Ponzio Jacquio, chisel led the noble monument of Albert of Carpi (1535), now in the Louvre. Another very fine portrait effigy of about 1570, a recumbent figure in full armour of the duke of Montmorency, preserved in the Louvre, is the work of Barthelemy Prieur. François Duquesnoy of Brussels (1594–1644), usually known as Il Fiammingo, was a clever sculptor, thoroughly French in style, though he mostly worked in Italy. His large statues are very poor, but his reliefs in ivory of boys and cupids are modelled with wonderfully soft realistic power and graceful fancy.
To these sculptors should be added Jacques Sarrazin, well known for the colossal yet elegant caryatides for the grand pavilion of the Louvre; and François Augier, the sculptor of the splendid mausoleum of the duc de Montmorency.
In the Netherlands the great development of painting was not accompanied by a parallel movement in plastic art. Of the few monuments that claim attention, we must mention the bronze tomb of Mary of Burgundy at Notre-Dame, Bruges, executed about 1495 by Jan de Baker, and the less remarkable The Netherlands.though technically more complete companion tomb of Charles the Bold (1558).
The course of the Renaissance movement in German sculpture differs from that of most other countries in so far as it appears to grow gradually out of the Gothic style in the direction of individual, realistic treatment of the figure which in late Gothic days had become somewhat conventional and schematic and idealized. Marked Beginning of the Renaissance in Germany. physiognomic expression, careful rendering of movement, costume and details, and the suggestion of different textures, together with almost tragic emotional intensity, are the chief aims of the 15th-century sculptors who, on the whole, adhere to medieval thought and arrangement. The Italian influence, which did not make itself felt until the early days of the 16th century, led to brilliant results, whilst the workers retained their fresh northern individuality and keen observation of nature. But in the latter half of this century it began to choke these national characteristics, and led to somewhat theatrical and conventional classicism and mannerism.
One speciality of the 15th century was the production of an immense number of wooden altars and reredoses, painted and gilt in the most gorgeous way and covered with subject-reliefs and statues, the former often treated in a very pictorial style.[26] Wooden screens, stalls, tabernacles and other church-httings of the greatest elaboration and clever workmanship were largely produced in Germany at the same time, and on into the 16th century.[27] Jörg Syrlin, one of the most able of these sculptors in wood, executed the gorgeous choir-stalls in Ulm cathedral, richly decorated with statuettes and canopied work, between 1469 and 1474; his son and namesake sculptured the elaborate stalls in Blaubeuren church of 1496 and the great pulpit in Ulm cathedral. Another exceptionally important work of this type is the magnificent altar at St Wolfgang in Upper Austria, carved by the Tirolese, Michael Pacher, in 1481. Veit Stoss of Cracow, who later settled in Nuremberg, a man of bad character, was a most skilful sculptor in wood; he carved the high altar, the tabernacle and the stalls of the Frauenkirche at Cracow, between 1472 and 1494. One of his finest works is a large piece of wooden panelling, nearly 6 ft. square, carved in 1495, with central reliefs of the Doom and the Heavenly Host, framed by minute reliefs of scenes from Bible history. It is now in the Nuremberg town-hall. Wohlgemuth (1434–1519), the master of A. Dürer, was not only a painter but also a clever wood-carver, as was also Dürer himself (1471–1528), who executed a tabernacle for the Host with an exquisitely carved relief of Christ in Majesty between the Virgin and St John, which still exists in the chapel of the monastery of Landau. Dürer also produced miniature reliefs cut in boxwood and hone-stone, of which the British Museum (print-room) possesses one of the finest examples. Adam Krafft (c. 1455–1507) was another of this class of sculptors, but he worked also in stone; he produced the great Schreyer monument (1492) for St Sebald’s at Nuremberg,—a very skilful though mannered piece of sculpture, with very realistic figures in the costume of the time, carved in a way more suited to wood than stone, and too pictorial in effect. He also made the great tabernacle for the Host, 80 ft. high, covered with statuettes, in Ulm cathedral, and the very spirited “Stations of the Cross” on the road to the Nuremberg cemetery.
The Vischer family of Nuremberg for three generations were among the ablest sculptors in bronze during the 15th and 16th centuries. Hermann Vischer the elder worked mostly between 1450 and 1505, following the earlier medieval traditions, but without the originality of his son, Peter Vischer.
Next to Nuremberg, the chief centres of bronze sculpture were Augsburg and Lübeck. Innsbruck possesses one of the finest series of bronze statues of the first half of the 16th century, namely twenty-eight colossal figures round the tomb of the emperor Maximilian, which stands in the centre of the nave, representing a succession of heroes and ancestors of the emperor. The first of the statues which was completed cost 3000 florins, and so Maximilian invited the help of Peter Vischer, whose skill was greater and whose work less expensive than that of the local craftsmen. Most of them, however, were executed by sculptors of whom little is now known. They differ much in style, though all are of great technical merit. The finest is an ideal statue of King Arthur of Britain, in plate armour of the 14th or early 15th century, very remarkable for the nobility of the face and pose. That of Theodoric is also a very fine conception. Both are wrongly said to be the work of Peter Vischer himself. Of the others, the best, nine in number, are by Master Gilg. The others, which range from stiffness to exaggerated realism, are executed by inferior workers. In the latter part of the 16th century the influence of the later Italian Renaissance becomes very apparent, and many elaborate works in bronze were produced, especially at Augsburg, where Hubert Gerhard cast the fine “Augustus fountain” in 1593, and Adrian de Vries made the “Hercules fountain” in 1599; both were influenced by the style of Giovanni di Bologna, as shown in his magnificent fountain at Bologna.
At the beginning of the 16th century sculpture in England was entering upon a period of rapid decadence, and to some extent had lost its native individuality. The finest series of statues of this period are those of life-size high up on the walls of Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster and others over the various minor altars.The Renaissance in England. These ninety-five figures, which represent saints and doctors of the church, vary very much in merit: some show German influence, others that of Italy, while a third class are, as it Were, “archaistic” imitations of older English sculpture.[28] In some cases the heads and general pose are graceful, and the drapery dignified, but in the main they are coarse both in design and in workmanship compared with the better plastic art of the 13th and 14th centuries. This decadence of English sculpture caused Henry VII. to invite the Florentine Torrigiano (1472?–1522) to visit England to model and cast the bronze figures for his own magnificent tomb, which still exist in almost perfect preservation. The recumbent effigies of Henry VII. and his queen are fine specimens of Florentine art, well modelled with lifelike portrait heads and of very fine technique in the casting. The altar-tomb on which the effigies lie is of black marble, decorated with large medallion reliefs in gilt bronze, each with a pair of saints-the patrons of Henry and Elizabeth of York-of very graceful design. The altar and its large baldacchino and reredos were the work of Torrigiano, but were destroyed during the 17th century. The reredos had a large relief of the Resurrection of Christ executed in painted terra-cotta, as were also a life-size figure of the dead Christ under the altar-slab and four angels on the top angles of the baldacchino; a number of fragments of these figures have recently been found in the “pockets” of the nave vaulting, where they had been thrown after the destruction of the reredos. Torrigiano’s bronze effigy of Margaret of Richmond in the south aisle of the same chapel is a very skilful but too realistic portrait, apparently taken from a cast of the dead face and hands. Another terra-cotta effigy in the Rolls chapel is also, from internal evidence, attributed to the same able Florentine. Another talented Florentine sculptor, Benedetto da Maiano, was invited to England by Cardinal Wolsey to make his tomb; of this only the marble sarcophagus now exists and has been used to hold the body of Admiral Nelson in St Paul’s Cathedral. Another member of the same family, named Giovanni, was the sculptor of the colossal terra-cotta heads of the Caesars affixed to the walls of the older part of Hampton Court Palace.
In Spain, in the early part of the 16th century, a strong Italian influence superseded that of France and Germany, partly owing to the presence there of the Florentine Torrigiano and other Italian artists. The magnificent tomb of Ferdinand and Isabella in Granada cathedral is a fine specimen of Italian Renaissance sculpture, somewhatSpanish Renaissance Sculpture. similar in general form to the tomb of Sixtus IV. by Ant. Pollaiuolo in St Peter’s, but half a century later in the style of its detail. It looks as if it had been executed by Torrigiano, but the design which he made for it is said to have been rejected. The statue of St Jerome, which he executed for the convent of Buenavista, near Seville, was declared by Goya to be superior to Michelangelo’s “Moses.” Some of the work of this period, though purely Italian in style, was produced by Spanish sculptors, —for example, the choir reliefs at Toledo cathedral, and those in the Colegio Mayor at Salamanca by Alonzo Berruguete, sculptor, painter and architect, trained in Rome and Florence, and the greatest designer of Spain up to that time. He worked under Michelangelo and Vasari, and on his return to Spain in 1520 was appointed court painter and sculptor to Charles V. The same position was occupied under Philip II. by Gaspar Becerra (1520–1570), whose masterpiece is a figure of Our Lady of the Solitude, in Madrid. Esteban Jordan, Gregorio Hernandez and other Spanish sculptors produced a large number of elaborate retables, carved in wood with subjects in relief and richly decorated in gold and colours. These sumptuous masses of polychromatic sculpture resemble the 15th-century retables of Germany more than any Italian examples, and were a sort of survival of an older medieval style. J. Morlanes was the first of Spanish sculptors to adopt the style of Albert Dürer, which afterwards became general. Philip de Vigarni, Christopher of Salamanca, and Paul de Cespedes, who was native of Cordova, are names of great prominence up to the end of the century. Alonzo Cano (1600–1667), the painter, was remarkable for clever realistic sculpture, very highly coloured and religious in style. Montañes, who died in 1614, was one of the ablest Spanish sculptors of his time. His finest works are the reliefs of the Madonna and Saints on an altar in the university church of Seville, and in the cathedral, in the chapel of St Augustine, a very nobly designed Conception, modelled with great skill.
In the 17th century sculpture in wood still prevailed. The statue of St Bruno of Montañez seems to have inspired others to repeat the subject in the same material: Juan de Juin (d. 1614) is a case in point. Pedro de Mena and Zarcillo achieved great success in this class of sculpture. A. Pujol of Catalonia and Peter Roldan carried on the Spanish tradition. The chief names in the 18th century are those of Don P. Duque Cornesso of Seville, Don J. de Hinestrosa, A. Salvador (known as “the Roman,” d. 1766), Philip de’ Castro of Galicia, one of the most eminent sculptors of his time (d. 1775), and F. Gutierrez (d. 1782).[29]
If the immediate followers of Michelangelo showed a tendency
to turn the characteristics of the master’s style into exaggerated
mannerism, the beginning of the 17th century finds
Italian sculpture in a state of complete decadence,
statuesque dignity having given way to violentBaroque sculpture
in Italy.
fluttering movement and ilorid excesses, such as was
revived in a later century. From Italy this “baroque” style
spread over the whole continent of Europe and retained its hold
for nearly two centuries. The chief sculptor and architect of
this period was the Neapolitan, J. L. Bernini (1598–1680), who,
with the aid of a large school of assistants, produced an almost
incredible quantity of sculpture of the most varying degrees
of merit and hideousness. His chief early group, the Apollo and
Daphne in the Villa Borghese, is a work of wonderful technical
skill and delicate high finish, combined with soft beauty and
grace, though too pictorial in style. In later life Bernini turned
out work of brutal coarseness,[30] designed in a thoroughly unsculpturesque
spirit. The churches of Rome, the colonnade
of St Peter’s, and the bridge of S. Angelo are crowded with his
clumsy colossal figures, half draped in wildly fluttering garments,—perfect
models of what is worst in the plastic art. And yet
his works received perhaps more praise than those of any other
sculptor of any age, and after his death a scaffolding was erected
outside the bridge of S. Angelo in order that people might walk
round and admire his rows of feeble half-naked angels. For all
that, Bernini was a man of undoubted talent, and in a better
period of art would have been a sculptor of the first rank; many
of his portrait-busts are works of great vigour and dignity, quite
free from the mannered extravagance of his larger sculpture.
Stefano Maderna (1571–1636) was the ablest of his contemporaries;
his clever and much-admired statue, the figure of the
dead S. Cecilia under the high altar of her basilica, is chiefly
remarkable for its deathlike pose and the realistic treatment
of the drapery. Another clever sculptor was Alessandro Algardi
of Bologna (1598?–1654), who formed a school, which included
G. Brunelli, D. Guidi and C. Mazza of Bologna.
In the next century at Naples Queirolo, Corradini and Sammartino produced a number of statues, now in the chapel of S. Maria de’ Sangri, which are extraordinary examples of wasted labour and neglect of the simplest canons of plastic art. These are marble statues enmeshed inThe classicist revival in Italy. nets or covered with thin veils, executed with almost deceptive realism, perhaps the lowest stage of tricky degradation into which the sculptor’s art could possibly fall.[31] In the 18th century Italy was naturally the headquarters of the classical revival, which spread thence, throughout most of Europe. Canova' (1757–1822), a Venetian by birth, who spent most of his life in Rome, was perhaps the leading spirit of this movement, and became the most popular sculptor of his' time. His work is very unequal in merit, mostly dull and uninteresting in style, and is occasionally marred by a meretricious spirit very contrary to the true classic feeling. His group of the “Three Graces,” the “Hebe,” and the very popular “Dancing-Girls,” copies of which in plaster disfigure the stairs of countless modern hotels and other buildings on the Continent, are typical examples of Canova’s worst work. Some of his sculpture is designed with far more of the purity that, distinguished antique art; his finest work is the colossal group of Theseus slaying a Centaur, at Vienna. Canova’s attempts at Christian sculpture are singularly unsuccessful, as, for example, his pretentious monument to Pope Clement XIII. in St Peter’s at Rome, that of Titian at Venice, and Alfieri’s tomb in the Florentine church of S. Croce. Fiesole in the 19th century produced one sculptor of great talent, named Bastianini. He worked in the style of the great 15th-century Florentine sculptors, and followed especially the methods of his distinguished fellow-townsman Mino da Fiesole. Many of Bastianini’s works are hardly to be distinguished from genuine sculpture of the 15th century, and in some cases great prices have been paid for them under the supposition that they were medieval productions. These frauds were, however, perpetrated without Bastianini’s consent, or at least without his power to prevent them. Several of his best terra-cotta works may be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Whilst monumental sculpture in France during the 17th century continued to be influenced by Italy, the national tradition was carried on to a certain extent by such In France portraitists as the two Coustous and their master Coysevox (1640–1720), whose works are marked by a greatIn France. sense of life and considerable technical skill. The exaggerated elegance in the treatment of the female figure, which became so marked a characteristic of French sculpture during this period, is the chief trait of Francois Girardon (1630–1715), who was chiefly employed on the sculptural decorations at Versailles, and on the famous equestrian statue of Louis XIV., which was destroyed during the Revolution and for which hundreds of exquisite drawings and studies were made, now in the French national collection. Far more strength and grandeur mark the work of Pierre Puget (1622–1694), who is best known by his “Milo of Crotona” for Versailles. His training was entirely Italian, and in style considerably influenced by Bernini. He worked for some considerable time in Italy, particularly in Genoa. The same opposed movements which run side by side in French 18th-century painting, academic allegory and frivolous sensuality, can be traced in the sculpture of this period. Of the first, the chief representatives are Lemoyne and his pupil Falconet, who executed the equestrian statue of Peter the Great at St Petersburg; of the other, Clodion, whose real name was Claude Michel (c. 1745–1814). The latter worked largely in terra-cotta, and modelled with great spirit and invention, but in the sensual unsculpturesque manner prevalent in his time.
In the later part of the 18th century France produced two sculptors of great eminence in Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714–1785) and Jean Antoine Houdon (1740–1828). Houdon may be regarded as the precursor of the modern school of French sculpture of the better sort. Towards the end of the 18th century a revolution was brought about in the style of sculpture by the suddenly revived taste for antique art. A period of dull pseudo-classicism succeeded, which in most cases stifled all original talent and reduced the plastic arts to a lifeless form of archaeology. Regarded even as imitations the works of this period are very unsuccessful: the sculptors got hold merely of the dry bones, not of the spirit of classic art; and their study of the subject was so shallow and unintelligent that they mostly picked out what was third-rate for special admiration and ignored the glorious beauty of the best works of true Hellenic art. Thus in sculpture, as in painting and architecture, a study which might have been stimulating and useful in the highest degree became a serious hindrance to the development of modern art; this misconception and misdirection occurred not only in France but in the other countries of Europe. In France, however, the victories of Napoleon I. and his arrogant pretension to create a Gaulish empire on the model of that of ancient Rome caused the taste for pseudo-Roman art to be more pronounced than elsewhere. Among the first sculptors of this school were Antoine Chaudet (1763–1810) and Joseph Bosio (1769–1845). Early 19th century. The latter was much employed by Napoleon I.; he executed with some ability the bronze spiral reliefs round the column of the Place Vendome and the statue of Napoleon on the top, and also modelled the classical quadriga on the triumphal arch in the Place du Carrousel. Jacques Pradier of Geneva (1792–1862), produced the “Chained Prometheus” of the Louvre and the Niobe group (1822). He possessed great technical ability, but aimed in most of his works at a soft sensuous beauty which is usually considered to be specially unsuited to sculpture. François Rude (1784–1855), worked in a style modelled on Graeco-Roman sculpture treated with some freedom. His bronze Mercury in the Louvre, is a clever work and the enormous high-relief on the Arc de l’Etoile in Paris, representing “The Song of Departure to Battle,” is full of vigour and movement, but his statues of Marshal Ney in the Luxembourg Gardens and of General Cavaignac (1847) in the cemetery of Montmartre are conspicuously poor. The reliefs on the pediment of the Panthéon are by Pierre Jean David of Angers (1789–1856); his early works are of dull classic style, but later in life he became a realist and produced very unsculpturesque results. A. bronze statue of a Dancing Fisher-lad modelled by Francois Joseph Duvet, now in the Luxembourg collection, is an able work of the genre class. Other French sculptors who were highly esteemed in their time were Ottin, Courtet, Simart, Etex and Carpeaux. The last was an artist of great ability, and produced an immense number of clever but often, sculpturesquely considered, offensive statues. He obtained the highest renown in France, and, hailed as a great innovator by those who welcomed a greater measure of naturalism, he was denounced by the “ pure” and classic school as a typical example of the sad degradation of taste which prevailed under the rule of Napoleon III.
The modern schools of French sculpture are the most important in the world; they are dealt with in a separate section later. Technical skill and intimate knowledge of the human form are possessed by French artists to a degree which has probably never been surpassed. Many of their works have a similar fault to that of one class of French painters: they are much injured by an excess of sensual realism; in many cases nude statues are simply life-studies with all the faults and individual peculiarities of one model. Very unsculpturesque results are produced by treating a statue as a representation of a naked person,—one, that is, who is obviously in the habit of wearing clothes,—a very different thing from the purity of the ancient Greek treatment of the nude. Thus the great ability of many French sculptors has been degraded to suit, or rather to illustrate, the taste of the voluptuary; An extravagance of attitude and an undignified arrangement of the figures do much to injure some of the large groups which are full of technical merit, and executed with marvellous anatomical knowledge. This is specially the case with much of the sculpture that decorates the buildings of Paris. The. group of nude dancers by Carpeaux outside the opera-house is a work of astonishing skill and sensual imagination, unsculpturesque in style and especially unfitted to decorate the comparatively rigid lines of a building. The egotism of modern French sculptors, with rare exceptions, has not allowed them, when professedly aiming at providing plastic decoration for buildings, to accept the necessarily .subordinate reserve which is so necessary for architectonic sculpture. Other French works, on the other hand, have frequently erred in the direction of a sickly sentimentalism, or a petty realism, which is fatal to sculpturesque beauty; or they seek to 'render modern life, sometimes on the scale of life-size, even to the point of securing atmospheric effect. This exaggerated misconception of the function of sculpture can only be a passing phase; yet as any movement issuing from Paris finds adherents throughout other countries, the effect upon sculptors and upon public taste can hardly be otherwise than mischievous. The real power and merits of the modern French school make these faults all the more conspicuous.
Whatever work of importance was produced by Netherlandish sculptors in the 17th and 18th centuries, was due entirely to Italian training and influence. Francois Duquesnoy (usually called “The Fleming”) (1594–1644) has already been mentioned; he worked principally inNetherlandish sculptors. Rome, in rivalry with Bernini, and most of his works have remained in Italy, but, inasmuch as his style is conspicuously French, he is here included in the French school. His pupil Arthur Quellinus is best known by his allegorical groups on the pediments of Amsterdam 'town-hall, and has also left some traces of his activity in Berlin. P. Buyster, native of Brussels (b. 1595), passed into France and is also often classed as a French sculptor.
By far the greatest sculptor of the classical revival was Bertel Thorwaldsen (1770–1844), an Icelander by race, whose boyhood was spent at Copenhagen, and who settled in Rome in 1797, when Canova’s fame was at its highest. The Swedish sculptors Tobias Sergell and Johann ByströmScandinavian sculptors. belonged to the classic school; the latter followed in, Thorwaldsen’s footsteps. Another Swede named Fogelberg was famed chiefly for his sculptured subjects taken from Norse mythology. H. W. Bissen and Ierichau of Denmark produced some able works,—the former a fine equestrian statue of Frederick VII. at Copenhagen, and the latter a very spirited and widely known group of a Man attacked by a Panther.
During the troublous times of the Reformation, sculpture, like the other arts, continued to decline. Of 17th-century monumental effigies that of Sir Francis Vere (d. 1607) in the north transept at Westminster is one of the best, though its design-a recumbent effigy overshadowedSeventeenth century in England. by a slab covered with armour, upborne by four figures of men-at-arms—is almost an exact copy of the tomb of Engelbert II. of Vianden-Nassau.[32] The finest bronze statues of this century are those of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham (d. 1628), and his wife at the north-east of Henry VII.’s chapel. The effigy of the duke, in rich armour of the time of Charles I., lies with folded hands in the usual medieval pose. The face is fine and well modelled and the casting very good. The allegorical figures at the foot are caricatures of the style of Michelangelo, and are quite devoid of merit, but the kneeling statues of the duke’s children are designed with grace and pathos. A large number of very handsome marble and alabaster tombs were erected throughout England during the 17th century. The effigies are poor and coarse, but the rich architectural ornaments are effective and often of beautiful materials, alabaster being mixed with various richly coloured marbles in a very skilful way. Nicholas Stone (1586–1647), who worked under the supervision of Inigo Jones and was master mason to King Charles I., was the chief English sculptor of his time. The De Vere and Villiers monuments are usually attributed to him.[33] One of the best public monuments of London is the bronze equestrian statue of Charles I. at Charing Cross, which was overthrown and hidden during the protectorate of Cromwell, but replaced at the Restoration in 1660; it is very nobly modelled and was produced under Italian influence by the French sculptor Hubert Le Sœur (d. 1670). The standing bronze statue of James II., formerly behind the Whitehall banqueting room, very poorly designed but well executed, was the work of Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721), a native of Holland, who was chiefly famed for his extraordinary skill in carving realistic fruit and flowers in pear and other white woods. Many rich and elaborate works of his exist at Trinity College, Oxford, at Cambridge, Chatsworth, and several other places in England. In the early part of the 18th century he worked for Sir Christopher Wren, and carved the elaborate friezes of the stalls and screens in St Paul’s Cathedral and in other London churches.
During the 18th century English sculpture was mostly in the hands of Flemish and other foreign artists, of whom Roubiliac (1695–1762), Peter Scheemakers (1691–1773), and J. M. Rysbrack (1694–1770) were the chief. The ridiculous custom of representing Englishmen of theEighteenth century in England. 18th and 19th centuries in the toga or in the armour of an ancient Roman was fatal alike to artistic merit and eikonic truth; and when, as was often the case, the periwig of the Georgian period was added to the costume of a Roman general the effect is supremely ludicrous. Nollekens (1737–1823), a pupil of Scheemakers, though one of the most popular sculptors of the 18th century, was a man of very little real ability. John Bacon (1740–1799) was in some respects an abler sculptor. John Flaxman (1755–1826) was in England the chief initiator of the classical revival. For many years he worked for Josiah Wedgwood, the potter, and designed for him an immense number of vases covered with delicate cameo-like reliefs. Many of these, taken from antique gems and sculpture, are of great beauty, though hardly suited to the special necessities of fictile ware. Flaxman’s large pieces of sculpture are of less merit, but some of his marble reliefs are designed with much spirit and classic purity. He modelled busts as well as small portrait medallions for production in Wedgwood’s pottery. His illustrations in outline to the poems of Homer, Aeschylus and Dante, based on drawings on Greek vases, have been greatly admired, but they are unfortunately much injured by the use of a thicker outline on one side of the figures—an unsuccessful attempt to give a suggestion of shadow. Flaxman’s best pupil was Baily (1788–1867), chiefly celebrated for his nude marble figure of Eve.
On the whole the 17th and 18th centuries in Germany, as in England, were periods of great decadence in the plastic art; little of merit was produced, except some portrait figures. Among the rare exceptions mention must be made of Andreas Schliiter, of Hamburg (c. 1662–1714),Modern German sculpture. who produced many decorative bronze reliefs for the royal castle in Berlin, and the famous colossal equestrian statue of the Great Elector on the bridge in Berlin. Another artist who approached greatness in a period of utter degradation was Rafael Donner, whose principal work is the large fountain with lead figures of Providence and the four rivers of Austria (the Enns, Ybbs, Traun and March), in Vienna, a very remarkable example of baroque sculpture which to this day is known as the Donner fountain. In the second half of the 18th-century, there was a strong revival in sculpture, especially in the classic style; and since then Germany has produced an immense quantity of large and pretentious sculpture, mostly dull in design and second-rate in execution. Gottfried Schadow of Berlin (1764–1850) finished a number of portrait figures, not in the customary antique guise, but in the costume of the period; Some of his works are ably modelled. He was followed by Christian Rauch (1777–1857), whose works are, however, mostly weak and sentimental in style, as, for example, his recumbent statue of Queen Louisa at Charlottenburg (1813), and his statues of generals Bülow and Scharnhorst at Berlin. Rauch became the leader of an important school in Berlin, but will be most honourably remembered by this splendid monument of Frederick the Great, in Berlin—an elaborate work, modern in feeling and of great technical accomplishment. Friedrich Drake was the ablest of Rauch’s pupils, but he lived at a very unhappy period for the sculptor’s art. His chief work is perhaps the colossal bronze equestrian statue of King William of Prussia at Cologne. Albert Wolff was a sculptor of more ability; he executed the equestrian portrait of King Ernest Augustus at Hanover, and a “Horseman attacked by a Lion” now in the Berlin Museum, Augustus Kiss (1802–1865) produced the companion group to this, the celebrated Amazon and Panther in bronze, as well as the fine group, of St George and the Dragon in a courtyard of the royal palace at Berlin. The St George and his horse are of bronze; the dragon is formed of gilt plates of hammered iron. Kiss worked only in metal. The bad taste of the first half of the present century is strongly shown by many of the works of Theodore Kalidé, whose “Bacchanal sprawling on a Panther’s Back” is a marvel of awkwardness of pose and absence of any feeling for beauty. Ernst Rietschel (1804–1861) was perhaps the best German sculptor of this period, and produced work superior to that of his contemporaries, such as Haagen, Wichmann, Fischer and Hiedel. Rietschel’s career was marked by steady progress from a meaningless classicism to serious realism. It was his task to erect monuments in memory of some of the greatest intellectual heroes of Germany, such as his Lessing monument in Braunschweig, the monument to Goethe and Schiller in Weimar, and that to Martin Luther at Worms. Some revival of a better style is shown in certain sculpture, especially reliefs, by Hähnel, whose chief works are at Dresden. Schwanthaler (1802–1848), who was largely patronized by King Louis of Bavaria, studied at Rome and was at first a feeble imitator of antique classic art, but later in life he developed a more romantic and pseudo-medieval style. By him are a large number of reliefs and statues in the Glyptothek at Munich and in the Walhalla, also the colossal but feeble bronze statue of Bavaria, in point of size one of the most ambitious works of modern times.[34] Johannes Schilling (b. 1826) is the author of the colossal national monument on the Niederwald near Rüdesheim, and Ernst Bandel of the imposing monument of Hermann Arminius in the Teutoburg Forest near Detmold.
It was Reinhold Begas (b. 1831) who definitely broke away from the all-pervading classicist tradition. His art has more in common with that of the Rococo period than with that of Canova and his followers. Not only did he excel in the rendering of textures, and in giving life and animation to his figures, but his earlier work was marked by unconventionality and great boldness of disposition. Unfortunately his rapid success, and the official favour that was shown to him, led him subsequently to hasty and what might almost be described as factory-like production. His work became pretentious, and though some of the reliefs and single figures on his monuments are remarkable for his keen gift of observation, the whole effect is frequently spoilt by the unnecessary introduction of disturbing decorative features, ill-disposed and singularly lacking in sculptural dignity. The monument of the emperor William I. with the two beautiful reliefs of Peace and War, and the Neptune fountain, both in front of the imperial palace, and the Schiller monument before the royal theatre, all in Berlin, are perhaps his most successful works. The Bismarck in front of the Reichstag building suffers from the excessive use of allegorical motifs and from other errors of taste.
Of Begas’s many pupils, Who participated in the execution of the numerous statues that flank the Siegesallee in the Berlin Thiergarten, the most distinguished is Joseph Uphues (b. 1850), who is the creator of the Moltke monument in Berlin, and of the Frederick the Great in the Siegesallee, a replica of which is to be found in Washington. Adolf Brütt (b. 1855) and Gustav Eberlein should be mentioned among the most successful Berlin sculptors; Robert Dietz, as the founder of an important school in Dresden; and Wilhelm Ruemann (d. 1906) and Rudolf Maison among the modern sculptors of Munich.
The closing years of the 19th century were marked by an enormous advance, not only in public appreciation of sculpture but in productive activity. The younger generation of Berlin sculptors includes such distinguished artists as Fritz Klimsch, who is best known by “The Triumph of Woman” and “The Kiss "; Hugo Lederer, the designer of the Bismarck monument in Hamburg; August Gaul, who excelled in statuettes of animals; Max Kruse, a woodcarver of great ability; and Louis Touaillon, who spent his early years in Rome, and became famous for the excellent anatomy and, action of his equine studies. Karl Seffner, of Leipzig; August Hudler, of Dresden; Georg Weba, Fritz Christ, Erwin Kurz, Hermann Hahn, Theodor von Gosen and Hugo Kaufmann, all of Munich, should also here be mentioned. Adolf Hildebrand (b. 1847) is best known by his Wittelsbach fountain in Munich and his Reinhard fountain in Strassburg. He has also executed some excellent medals and plaquettes. Franz Stuck, who has ranked among the leading painters of modern Germany, has also produced some powerful pieces of sculpture, such as the Beethoven, and the “Athlete holding a heavy Ball.” Max Klinger (b. 1857), famous as painter and etcher, revived polychromatic sculpture in Germany. His Beethoven monument, at the Leipzig Museum, is the best known example of his work in this direction. The great composer is conceived as Jupiter enthroned, with the eagle at his feet. The Work caused an enormous sensation on its first appearance before the public and became a veritable apple of discord around which a wordy war was waged by the different factions. The Leipzig Museum also owns his Cassandra and a rough-hewn portrait bust of Liszt. One of his most striking works is the Nietzsche bust at Weimar. At the Albertinum, in Dresden, is an important late work of his, a marble group of three beautifully modelled life-size figures, “The Drama.” (J. H. M.; M. H. S.; P. G. K.)
During the first half of the 19th century the prevalence of a cold, lifeless pseudo-classic style was fatal to individual talent, and robbed the sculpture of England of all real vigour and spirit. Francis Chantrey (1782–1841), produced a great quantity of sculpture, especially sepulchralModern British sculpture. monuments, which were much admired in spite of their limited merits. Allan Cunningham and Henry Weekes, who excelled in busts of men, worked in some cases in conjunction with Chantrey, who was distinguished by considerable technical skill. John Gibson (1790–1866) was perhaps after Flaxman the most successful of the English classic school, and produced some works of real merit. He strove eagerly to revive the polychromatic decoration of sculpture in imitation of the circumlilio of classical times. His “Venus Victrix,” shown at the exhibition in London of 1862 (a work of about six years earlier), was the first of his coloured statues which attracted much attention. The prejudice, however, in favour of white marble was too strong, and both the popular verdict and that of other sculptors were strongly adverse to the “tinted Venus.” The fact is that Gibson’s colouring was timidly applied: it was a sort of compromise between the two systems, and thus his sculpture lost the special qualities of a pure marble surface, without gaining the richly decorative effect of the polychrome either of the Greeks or of the medieval period. The other chief sculptors of the same inartistic period were Banks, the elder Westmacott (Who modelled the Achilles in Hyde Park), R. Wyatt (who cast the equestrian statue of Wellington, removed from London to Aldershot), Macdowell, Campbell, Calder Marshall, and Bell. Samuel Joseph (d. 1850), working in a naturalistic spirit, produced some excellent work, notably (in 1840) the remarkable statue of Samuel Wilberforce now in Westminster Abbey. The brilliant exception of its period is the Wellington monument in St Paul’s cathedral, probably the finest plastic work of modern times. It was the work of Alfred Stevens (1817–1875), a sculptor of the highest talent, who lived and died almost unrecognized by the British public. The value of SteVens’s work is all the more conspicuous from the feebleness of most of the sculpture of his contemporaries.
During the last quarter of the century a great change came over British sculpture—a change so revolutionary that it gave a new direction to the aims and ambitions of the artist, and raised the British school to a level wholly unexpected. It cannot be pretended that the school yet equals either in technical accomplishment, in richness or elasticity of imagination, or in creative freedom, the schools of France and Belgium, for these have been built up upon the example of national works of many generations of sculptors during several centuries. British sculptors, whose training was far less thorough and intelligent than that which is given abroad, found themselves practically without a past of their own to inspire them, for there existed no truly national tradition; with them it was a case of beginning at the beginning.
The awakening came from without, brought to England mainly by a Frenchman—Jules Dalou—as Well as by Lord Leighton, Alfred Gilbert and, in a lesser degree, by Onslow Ford. To Carpeaux, no doubt—despised of the classicists—the new inspiration was in a great measure due; for Carpeaux, who infused life and flesh and blood into his marble (too much of them, as has been here shown, to please the lovers of purism), was to his classic predecessors and contemporaries much what in painting Delacroix was to David and the cold professors of his formal school. But it was to Jules Dalou that was chiefly due the remarkable development in Great Britain. A political refugee at the time of the Commune, he received a cordial welcome from the artists of England, and was invited to assume the mastership of the modelling classes at South Kensington. This post he retained for some years, until the amnesty for political offenders enabled him to return to his native land; but before he left he had succeeded in making it clear that severe training is an essential foundation of good sculpture. This had been but partly understood—is not even now wholly realized; yet by the impression he made, Dalou improved the work in the schools beyond all recognition. The whole conception of sculpture seemed to be modified, and intelligent enthusiasm was aroused in the students. When he departed, he left in his stead Professor Lantéri, who became a naturalized Englishman, and who exercised a beneficent influence over the students equal to that of his predecessor. Meanwhile, the Lambeth Art Schools—where Mr W. S. Frith, a pupil of M. Dalou, was conducting his modelling class under the directorship of John Sparkes (d. 1907)—were being maintained with great success. At the Royal Academy, where in 1901 the professorship of sculpture was revived after many years, the inspiring genius of Alfred Gilbert aroused the students to an enthusiasm curiously contrasting with the comparative apathy, which passed as dignified restraint, of earlier days. British sculpture, therefore, when it is not coloured directly from the Italian Renaissance, is certainly influenced from France. But it is remarkable that in spite of this turning of British sculptors to romantic realism as taught by Frenchmen and Italians, and in spite of the fact that the spirit of colour and decoration and greater realism in modelling had been brought from (abroad, the actual character of British sculpture, even in its most decorative forms, is not in the main other than British.
Nevertheless, there has been shown a tendency towards reviving the application of colour in sculpture which has not met with universal approval. Although the polychromatic work of the Renaissance, for example, may keep its place, it is held to clash with the idea of sculptural art; for though there is no absolute approach to imitation, there is a very strong suggestion of it. The use of a variety of marbles and metals, or other materials, such as has been increasingly adopted, does not offend in the same measure, as the result is purely formal. Yet, in the final result, the work becomes not so much sculpture broadly seen, as an “object of art,” amiably imagined and delicately wrought.
Indeed, the sculptor has been greatly reinforced by the artificer in metal, enamel, and the like. But the revival of metal-work, cut, beaten, and twisted, however fine in itself, does not help sculpture forward very much. It may even keep it back; for, popular a.nd beautiful as it is, it really tends to divert the attention from form to design, and from light and shade, with planes, to ingenuity, in pleasing lines—a very beautiful and elevated art, but not sculpture. As an adjunct, it may be extremely valuable in the hands of a fine artist who does not mistake the mere wriggles and doubling which are the mark of the more extravagant phase of the so-called “New Art” for harmonious “line.” But it must always suggest the man with the anvil, shears, and pincers, rather than the man with the clay and the chisel. It is mainly to Alfred Gilbert that is due the delightful revival of metal-work in its finest form wedded to sculpture, with the introduction of marbles, gems, and so forth, felicitous and elegant in invention and ornament, and so excellent in design and taste that in his hands, at least, it is subservient to the monumental character of his sculpture.
The first effectual rebellion against the Classic, and the birth of Individualism, dates back to Alfred Stevens. The picturesque fancy of the Frenchman Roubiliac (who practised for many years in England), with his theatrical arrangement and skilful technique, inherited from his master. Coustou, had left little mark on the Englishmen of his day. They went on, for the most part, with their pseudo-classic tradition, which F laxman carried to the highest point. But until Stevens, few in England thought of instilling real life andblood and English thought and feeling into the clay and marble. It was not only life that Stevens realized, but dignity, nobility of form, and movement, previously unknown in English work. Follower though he was of) Michelangelo and the Italian Renaissance, he was entirely personal. He was no copyist, although he had the Italian traditions at his fingers’ ends, and his feeling for architecture helped him to treat sculpture with fine decorative effect. Yet even Stevens and his brilliant example were powerless to weaken the passion for the Greek and Roman tradition that had engrossed English sculptors—with their cold imitations and lifeless art, pursued in the name of their fetish, “the Antique.”
Until towards the close of the 19th century this pseudo-classic art was blindly pursued by a non-Latin race, and a public favourite like W. Calder Marshall (1813–1894; A.R.A., 1844; R.A., 1852) never attempted, except perhaps in the “Prodigal Son,” now at the Tate Gallery, to break away towards originality of thought.
Thomas Woolner (1825–1892; A.R.A., 1871; R.A., 1874), who had represented a modern heroine as a Roman matron, and had shown in his monument to Bishop Jackson in St Paul’s cathedral an archaic severity and dryness altogether excessive, sought elevation of conception such as brought him applause for his “Tennyson” in portraiture and for his classically-inspired relief “Virgilia lamenting the Banishment of Coriolanus”—probably his most admirable and most exquisitely touching work.
Meanwhile, Baron Carlo Marochetti (1809–1867; A.R.A., 1861; R.A., 1866), an Italian of French arentage, had tried to introduce a more modern feeling, and his “Richard Cœur de Lion” at Westminster evoked great enthusiasm. It is difficult, now, to admire without reserve the incongruity of the 12th-century king, mounted on a modern thoroughbred, and raising arm and weapon with an action lacking in vigour. The intention was excellent and fruitful, notwithstanding, and the statue is not without merit. It was he who cast for Landseer the lions of the Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square, London.
Later on Charles Bell Birch (1832–1893; A.R.A., 1880), with his German training, introduced a new picturesque element in his “Wood Nymph,” “Retaliation,” “The Last Call,” and the “Memorial to Lieut. Hamilton, V.C., dying before Kabul”; but neither the vigour nor the individuality of is work influenced his contemporaries to any extent, doubtless on account of the strong Teutonic feeling it displayed.
Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, R.A. (1834–1890), an Austrian by birth, was more successful, and his influence, held by the talent of able studio-assistants (Professor Lantéri, Alfred Gilbert, and others), contributed somewhat to thaw the chill which the cold marble still seemed to shed around. There was not much inspiration in his monument of “General Gordon” in St Paul’s cathedral, and his “Wellington Memorial” is cold and empty, though correct enough; but the “Herdsman and Bull,” among his ideal subjects, the “Carlyle” on Chelsea Embankment, among his portrait-statues, had the right feeling in them. His busts were usually excellent.
J. H. Foley (1818–1874; A.R.A., 1849; R.A., 1858), who at first was all for “the unities” and a “pure style,” seemed in his later years to throw his previous convictions to the winds, when he produced the finely spirited equestrian statue of “General Sir James Outram,” now erected in India, and-the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the Tate Gallery. This statue was welcomed with enthusiasm in the art world, and helped to remind the public that monuments need not be staid to dulness, nor stiff and dead in their imperturbability.
Meanwhile Henry Hugh Armstead (1828–1905; A.R.A., 1875; R.A., 1880), who had begun by devoting himself to the art of the silversmith, fashioning the “St George’s Vase,” “The Packington Shield,” and “The Outram Shield,” was working in the spirit of the younger school; he made his first appearance in the exhibitions in 1851. He was carrying out commissions of considerable magnitude—in the Palace of Westminster, and in the Abbey itself, for which he executed the marble reredos with its many figures, the whole of the external sculptural decorations for the Colonial Office in Whitehall, as well as the eighty-four life-sized figures on two sides of the podium of the Albert Memorial, with the four bronze statues, “Chemistry,” “Astronomy,” “Medicine,” and “Rhetoric.” Portrait-figures of all ages are here classed together, and the work is a better-sustained piece of designing and carving than is commonly understood. The statue set up at Chatham of “Lieutenant Waghorn” is a good example of Armstead’s sculpture, impressive by its breezy strength and picturesqueness; but a more remarkable work, technically speaking, is the memorial to a son of the earl of Wemyss, “David and the Lion,” now fixed in the Guards’ Chapel. It is in very fiat relief; Ninevite in character of treatment, and carved wholly by the artist directly from the living model, it is, in point of technique, one of his best productions. His marble statuette of “Remorse,” bought for the Chantrey Collection, is a remarkable example of combined intensity of expression and elevated purity of style. The work of Armstead is monumental in character—the quality which has been so rare among British sculptors, yet the finest quality of all; and in almost everything he did there is a “bigness” of style which assures him his lace in the British school.
Following the chronological order of the artists’ first, public appearance, as being the most convenient and the only consistent method that will prevent overlapping, we come to F. J. Williamson (b. 1853), who executed many works for Queen Victoria; John Hutchison, R.S.A. (b. 1856), a Scottish sculptor of the Classic school; and George A. Lawson, H.R.S.A. (1832–1904). Lawson was a pupil of Alexander Ritchie, of the Royal Scottish Academy, and in a measure of Rome. He went to London in 1867, and soon proved himself one of the best sculptors Scotland has produced. “In the Arena” was his first striking group; “Daphnis” is an excellent example of his Classic life-size work; and “Motherless” one of his greater successes in a more modern and pictorial spirit, a group full of pathetic pathos and free and sympathetic handling. “Callicles,” “The Weary Danaid,” “Old Marjorie,” and the statue of “Robert Burns,” erected at Ayr, are all in their way noticeable, Lawson’s work, which only requires a little more animation to be fine, has the quality of “style,” and is strong, manly, and full of distinction.
Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) had exhibited in 1866 a “Stag at Bay,” but his four colossal lions for the Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square, London, constitute his principal plastic works. They engaged him from 1859 to 1867, the year in which they were set up. The casting of them, as already stated, was carried out by Baron Marochetti. Each is 20 ft. in length and weighs 7 tons. They have great nobility and dignity of pose, and although they are not altogether sculptural in treatment, they are finely impressive with a good sense of style.
George Simonds (b. 1844) is a product of the foreign schools. He is the author of many monumental works and not a little decorative sculpture, but he is best recognized by ideal subjects, such as “Dionysus astride his Leopard” (his finest work), “The Goddess Gerd,” “The Falconer” (in the Central Park, New York), “Cupid and Campaspe” and “Anemone, the Wind Flower.” His treatment of the undraped female figure is refined and delicate, and there is an intellectual reality about his best work, as well as imagination in conception. A. Bruce-Joy (b. Dublin, 1842) has produced ideal work and statues of public men for public spaces, and many busts.
Thomas Brock (b. 1847; A.R.A., 1883; R.A., 1891), whose work is prodigious in amount as well as solid and scholarly, came to London from Worcester in 1866 and fell early under the influence of the sculptor Foley, who was soon to rebel against the formalism that prevailed. When his chief died, in 1874, Brock was appointed to carry out the great unfinished works in the studio—the “O’Connell Monument” in Dublin, the “Lord Canning” in Calcutta, and several others. But he felt the foreign current; and even when his style was formed, his career being already assured, he was perceptive enough to modify it, and, so developed, he left his master very far behind. The ideal work that marked this transition was “The Moment of Peril,” a fine, scholarly work representing a mounted Red Indian repelling the attack of a great serpent which has thrown his horse to earth. How greatly he improved in technical quality and in refinement of taste is to be seen in the life-sized marble statue called “The Genius of Poetry”—graceful where the “Moment of Peril” was violent in action, reposeful and harmonious where that was vigorous, and sculpturesque where that was anecdotal. A higher intellectual point was reached in “Song” and in the “Eve,” now in the Tate Gallery in London. A similar advance is to be observed in Brock’s portraiture. The statues of “Robert Raikes” (on the Thames Embankment) and “Sir Richard Temple” (in Bombay Town Hall), for. example, are finely treated, unconventional figures; but “The Rt. Rev. Henry Philpott, D.D., Bishop of Worcester,” in which the inherent difficulty of a seated figure is happily surmounted, marks the progress. The skill with which the artist has given the drapery, especially of the sleeves, a lightness not commonly seen, is striking. There are no black holes of shadow: the depressions are shallow and of the right shape to hold light even while securing shadow; yet weakness. is avoided and crispness is secured by the sharpening of the edge of the folds—the principle which is established in the Pheidian group of “The Fates,” for example, among the Elgin Marbles. Other works of importance in the same class are the effigy of “Dr Benson, archbishop of Canterbury,” and the admirable statue of “Sir Richard Owen” in the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, and especially the “Thomas Gainsborough” in the Tate Gallery, are all of a high order whether as to character or handling. With these may be grouped the statue of “Sir Henry Irving,” the tribute of British actors to the memory of the great dramatic artist (1910), and the seated marble statue of Lord Russell (1904). The bust of Queen Victoria is one of the noblest and most dignified works of its class executed in England; full of tenderness and of character, lovingly rendered; and with a delicate feeling for form, rightly realized. This head heralded the noble work by which the memory of Lord Leighton is to be kept green in the aisle of St Paul’s cathedral. In proportion and in harmony of design and of line, alike in conception and in reticence, it is the sculptural expression of a well-ordered mind and taste. The effigy shows Leighton asleep, while figures personifying his arts, painting and sculpture, guard his sarcophagus at head and foot. There is a note of triumph in the great design for the “Queen Victoria Memorial,” which provides London with it s most elaborate sculptural effort, rising 10 ft. high on a plateau 200 ft. across, with numerous emblematically figures of great size and imposing arrangement. It is based on an elevated style, dignified, refined and monumental; for Brock is a sculptor in the full sense of the term, and his lines are always good.
D. W. Stevenson, R.S.A. (1842–1904), in his general work showed but little sympathy with modern developments. The “Bronze Lectern” (in St Cuthbert’s Church, Edinburgh) is perhaps the most decoratively effective; but his most ambitious work, called “The Pompeian Mother,” is a modern adaptation of the “Niobe and her Daughter” by a follower of the school of Scopas in the Uffizi Gallery.
Although Horace Montford, modelling master at the Royal Academy, passed much time in the studio of Matthew Noble (1818–1876), he did not thereby lose his sculptural taste. Not that he displayed it much in the share he had, as assistant to C. B. Birch, A.R.A., in the modelling of the notorious “City Griffin” at Temple Bar—a weird but spirited beast, the design for which had been supplied by the city architect, Sir Horace Jones. “A Hymn to Demeter,” a life-size statue full of movement, and the statue of “Psyche and the Casket of Venus,” may be named as typical of the style of Montford, whose work is usually broad and sculpturesque, distinguished by firmness and grace.
Sir Charles B. Lawes-Wittewronge (b. 1843) has produced three large works which have attracted attention: an elaborate and spirited equestrian group of a female Mazeppa—“They Bound me on” (1888); “The United States of America” (1890), decorative and not without elegance, and “The Death of Dirce.” The last named, of heroic size, in variously coloured bronze, was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1908, and again, in coloured marbles (yet not truly polychromatic in character) in colossal size, at the Franco-British Exhibition (1908). The complexity of the design, the skilful composition and arrangement of the elaborate group, the vigour of the modelling, and the impressiveness with which the work imposes itself upon the spectator, combine to render this perhaps the most important sculptured group of its kind exhibited in England. Sir Charles’s work is always strong and robust, though occasionally somewhat lacking in repose.
W. Hamo Thomycroft (b. 1850; A.R.A., 1881; R.A., 1888) became a great influence for good in the British school. His tendency towards the Greek has been a wholesome reminder of the danger of the over-enthusiasm for naturalism, and yet was never forced to conventionalism. Alike in ideal work, in monumental sculpture and in portraiture, his art is marked by refined taste and scholarship and a noble sense of beauty. It is strong, yet without undue display of power. In him we have to appreciate an unaffected sympathy with grandeur and style, and in all, a big, broad rendering of the human form, with something of the movement of the Greek sculptors and not a little of their repose, yet individual and unmistakably belonging to the British order of mind. In his largest monumental group, however, the “National Memorial to W. E. Gladstone,” erected in the Strand, London, there is little trace of the classic. In this work, asin the bronze statue of Bishop Creighton in St Paul’s Cathedral, there is a modern feeling entirely responsive to the feeling of the people. Mr Thornycroft’s seated marble statue of Lord Tennyson (1909) in Trinity College, Cambridge, is one of his finest portrait figures, full of dignity and excellent in likeness—a worthy memorial of the poet.
J. Havard Thomas began in 1872 to exhibit portrait sculpture, and soon turned his attention to ideal work, but he did not attract widespread attention until 1886, when he produced “The Slave Girl.” This marble nude was a curious contrast to most Slave Girls by other sculptors—that by Hiram Powers, for example. Somewhat stunted in form, she is nevertheless full of very human grace and well-felt realism, and is a good example of the artist’s carving. Mr Thomas, indeed, is one of the few to carve his own marbles, often without taking the intermediate step of making a clay model. This of course cannot be the case with his large sculpture, such as his great statue of “The Rt. Hon. W. E. Forster” at Bradford, and his “Samuel Morley, M.P.,” and “Edmund Burke, M.P.,” both at Bristol; but the beautiful small heads of peasants and children—such as the Donatellesque “Pepinella”—of Capri, where he lived for years from 1889 onwards, are mostly carved direct from life. The beauty of his chisel work can be seen to perfection in the exquisite bust of Mrs Wertheimer in the Tate Gallery; the marble seems to turn to flesh under his chisel and to palpitate with life: it is, perhaps, too much like flesh. This is very far from the “Classic,” with over-attention to which, Mr Thomas has curiously and quite inaccurately been reproached. It is true that his much discussed statue “Lycidas” appears to be a distant echo of Myron; it is in truth archaistic, but with an aim altogether different from that of the Greek. It is Classic in a sense, full of life and wonderfully modelled, but the attainment of perfection of human beauty was not the intention of the sculptor, and yet it appears to the unobserving as but a rifacimento. There is a vivid sense of style in Mr Thomas’s work, and sometimes a search for beauty in subjects which to the common eye may suggest the ugly. But Mr Thomas must be recognized as an artist of great power and originality and to the last degree conscientious. Sculptural subtleties he loves, and he works in a low key, quiet and unobtrusive, and severe though he is, he is a poet in sentiment with extreme refinement of taste. His reliefs are fine in rhythm, and by their accentuated definition, allied with delicacy, extremely telling.
From the year 1873 Edwin Roscoe Mullins (d. 1905) produced numerous busts and statues, and his work was in the main ideal and decorative. His best figure is probably that of “Cain—My Punishment is Greater than I can Bear,” executed in 1896; his latest work, “The Sisters” (1905), shows considerable grace. Mullins work in architectural embellishment was good in style, appropriate and effective.
Joseph Swynnerton (d. 1910) was a sculptor who spent a good deal of his time in Rome and worked under her influence. His colossal fountain of flowers, zephyrs and splashing nymphs is, on the contrary, rather rococo in style, with charming passages. On the other hand, “Love’s Chalice” is Classic in feeling. Generally speaking, Swynnerton’s work has an appearance of strength, without commonness or lack of effect.
E. Onslow Ford (1852–1901; A.R.A., 1888; R.A., 1895) was lost to British art before he had passed middle age. His seated statue of “Henry Irving as Hamlet” is a well-conceived piece of realism, with expression subtly marked, and verging upon the theatrical—which is precisely what an actor’s character-portrait should be. Compared with this work, the later seated statue, that of “Huxley,” keen and refined, is more strictly sculpturesque—for in it there is no “subject,” and there are no ornaments to divert the attention and suggest a false appearance of decoration. The statue of “Gordon” mounted on a camel—reminding us too vividly of the “Arab Chief” by Barye—is more open to criticism on the score of the elaborateness of the ornamental details, which almost reach the boundary of what is allowable in sculpture. It is erected at Chatham, and a replica has been set up (1902) in Khartum. A finer memorial is that to the honour of “Shelley.” It is, however, better in its parts than in its entirety, because the decorative scheme injures, rather than helps, the sculptural dignity of the drowned poet’s exquisitely-rendered figure. Of Onslow Ford’s other memorials, that of Queen Victoria at Manchester is perhaps the most discussed and the least to be admired, for although the conception is dignified and characteristic, it does not rank by any means with the best of which the artist was capable. As a truthful portraitist Onslow Ford had few rivals. The sitter is before the spectator, without undue flattery, yet without ever showing the commoner side of the model. Flesh, bone, hair, clothing, are all in their true relation, and the whole is admirably realizei Idealism, or at least poetic realism, Onslow Ford cultivated in a series of small works. Of his last figure, “Glory to the Dead,” it may be said that, although statuesque, it carries realism rather far in treatment. It may be objected that in funerary art, so to call it, the nude was never resorted to by the Greeks in such a relation; but Onslow Ford felt that he was working, not for ancient Greeks, but for modern Englishmen, and that sentiment, and not archaeology, must in such matters be the guide. There are, besides, the “Marlowe Memorial,” set up in Canterbury—graceful and refined, but rather trifling in manner—and the “Jowett Memorial,” a wall decoration, in the style of the Italian Renaissance. The work of Onslow Ford always charms, for he had a strong sense of the picturesque and a true feeling for beauty, but with insufficient power. But for his delight in decorative detail, he would have been greater than he was; for over-enrichment is in inevitable opposition to the greater qualities of the monumental and the dignified in glyptic art, and abundance of small details involves poorness of effect. But against Ford’s taste, especially against his admirable dexterity, little can be said. The high degree of refinement, the charm of modelling, grace of line and composition, sweetness of feeling, which are the note of his work, are in a great measure a set-off against occasional weakness of design and character, and lack of monumental effect.
H. R. Hope Pinker is primarily a portrait-sculptor. Of all his works the seated statue of “Dr Martineau” is perhaps the best, for interest, refinement, and for technical qualities. His reliefs are as numerous as his statues, of which the most popular is the “Henry Fawcett” in the Market Place of Salisbury, but his most important work is the colossal statue of Queen Victoria executed for the government of British Guiana.
The most remarkable work executed by any British amateur sculptor is the “Shakespeare Memorial,” presented to the nation. by Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, and set up by him outside the Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon (1888). This monument. carried out in Paris, represents the poet on the summit, attended below by the four great characters—“Hamlet,” “Henry V.,” “Lady Macbeth” and “Falstaff,” designed with singular ability and a happy display of symbolic inventiveness. Lord Ronald also modelled statues of “Marie Antoinette,” “The Dying Guardsman,” and other works which have secured wide attention.
In 1877 there burst upon the world a new sculptor, in the person of Sir Frederick (afterwards Lord) Leighton (1830–1896; A.R.A., 1864; R.A., 1868), who, in the following year, was to be the president of the Royal Academy. His first work was “An Athlete Struggling with the Python.” No piece of sculpture of modern times made a greater stir on its appearance; for here was a work, by a painter, a work, it was declared, which would have done honour to the ancients. fine in style, noble in type and in form, learned in the knowledge of the figure it displayed, original and strong in pose, in action and movement; scholarly in execution and instinct, with the manner of the painter himself. The group was hailed as a masterpiece by one who was thought to be not yet even a student in sculpture, and it was declared by the most exacting critics to be worthy to rank with the best examples of all but the finest periods. Yet it is somewhat lacking in expression—in that kind of humanity which every really great masterpiece of art should exhibit; and connoisseurs applauded the technique, the surface qualities and the like, when they should have been caught by the sentiment. But as Leighton was seeking only the beauty and expression of form, to the neglect of sentiment, he was well content with the reception and world-wide recognition of his work. One day the model for the “Athlete,” tired out, rose and stretched himself, and the sculptor was so enraptured by the pose that he forthwith began the model for the “Sluggard.” This work is in its way of still higher accomplishment than the “Athlete.” It is just as Greek as the other in its devotion to form and its worship of the beauty of the human frame. But it is a condition, a sensation, an idea, rather than an action, that is here recorded; and so it is the higher conception. And it has some of the mystery which is distinctive of the finest art of ancient times, in which modern sculpture is almost entirely deficient. Yet while the “Athlete” may be compared, in idea, with the relatively debased “Laocoon,” which it seems in some degree to follow if not to challenge; the “Sluggard” belongs to a more elevated expression of a distinctly pagan art, and, as it were, to a better period. Great as was the sensation made by these works, and by the charming little statue of “Needless Alarms ” (cast by the “lost-wax” process), Leighton seems to have left no direct follower or imitator among the younger men.
T. Stirling Lee, by natural ability as well as by cultivation, is an artist of unusual elevation of mind and excellence of execution, and in his composition he aims at securing beauty by the arrangement of his figures in the panel, rather than at enriching them with details, as a designer would do. He is an ascetic in choice of materials, so that his works generally remain beautiful studies of the human form, draped or undraped. It is for his power of telling a story beautifully in marble—as in his panels for St George’s Hall, Liverpool, which are among the finest work of their kind in England—that Mr Lee will continue to be admired: he is, beyond almost all others, a sculptor’s sculptor. His statue of “Cain,” extremely simple in conception, is a masterpiece of expression.
John M. Swan (1847–1910; A.R.A., 1894; R.A., 1905); a pupil of the Royal Academy and of Gérôme and Frémiet, specialized as a sculptor of a particular class of subject. He is a stylist in a high degree, whose work is full of beauty and importance. For the most part, but by no means exclusively, his sculptures are studies of animals, mainly of the felidae; but he would pass from the accentuation of action to the covering of skin and hair, without seeking much to emphasize the bone and flesh, because they alone display, with the fascinating expressiveness of their sinuous bodies, the whole range of the passions in the most concentrated form. In the “Leopard Playing with a Tortoise,” “Leopard Running,” “Puma and Macaw,” and similar works, we have the note of his art—sinuosity, with tense muscles, stretched and folded skin, suppressed frenzy of enjoyment. The note of Barye, the' great Frenchman, from whom in some measure Swan drew inspiration, is power and strength and decorative form, but his aim is rather at fine, grim, naturalistic studies of a great cat’s crawl, with amazing vivacity and vitality. In certain groups, such as “Orpheus” and “Boy and Bear Cubs,” the sculptor combines the human figure with animal forms. In the composition of these there is always the note of originality.
Another student of animal life is Harry Dixon, whose bronze “Wild Boar” is in the Tate Gallery. “A Bear Running,” excellent alike in character, form and construction, and especially in movement, “Otters' and Salmon,” and the figure-subject called “The Slain Enemy”—a prehistoric man with a dead wolf—are among his chief works.
Andrea C. Lucchesi is one of the few who, in spite of all discouragement, has not only persisted in concentrating his attention on ideal work, but has devoted most of it to the rendering of the female form. Prominent among his figures are those called “Destiny,” “The Flight of Fancy,” “The Mountain of Fame,” “The Myrtle’s Altar,” “Carthage, 149 B.C.,” and “Verity and Illusion.” Mr Lucchesi’s main excellence is in the treatment of nude forms, in which he has succeeded, through agreeable working out of idea and excellent execution, in interesting a public usually indifferent to this branch of sculpture.
Alfred Gilbert (b. 1854; A.R.A., 1887; R.A., 1892; resigned, 1909) is to be regarded as one of the greatest figures in British sculpture, not only as being a master of his art, but as having preached in his work a great movement, and in less than a decade effected more than any other man for the salvation of the British school, and inspired almost as much as Carpeaux or Dalou, the young sculptors of the country. Among his earlier works are two fine heads of a man and a girl, pure in style and incisive in character, which were cast by the cire perdue, or “lost-wax,” process, which he had learned in Naples. Its introduction into Great Britain—or, it may be more correct to say, its revival—had considerable influence on the treatment of bronze sculpture by British artists. In Gilbert’s portraiture we have not merely likenesses in the round, but little biographies full of character, with a spiritual and decorative as well as a physical side, and the mental quality displayed with manl sympathy. Flesh and textures are perfectly realized, yet broad: simple, and modest. Many of these qualities are as obvious in his portrait-statues, such as the fine effigy set up to “John Howard” in the market-place of Bedford. The monument with which Gilbert’s name will ever be associated is the “Statue of Queen Victoria” set up at Winchester, which, since its erection and re-erection in that city, has been irretrievably injured by depredations, and remains incomplete in its decorative details. The queen is shown with extraordinary dignity. Large in its masses, graceful in its lines, the person of the queen enveloped by all the symbolical figures and fanciful ornaments with which the artist has chosen to enrich it, the monument marks the highest level in this class to which any sculptor and metal-worker has reached for generations. The profusion of an ardent and poetic imagination is seen throughout in the arrangement of the figure itself in the exquisite “Victory” that used to surmount the orb, in the stately throne. Invention, originality, and inspiration are manifest in every part, and every detail is worked out with infinite care, and birth is given to a score of dainty conceits, not all of them, perhaps, entirely defensible from the purely sculptural point of view. In a measure it suggests goldsmithry, to which the genius of Gilbert has so often yielded, as in the exquisite epergne presented to Queen Victoria on her jubilee in 1887, typifying Britannia’s realm and sea power in endless poetic and dainty suggestions of beautiful devices. Among Gilbert’s memorials, not mentioned elsewhere, are those to “Frank Holl, R.A.,” and to “Randolph Caldecott,” both in the crypt of St Paul’s cathedral, London; the “Henry Fawcett” memorial in Westminster Abbey, which, with its row of expressive little symbolical figures, has been styled “a little garden of sculpture.” The finest work of its kind in England is the “Tomb of the Duke of Clarence” in St.George’s chapel, which in 1910 still awaited final completion. Perhaps his best composition expressive of emotion is the half length group “Mors Janua Vitae,” a terra-cotta group designed to be executed in bronze or the hall of the Royal College of Surgeons. Few artists in any age have shown greater genius as at once artificer and sculptor. Gilbert is fond of dealing with a subject which allows his fancy full play. His Work is full of colour; it is playful and broad. The smallest details are big in treatment, and every 'part is carefully thought out and most ingenious in design. His play ulness has caused him at times to be somewhat too florid in manner; but his taste is so just, and his fancy so inexhaustible, that he has safely given rein to his imagination where another man would have run riot and come to grief.
Robert Stark is an animal sculptor who has usually attracted the notice of connoisseurs rather than of the greater public, and his fine bronze statuette of an “Indian Rhinoceros” is to be seen in the Chantrey Collection. Mr Stark has a profound knowledge of
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| (Photo, London Stereoscopic Co.) | (Photo, Mansell & Co.) | |
| ALFRED STEVENS—The Wellington Monument, St Paul's Cathedral, London. |
SIR GEORGE FRAMPTON, R.A.— The Dr Barnardo Memorial. |
LORD LEIGHTON, P.R.A.—The Sluggard. |
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| (Photo, Frederick Hollyer.) HARRY BATES, A.R.A.—Homer. | ||
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| H. H. ARMSTEAD, R.A.—Lieutenant Waghorn. | G. F. WATTS, R.A.—Hugh Lupus. | A. GILBERT—Icarus. |
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animal anatomy; his range is considerable, and he is as easy with a rhinoceros as with a cart-horse or a hunter.
Conrad Dressler is best known for his busts of distinguished men, but his statue of “A Girl Tying up her Sandal,” and his two large marble panels for St George’s Hall, Liverpool, assured him his position. There is a cleverness, a daring, in his marked style, vigour of treatment, and a tendency towards emphasis, especially in his decorative work. much of which is designed for execution in Della Robbia ware. Since his return to pure sculpture he has executed some important work, including a bronze “Bacchante.”
In the work of Harry Bates (1850–1899; A.R.A., 1892), especially in the reliefs, with its balance and dignity, its rhythmical line and fine expression, is to be seen a flexibility which few Englishmen had shown up to that time. Style and a genuinely modern treatment of classic form, which is not weakened by touches of naturalism, were also to be recognized. Nor—in his “Homer,” for example—does the background detract from the main subject: Homer and Humanity in front; and behind, a vision of the Parthenon and Pallas Athene, and the great Sun of Art rising with the dawn of Poetry. “Psyche” is more delicate in thought and treatment, but it has little of the originality or force of the “Homer,” or of the classic style seen in the head called “Rhodope.” The serene and reposeful statue of “Pandora,” about to open her ivory casket, successfully achieves the purity of style at which the sculptor aimed. “Hounds in Leash” (the bronze of which belongs to the earl of Wemyss) is a vigorous group which was undertaken by Bates in response to the criticism that he could design no figures but such as are at rest. The plastic group is in the Tate Gallery, where it figures along with the “Pandora.” In “Endymion” the sculptor seems to have united in some degree the sculptural ideas expressed in the “Homer” and the central relief of “Psyche”: there is in it a good deal of the grace of the one and of the decorative force of the other, together with a lofty sense of beauty. The portrait-busts of Harry Bates are good pieces of realism—strong, yet delicate in technique, and excellent in character.
Sir George Frampton (b. 1860; A.R.A., 1894; R.A., 1902; knighted, 1908), pupil of the Royal Academy, the Lambeth Schools, and Mercié in Paris, is a particularly versatile and original artist, thoroughly in the “new movement” which he has done so much to direct. Highly accomplished, he is at home in every branch of his art, and covers the whole field. He first exhibited “Socrates Teaching” (1884), and followed this with “The Songster” (1887), “An Act of Mercy” (1888), “In Silence Prayeth She,” “The Angel of Death” (1889), “Caprice” (1891), and in 1892 “The Children of the Wolf”—his last ideal statue of the kind. It was followed by “Mysteriarch,” heralding a class of work with which the artist has since identified himself; or being in open rebellion against “white sculpture,” he thenceforward devoted himself to colour. “Mother and Child” is an experiment in polychromatic figure-work. The half-length figure called “Lamia,” with ivory face, head, and neck, and in a quaint head-and-neck dress of bronze jewelled, is a further departure from the true reserve of sculpture, but beautiful and delightful in feeling. The statue of “Dame Alice Owen,” in bronze and marble, and “King Edward VI.” are original, notwithstanding the pseudo-medieval taste of their conception. Frampton is happiest in distinctly decorative sculpture. His prolific and inventive fancy has expressed itself in such works as the bronze “The Steamship” and “The Sailing Ship” for Lloyd’s Registry in London, and in the memorial “Monument to Charles Mitchell,” at Newcastle-on-Tyne. Herein a new note is sounded, and we have some of the most striking features of Frampton’s design. That is to say, he seeks to escape from the purely architectural forms, pediments and mouldings, introducing his own inventions of curved lines, and frequently substituting tree-forms for columns or pilasters, with roots for bases, trunks for pillars, and branches and foliage for capitals. Besides these should be mentioned “The Vision,” the seven heroines from the Morte d’Arthur, “My Thoughts are my Children,” “Music” and “Dancing,” and memorials and busts of “Charles Keene,” “R. Stuart Poole,” “Leigh Hunt,” “Passmore Edwards,” “Dr Garnett,” a colossal statue of “Queen Victoria” erected in Calcutta, and another, an extremely successful work, for Leeds. His group of “Maternity” (1905) and the full-length seated statue of the marquess of Salisbury (1907) have added to his reputation. There are always charm of arrangement, delicacy of workmanship, and daintiness of feeling, as well as considerable power of design, simplicity, and breadth in his work. Sir George Frampton has also produced a number of fine medals.
W. S. Frith, one of the most successful teachers of sculptors in England, is chiefly remarkable for the decorative quality of his work. As in the monument to “Wheatstone, Inventor of the Telegraph,” or again, the standard lamps at the Astor Estate Office on the Thames Embankment, the sculptor shows charm of thought and spirit of design, vigour, and richness of effect. His ideal statuary and portraiture are not his chief work, however; his decorative sculpture for ecclesiastical and secular buildings is vast in extent and has had good influence on the younger school. One of his chief works is the “Bishop Ellicott’s Memorial,” a tomb with recumbent figure, a design of considerable imagination.
Henry A. Pegram (b. 1862; A.R.A., 1904), a pupil of Hamo Thornycroft and of the Royal Academy, attracted early attention with “Death Liberating a Prisoner,” and by the two high reliefs “Ignis Fatuus” (acquired for the Chantrey Collection) and “The Doom of Medusa.” These were followed by “Eve,” “Sibylla Fatidica,” “The Last Song,” “The Bather,” “Labour,” and “Fortune,” by decorative work for the exterior of the Imperial Institute, and later by the great candelabra which flank the interior western end of St Paul’s cathedral. “Into the Silent Land” (1905) is a group typical of the funerary sculpture on which his chisel was engaged in later years. His portraiture is also noteworthy. and his work generally is usually sculpturesque, with movement and life.
A. G. Walker has produced notable work in the class of pure sculpture, including the relief representing “The Last Plague: The Death of the Firstborn,” “Adam and Eve: And They were Afraid” and “The Thorn” (exhibited in bronze in 1910), graceful and quaintly charming, with elegance in the pose and in the action. His chief decorative work includes the sculptural figures in Stamford Hill Church.
The name of Captain Adrian Jones was for many years chiefly associated with the spirited work called “Duncan’s Horses,” a group displaying great knowledge of equine anatomy, form and action; since then his equestrian statue of “The Duke of Cambridge,” erected in Whitehall, London, outside the War Office, has been recognized as a vigorous performance. His most important work is the monumental quadriga designed to crown Burton’s great Arch at Hyde Park Corner, London.
W. Reynolds-Stephens (b. 1862), more devoted to goldsmith’s figure-work than to larger and more searching sculpture, must be considered less as a statuary than as “a poet who sings in metal.” A relief, after Sir L. Alma-Tadema’s “Women of Amphissa” (1889), was followed by. a “Wall Fountain,” “Truth and Justice,” and the “Sleeping Beauty,” a bas-relief, full of thought, invention, and dainty conceits. In the highly decorated “Launcelot and the Nestling,” “Guinevere and the Nestling,” and similar works, the artist makes use of various coloured metals, ivory, ems and the like, with pretty symbolism. Apart from his choice of material, there is a delicate languor about the lines', of his figures and reliefs, which display a charming feelings and refined taste. By two striking works he has re-entered the field of pure sculpture—the dramatic and somewhat tool anecdotal “A Royal Game” and “The Scout in War,” exhibited in 1908, an equestrian group of great refinement and excellence.
Alfred Drury (b. 1857; A.R.A., 1900) was a pupil of Dalou, whose assistant for a time he became. The first result was the curious echo of the master’s style, “The Triumph of Silenus” (1885). “The Genius of Sculpture” and “The First Reflection” (bought by the queen of Saxony) and “The Evening Prayer” (1890, Manchester Corporation Gallery) were followed by the statue of “Circe” (1893), which, through its grace, elegance of line, and symbolical realization of the subject, achieved a great popular success and was acquired by Leeds. The bronze head of “St Agnes” (1894) is one of the first examples of Mr Drury’s later style, belonging to the higher order of conception which, generally speaking, he has since maintained. This may be seen also in “Griselda” (bought for the Chantrey Collection), “The Age of Innocence,” and other busts symbolical of childhood, and in the series of “The Months,” at Barrow Court. For the decoration of the City Square at Leeds Drury executed the statue of Dr Priestly, consisting of the colossal figure entitled “Even.” His colossal groups for the decoration of the War Office, the monumental panels in high relief for the piers of Lambeth Bridge; and the decorative sculpture for the façade of the new Victoria and Albert Museum, all in London, are works of considerable importance. Among the latter are the figures of “Inspiration” and “Knowledge,” executed in 1907. Drury’s quiet, suave, and contemplative art lends itself well as decorative sculpture to architectural embellishment. His portraiture is also good, reticent, and full of character, and as a manipulator of clay he represents the highest contemporary standard of English sculptors.
Frederick W. Pomeroy (A.R.A., 1906), pupil of the Lambeth and Royal Academy Schools, and of M ercié, is of equal taste and ability. After 1888, when he exhibited the bronze statuette “Giotto,” he produced many ideal works—“Love, the Conqueror” (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), “Pleasures are like Poppies Spread,” “Boy Pipin,” “Dionysos,” and “The Nymph of Loch Awe” (both in the Tate Gallery), “A Nymph Finding the Head of Orpheus,” “Undine,” “Pensée,” and the clever study of the nude called “The Potter.” “Perseus is an inspiration from Benvenuto Cellini, but “The Spearman” is an original and powerful work. “Feroniae” (1909) is a nude statue, in bronze, remarkable for grace and sculptural animation. In ideal portraiture he has produced the statues. of “Admiral Blake,” “Dean Hook” (a colossal work for Leeds); “Oliver Cromwell” (also colossal, for St Ives, Huntingdonshire), “Robert Burns” for Paisley, as well as “R. P. Bonington” (1910), “Monsignor Nugent of Liverpool” (1905), an impressive group, and similar work, together with the life-size panel of “Archbishop Temple,” in bronze, for St Paul’s cathedral. In true portraiture, Pomeroy executed the Liberal Memorial Statue of Mr Gladstone, in the lobby of the Houses of Parliament, and the recumbent effigy of the Duke of Westminster, for Chester cathedral. His work is strong and sculpturesque, and his statues “stand” well. He sees nature in a big broad way, and his decoration is effective and well designed.
Albert Toft became known by his statue of “Lilith” (1889), and emphasized the impression then created by “Fate-Led” (1892, Walker Art Gallery), “Age and the Angel of Death,” “In the Sere and Yellow Leaf” (a remarkable study of old age), “The Goblet of Life,” and “Hagar.” “The Spirit of Contemplation” and “The Cup of Immortality” are more complete and display dignity and refinement. His memorials of the Boer War, at Cardiff and Birmingham, in design and silhouette, are among the most striking in the country. In “Mother and Child” (1903) and “Maternity” (1905) he has greatly raised the high-water mark of his achievement. Toft’s busts, such as those of W. E. Gladstone and Philip Bailey, as well as his statue of Sir Charles Mark Palmer, at Jarrow, and similar works, have force and breadth of character; and in his ideal work there is an effort, well sustained and successful, after dignity, harmony, evenness of balance, and relation of the whole.
Professor Édouard Lantéri, a naturalized Englishman, to whom British sculpture owes much, employed his own striking gifts to teach rather than to produce. But “The Fencing Master,” “The Duet,” and “A Garden Decoration” have exercised influence on the younger school through their fine sculptural qualities of vitality, richness, joyousness, sensuousness, and movement. His portrait busts are full of life and have that refinement and elegance pushed to the utmost length, which are characteristic of all his work; in his nude figure called “Pax” we have much of the severity, dignity, and placid repose of the Greek.
W. Birnie Rhind, R.S.A., has produced little work so important as the elaborate decorations for the doorway of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, but some of his statues and busts—“King James V. of Scotland,” “Lord Salisbury,” and others—show the influence of the modern school.
W. Goscombe John (b. 1860; A.R.A., 1899, R.A., 1909) achieved an early reputation with a figure of “St John the Baptist,” an austere creation of real importance. His other chief works are “Morpheus,” “A Girl Binding her Hair,” “A Boy at Play” (Tate Gallery), “The Glamour of the Rose,” and “The Elf”—a weird creation of true comedy. In these are shown a love of the purity and refinement of nature, realized with delicacy and a feeling for beauty. In portraiture Mr John is not less successful. The colossal seated statue of “The Duke of Devonshire” at Eastbourne has been acknowledged by the best critics in France and England to be one of the finest things of its kind, good in design and uiet suggestion of power. Among his chief memorials are the tomb of the marquess of Salisbury in Westminster Abbey, the “Memorial of the King’s Regiment” at Liverpool, the equestrian statue of “Viscount Tredegar” at Cardiff, the “Maharajah oil Balrampur” at Lucknow, and the monument to Sir Arthur Sullivan in the Embankment Gardens, London. These all sustain the reputation of the sculptor who has from the first been lo ally encouraged by his fellow-countrymen of Wales. The striking frieze “The Battle of Trafalgar,” for the pedestal of the statue of Viscount Tredegar (1910), is a remarkable performance.
Bertram Mackennal (A.R.A., 1909), the son of a Scottish sculptor settled in Australia, acknowledges no school, but was chiefly influenced by study in Paris. In his early ideal works, such as “Circe” and “For She Sitteth on a Seat in the High Places of the City,” there are boldness and a sense of drama, with a keen appreciation of elegance of form, not without severity and power of design. But they give little hint of the excellence that was to follow and to bring him to the very front rank of British sculptors, so that in 1910 he was selected to design the coinage of the new reign. His great pediment in the Local Government Offices in Whitehall is perhaps the finest work of its kind in the Kingdom., “Diana,” 1908, bought for the Chantrey Collection in the same year, is a marble nude of extraordinary grace, beauty, and refinement; and his small “Earth and the Elements,” similarly acquired in the preceding year for the Chantrey Collection, reveals a poetic beauty rare in these days. “The Mother” (1910) belongs to this group. The bronze statue of “The Dancer” (1904) is a work not less subtle, in which the learnedness of the sculptor is evident to every discerning eye, and “War,” a colossal female bust, reveals a power, amounting almost to ferocity, not disclosed in the other works. Among Mackennal’s other important statuary are the War Memorial at Islington and statues of Queen Victoria for India, Australia, and Blackburn; in all of these the sculpture is marked by good style, with movement, vigour, grace and nervousness of treatment.
G. Herbert Hampton made his first appearance in the Paris Salon with “The Mother of Evil,” and then the statues of “David” and Apollo” and “The Broken Vow,” “A Mother and Child,” “Narcissus,” “Orpheus” and other works were seen in the London galleries. Portraiture of merit has come from Mr Hampton, but his greatest success, perhaps, has been achieved in decorative sculpture.
F. E. Schenck (d. 1908) was similarly and more emphatically an architect’s sculptor—one of those who have done much to embellish many of the numerous great buildings which during the last twenty years of the 19th and the opening decade of the present century sprang up all over Great Britain. The municipal buildings at Stafford and Oxford, the public library at Shoreditch, and the Scotsman offices in Edinburgh—involving groups of colossal, figures bearing close relation to their architectural setting—are among the works which made his reputation. His defect was a “curliness” in his ornamental forms, which frequently detracts from the dignity and seriousness of his work.
J. Wenlock Robbins is another architectural sculptor of real power and individuality, whose work for the New General Hospital in Birmingham and for the Town Hall of Croydon is of a high order. His portraiture is also good, the colossal statue of “Queen Victoria” for Belfast being the most important of his achievements. Of ideal work, the statue called “Nydia” is the best known.
Henry C. Fehr (pupil at the Royal Academy and of T. Brock) contributed the group of “Perseus and Andromeda” to the Academy in 1893, when it was purchased for the Chantrey Collection (Tate Gallery). His subsequent ideal works, “Hypnos Bestowing Sleep upon the Earth,” “The Spirit of the Waves,” “St George and the Rescued Maiden,” and “Ambition’s Crown Fraught with Pain,” confirmed the high opinion of his cleverness; but in some of them his exuberance tells somewhat against their general effect, in spite of their inherent grace and strength. On the other hand, the statue of “James Watt” for the City Square of Leeds exhibits those qualities needful for open-air portraiture; and his busts and statues have character and life. “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” is free from this defect, and is an original treatment of the subject; and “The Briton” (1908), though full of vigour and imagination, shows restraint.
George Wade is essentially a sculptor of busts and statues; the most noteworthy of his works are the memorial to Sir John Macdonald in Montreal, the seated figure for Madras of the native judge, Sir Aiyar Muthuswamy, and a number of ambitious monumental works.
Gilbert Bayes, at first a modeller in the flat of horses treated in a decorative manner, produced “Vanity,” “A Knight-Errant,” and similar picturesque bibelôts on a large scale; and later still, such work as “The Fountain of the Zodiac,” showing a talent at once more serious, ordered and graceful. “The Coming of Spring” (1904) and “The Gallopers” (1905) are reliefs noteworthy for the intelligence and the sculptural appropriateness they display. The equestrian “Sigurd” (1909 and 1910) is full of fancy anti) illustrates the personal talent of the sculptor: the latter group was acquired for the Chantrey Collection. He is the designer of the great seal (1910).
W. R. Colton (b. 1867; A.R.A., 1903) is a sculptor of strong individuality, capable equally(of deep feeling and dainty fancy. “The Girdle,” “The Image-Finder,” “The Crown of Love,” “The Wavelet” and the “The Spring-tide of Life” revealed a sculptor of exceptional ability, whose love of truth and life has sometimes inspire him to place a touch of rather awkward realism in a graceful and charming composition; the result is something unusual, yet quite natural, and because it imparts to the work a flavour of quaintness and originality, it is not only unobjectionable but welcome.; Later, Colton struck out another path especially in the monumental and statuary work executed in England and India. Among his principal efforts are the South African memorial to the Royal Artillery erected in the Mall, London, during the summer of 1910, the statue of the Maharajah of Mysore (1906) and a monumental “Tiger” (1909) in bronze—a work of considerable power. His vigour of design and sense of style made him a force in the younger school of sculptors. He has acted as professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy.
David McGill first attracted attention with the relief of “Hero and Leander,” following it with a series of figures, of which the most striking is “The Bather,” a work at once of vigour and of humour. His work is good in pose and line, refined in drawing and feeling, and excellent in style.
Charles J. Allen belongs to the same group. “Love and the Mermaid” (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), “A Dream of Love,” “Rescued” and “Love’s Tangles” (1908) are works of high merit, in every case good in treatment, free in modelling and pleasing in design. His important Queen Victoria memorial in Liverpool was unveiled in 1906, and the monument to “Rt. Hon. Samuel Smith, M.P.,” and numerous busts have followed. “The Woman whom Thou gavest to be with me” is probably his completest ideal work.
F. M. Taubman, who had both French and Belgian teaching, has produced a series of works which display his power of design and strength of technique. “The Angel of Sad Flowers,” “Orpheus and Eurydice” and “Adam and Eve” reveal his strength in ideal work; and the statue of “Sir Sidney Waterlow” at Highgate is a good example of his monumental portraiture; In “The Sandal,” a small nude kneeling figure, he has turned frankly to classic coldness, and even the purity of design and modelling cannot warm it into life.
J. Pittendrigh Macgillvray, R.S.A., belongs to the rather meagre Scottish group, of whom he is generally regarded as the chief. His chief work consists mainly of monuments and colossal memorials. The “Peter Low Memorial” in Glasgow cathedral, the “Robert Burns,” the “Allan Family Memorial,” the fine relief of “Rhythm”. and the “National Gladstone Memorial” for Scotland are his leading works. With these should be considered the “Dean Montgomery Memorial” in St Mary’s cathedral, Edinburgh, and the “John Knox Memorial” in St Giles’s cathedral.
F. Derwent Wood (A.R.A., 1910) is a scul tor of exceptional ability. His varied training—at the Royal College of Art, the Slade School, the Royal Academy schools, and under M. Rodin and Mr Brock—gave him a wide outlook without impairing his individuality. His merit was recognized as soon as he quitted his masters, and he forthwith won the competition for a series of statues
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| W. R. COLTON, A.R.A.—Maharajah of Mysore. |
SIR CHARLES LAWES-WITTEWRONGE— The Punishment of Dirce. |
G. F. WATTS, R.A.—Clytie. |
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| SIR J. EDGAR BOEHM, R.A.—Carlyle. | W. R. COLTON, A.R.A.—The Crown of Love. | THOMAS BROCK, R.A.—The Genius of Poetry. |
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representing the arts for the Kelvingrove art gal lery at Glasgow. A great mural tomb followed, with “Love Sacred and Profane” as its motif, together with a series of other works of growing artistic importance. “Cain” (1905), a vigorous, dramatic, yet wholly sculpturesque figure, is in powerful contrast to the three works that appeared in successive years: “Abundance” (a group of a woman and two children) and the marble statues “Atalanta” and “Psyche”—all of them the type of grace in pose and of beauty of face and form. At the same time Derwent Wood produced the two boy figures on the piers to the southward of the Queen Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace. There is marked individuality in all he does, sculpturesque character, firmness and delicacy of handling, with a richness of style and appreciation of breadth and simplicity.
Paul Montford, the son of Horace Montford, after a brilliant academic career made his mark in decorative sculpture. It is not by such work as “Court Favourites” (1906) that he sustains his reputation, but rather by the sculptural embellishments wherewith the archway connecting the Local Government offices with the Home Office in Whitehall is enriched. “The Spinning Girl” is one of his best ideal figures, and the 18th century “Viscount Bolingbroke and “The Storm Waves” are characteristic of his vigorous style and personal conception and execution. .
John Tweed, who studied under Falguiere and Rodin, was influenced more by the latter than by the former, and inclines rather to the impressionistic school than to the academic. His statue of Cecil Rhodes has power and emphasis—it impresses rather than attracts. The statues of Queen Victoria at Aden, of van Riebeck at Cape Town, and the Wilson Memorial in Rhodesia are among his chief works. He was selected to “complete” Alfred Stevens’s Wellington Memorial in St Paul’s cathedral. Basil Gotto has not less force, and he is more exuberant in his realization of life—an exuberance which does not always make for refinement. “Brother Ruffino” has dignity and strength, and the “Bacchus” of 1907 is realistic enough to repel those who ask for elegance even in an unrefined subject. The work, however, is ably treated.
Henry Poole belongs to the same vigorous school, and has a true sense of the monumental. as is evident in his colossal group of “The Mermaids”; while his “Naiad” (1909) shows an innate refinement.
S. Nicholson Babb, for some years an assistant of Mr Brock, has produced an ambitious “War Memorial” and many able groups and figures, among which “The Coming of Spring” (1910) reveals the modern French influence.
Albert H. Hodge stands by himself. Asa sculptor-decorator with special views on relief-work in which he adheres to the sentiment and character of the architecture it is to embellish, he adopts a convention which gives the appearance of high relief to what is really low, by sharpness of edges and by a learned use of light and shade. His panels of “Science and Art” (1904) and “Commerce” (1906) are good illustrations of this original kind of architectonic work, while his large equestrian group of “Prosperity” applies the same principles to the round. These three works were modelled for the town of Hull.
A man of similar force is Joseph Epstein, who replaces refinement by vigour, archaic simplicity, and primitiveness of outlook, as though casting his vote in favour of the Garden of Eden as against/the garden of the Tuileries. His work, in which he leans towards the modern German view, is mainly decoration for buildings; his most discussed productions are the statues (1907) on the topmost storey of the British Medical Association offices.
Richard Garbe, a sculptor of equal strength, was a pupil of the London County Council School of Arts and Crafts and began to exhibit in 1898. Rugged power both in subject and execution mark his productions. His ideal works, such as “The Egoist” (1906), “Man and the Ideal” (1907), “The Idealist” (1908) and “Undine” (1909), illustrate his range of thought and reveal his uncommon vigour which amounts, it might be said, to well-controlled, idealistic brutality; they are broad and impressive, and are conceived in a monumental spirit.
Charles L. Hartwell has grace and strength combined. The nude figure representing “The Rising Tide” (1906), reminding us a little of Leighton’s work, and “The Bathers” (1907), are both works of refinement and elegance, and “Dawn” (1909) displays unusual charm and, like the others, offers a silhouette of much interest. While much poetry of expression and grace of composition distinguish his “Sirens" (1910), vigour is the note of the small group f' A Foul in the Giants' Race,” which was acquired by the Chantrey trustees in 1908.
Benjamin Clemens, pupil of Professor Lantéri and the Royal College of Art, is another member of this talented group. His lifesize ideal figures, “Sappho” (1902), “Cain” (1904), “Eurydice” (1906), “Andromeda” (1907) and “Aurora” (1908), all made their mark when exhibited in the Royal Academy, and showed the sculptor to be possessed of the qualities of sensitiveness, elegance, and strength. The group of “Kephalos and Prokris” (1910) is his most important and most striking work.
Harold Parker came to England from Australia in I$96 at the age of twenty-three, and after studying under W. S. Frith, made many Academic successes, and in 1904 exhibited his plaster life-size statue of “Ariadne,” which, translated into marble and re-exhibited in 1908, was bought by the trustees of the Chantrey Collection and is now in the Tate Gallery. His other more .important works include “The Long, Long Dreams of Youth” (1905), “Narcissus” (1906), and “Prometheus” (1909). Without revealing any striking originality, Parker displays very considerable accomplishment and a good sense of the sculpturesque, and his busts are refined and good.
Oliver Wheatley, formerly assistant to Brock, and pupil of Aman-Jean, has done much decorative work. His life-size recumbent statue “Awakening” is among the best of his figures.
T. Tyrrell, who first attracted attention by his decorative figures on Professor Pite’s house in Mortimer Street, London, has shown 2nuch)graceful fancy in his “The Ideal,” such as “The Whisper” 1906 .
Reuben Sheppard has shown himself poetic and pleasing in symbolic suggestion in his striking half-length group “The Music of Death” (1907); and Oliver Sheppard, in his “Eve” of the same year, produced a graceful work.
The Irish sculptor, John Hughes, achieved a great success by his monument to Queen Victoria erected in Dublin. It is a fine combination of sculptural and architectural effect and richness of grouping, and although it reveals too great a love of ornament it is impressive alike in mass, design, silhouette, and general arrangement.
There should also be mentioned, among the younger sculptors, Mortimer Brown (“St John the Baptist”), David B. Brown (“The Spirit of Ivy”), Bertram Pegram (“Down to the Sea”), the Scotsmen, McFarlane Shannan (“The Arcadian Shepherd’s Dream”), Kellock Brown, and J. Crosland McLure (“Leicester War Memorial”); Herbert Ward (bronzes of South African savages, “The Idol Maker” and the like), Alfred Turner, Charles Pibworth, and F. Arnold Wright.
The women sculptors include such accomplished amateurs as H.R.H. the duchess of Argyll (“A Crucifix”—the Colonial Memorial in St Paul’s cathedral) and Countess Gleichen. The principal recent names are those of Mary Pownall (Mrs Bromet), (“A Harpy”), E. M. Rope (“Springtime,” relief), Ruby Levick (“Fishermen hauling a Net”), Margaret Winser (“Mourners,” a relief), Esther Moore (“At the Gates of the Past”), Edith Maryon (“The Poet of Umbria”), and Gwendolen Williams (“The Lorelei,” 1907, and charming groups of children).
The sculptor-decorators make a group of workers of striking fancy and ability. Lynn Jenkins, whose frieze in bronze, ivory and mother-of-pearl at Lloyd’s Registry is a remarkable achievement, is one of the leaders. He has latterly devoted himself to pure sculpture, such as the life-size bronze figure on a sarcophagus, “Destiny” (1909 and 1910) and bust portraits remarkable for exquisite feeling and delicacy of carving. Walter Crane designed for Manchester a mace that is remarkable for beauty of conception and felicity of symbolism. Alexander Fisher and Nelson Dawson should be included in the group. Other sculptors already mentioned, including Thornycroft, Gilbert, Frampton, Pomeroy, Colton and Toft, have all devoted themselves to sculptural decoration pure and simple, whether in metal, stone, or marble.
The painter-sculptors claim among them Alfred Stevens, Sir Edwin Landseer, Lord Leighton, J. M. Swan, W. Reynolds-Stephens, George Richmond, and G. F. Watts. George Richmond’s real talent may be gauged by his “Monument to Bishop Blomfield” in St Paul’s cathedral. His son, Sir William Richmond, K.C.B., has also practised in sculpture—the memorial tomb of Mr and Mrs Gladstone is his. Watts educated himself artistically on the Elgin Marbles, and he produced half a dozen pieces of sculpture which place him high among the world’s finest sculptors of the 19th century. The recumbent effigy of “Bishop Lonsdale” in Lichfield cathedral was an epoch-marking work, not only in the technical matter of the bold treatment of the drapery, but in largeness and breadth and its noble sense of style, and the “Lord Lothian” in Bickling church is also very remarkable. The artist then produced the colossal equestrian group of “Hugh Lupus” for the duke of Westminster (Eaton Hall), a composition as imaginative and original asit is grand and sculpturesque. Then followed “Physical Energy,” another equestrian group, which, after being about twenty years in progress, was cast in 1902; it was executed in duplicate; one copy has been set up in South Africa, to the memory of Cecil Rhodes, whose character it may be held to symbolize, and the other has been erected in Kensington Gardens, London, at the expense of the British government. In 1902 also, the startle of “Lord Tennyson” was completed. But the bust of “Clytie” is surpassed in bigness and classic purity of style and feeling by nothing ever produced in England; it is a complete and noble thing. There is no sculptor who has come nearer to obtaining the grandeur of form which is so wonderful in the Greek masterélpieces. Simple in line, immense in character, full and rich in mo elling, Watts’s work is instinct with vigour, breadth and movement. It sets the true standard, and is a constant and a noble warning to sculptors of the younger school not, to be led away by the dainty and fanciful, however alluring. Especially it warns them against what has become a feature with a certain section—the devotion to metalworking, enamelling, and the like, and the free introduction of these accessories into serious sculptural work. Irresistible in the hands of a great artist like Alfred Gilbert, such work, at all times attractive, is the goldsmith’s and iron smith’s business rather than the sculptor’s; and although it has coloured the work of some of the younger sculptors of the day, it is not likely to obtain any very wide hold, or to exercise permanent influence for evil. The variety and independence of the British School are such that it is impossible to define any particular tendency in its practice other than towards an ever increasing rise in the level of technical excellence and the power of design. There is, broadly speaking, a general stand against the “modernity” imported into sculpture by the younger members of the foreign schools, and a disinclination to bend the art to the illustration of everyday life and to the rendering of effects not hitherto considered to be the function of the plastic arts. (M. H. S.)
After 1870, when a great artistic movement marked the resuscitation of France after the Franco-German War, sculpture especially revived with exceptional vigour, and the last thirty years of the 19th century were a memorable epoch in its history. Not that many new and unexpected men of genius suddenly arose, for most of the artists who then came to the front had already distinguished themselves by equally noble work; but sculpture, like the other arts, benefited by the pause for thought, and by the ripe and manly tone stamped on the national mind by the discipline of events. Intense ardour animated the admirable group of French sculptors: the oldest still found some lofty expression; the men in their prime showed their powers with unwonted force and fire; and the younger generations grew up in rapid succession, a close phalanx of sculptors whose number is still increasing, for if we include only living artists, and those who have taken honours in the Salons, we find a list of seven hundred exhibitors. The first generation of survivors of the war, who led the way in the new period, still boasted of such men as Dumont (1801–1884), Cavelier (1814–1894), Bonnassieux (1810–1892), Jouffroy (1806–1882), Schoenewerck (1820–1885), Carrier-Belleuze (1824–1887), Aimé Millet (1819–1891) and Clésinger (1814–1883). These artists, born in the first quarter of the 19th century, were for the most part each the head of a studio,” their teaching being carried on till the end of the century. Next to them followed their immediate pupils, already their rivals, and some indeed famous before the new era; such were Guillaume, Dubois and Frémiet; others, fresh from the Academy at Rome, at once rose to distinction, and all combined to form the remarkable group of artists to which the modern school of French sculpture owes its world-wide fame. At this time Eugene Guillaume (1822–1905) was exhibiting his “Roman Marriage,” his “Bust of Mgr Darboy,” his “Orpheus,” and “Andromache,” works of learned skill and severe distinction. Paul Dubois (1829–1905) executed his “Narcissus,” and the “Tomb of General Lamoriciere,” on which the decorative figures of Charity, Faith, and Military Courage are popular favourites, full of grave and pathetic feeling. Chapu (1833–1891) executed his exquisite figure of “Youth” for the tomb of Henri Regnault, and that of “Thought” for the tomb of Daniel Stern, his monuments to Berryer and to Mgr Dupanloup. Barrias' (1841–1905) “First Interment” won him the medal of honour in 1878; besides his patriotic group of the “Defence of Paris.” F alguiere (1831–1900) produced a remarkable series of statues, characterized by their life-like power; some dignified or pathetic, as “St Vincent de Paul,” “La Rochejacquelein,” and “Cardinal Lavigerie” ; some full of bold and- dashing spirit, as his “Diana,” his “Nereids,” and “Hunting Nymphs.” Mercié gave us “Gloria Victis,” “Quand Meme,” and his monuments, among which that called “Memory” must be mentioned; his pediment for the Tuileries; his “Genius of Art,” &c. Delaplanche (1836–1890) produced his “Mother's Teaching,” “Music,” “The Virgin with a Lily,” and “Aurora” ; and Allar “The Death of Alcestis.” To these names must be added those of Degeorge, who, with Chapu, gave so powerful an impetus to the art of the medallist; of Gautherin, Hiolle, Thomas, Crauck, Lafrance, Maniglier and Moreau-Vauthier—one of the men who, with Gérome (the painter) and Frémiet, revived the taste for coloured sculpture, a style first attempted long before by Simart; besides many more. These artists created a supremely healthy and vital school of sculpture, dignified and elegant, learned and varied, fresh and charming, and, above all, as single-hearted and as well trained as in any period of history.
To understand, however, the position of contemporary sculpture in France, it will be necessary to look back even further than 1870. It must be remembered that the whole history of French sculpture, as far back as the 17th century, is connected with the invasion of Italian influence in the 16th century, which remained paramount over French art for more than three hundred years. Statue-making, until then an art of expression-national, popular, human and Christian—lost its primitive character under the dilettante refinement of an aristocratic society closely gathered round a king who made art subservient to his splendour or his pleasure; it sank into superficial and conventional beauty, and became almost exclusively the interpreter of trivial ingenuity or flattering allegories derived from the dead fables of heathen mythology. The best that would be expected from this was choice elegance of line, a harmonious treatment of mass and composition, a loving study of the nude-in short, a purely plastic type of art. And sculpture had become the art of the nobility and of the court, having no hold, as it had in the past, on the great human family—the nation. Still, even at the high tide of Louis XIV.'s reign, some dissatisfaction became evident, even some rebellion, in the great though solitary spirit of Puget, who strove to animate the marble with the passions of humanity. In the next century he found followers-Falconet, Pigalle and Houdon, who also asserted their right to infuse life and passion and movement into their statues, seeking them in the despised province of stern reality. The great cataclysm of the Revolution, which might have been expected to break the bonds of thought, turned men's minds to contemplate the Antique, and though it certainly modified the style of sculpture, was far from changing the source of its inspiration, since it sent it once more to the Antique. Indeed, at the beginning of the 19th century, when the teaching of David was paramount in spite of Gros, who, then in the master's studio, was unconsciously sowing the seed of romanticism in painting, a robust individuality was developing among French sculptors-a spirit somewhat rugged, independent, and partly trained, beyond the academic pale, prepared to carry on the tradition of Puget, and quite simply, without any revolutionary airs of innovation, to shake off torpid conventionality. By the mere force of a strong plebeian temperament Rude quite naturally happened on a style of art-high art-at once expressive and popular. He was the first to raise the cry of liberty in sculpture, and he left successors who bravely worked out what he had begun. Barye and Carpeaux were both in 1875 on the threshold of an era to which they bequeathed a fruitful influence. Barye carried on Rude's tradition of expression, and transformed what had previously been mere decorative carving into a new style and branch of art now adopted by a whole phalanx of admirable artists: the sculpture, namely, of animals, the first glance that sculpture had till then bestowed on nature apart from man. Carpeaux, who was much younger, was in his dayas Puget had been-an exceptional personality; he carried on the slow revolt of two centuries which was to break the narrow mould of school-training and infuse a soul of more ardent vitality into sculptured forms.
The importance of these two great artists in relation to contemporary art was not fully seen till after their death. In point of fact Painting had until now amply filled the new part assigned to Art; its vehement efforts had strongly influenced public opinion; and as, in the early years of the 19th century, it had largely extended the field of human vision over the remote past and the domains of feeling, with the promise of surveying all nature, space and time, the spirit of the age asked no more, and did not expect sculpture, too, to abandon old-world myths. It must also be said that those sculptors who at that time carried on the classical tradition had renewed its youth by their learned and enthusiastic love of it; they had reverted to the past, but it was the past of the really great masters, either of antiquity or of the early Florentine school, no less enamoured of life, beauty and nature. Guillaume and Paul Dubois, Chapu and Falguiére, Mercié, and Delaplanche were the rivals in sculpture of the great idealist painters-Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Ricard, Delaunay, Baudry, and Henner-who were working at the same time.
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| A. FALGUIĖRE—St Vincent de Paul. |
E. BARRIAS—The First Funeral. | E. DELAPLANCHE—The Virgin with the Lily. |
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| A. IDRAC—Mercury inventing the Caduceus. | ||
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| JUSTE BECQUER—St Sebastian. | L. GÉRÔME—Bonaparte at Cairo. | L. MARQUESTE—Galatea. |
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| FRÉMIET—The Bear Hunter. | ||
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| L. LONGEPIED—Immortality. | GUILLAUME—The Roman Marriage. | D. PUECH—The Siren. |
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| R. DE SAINT-MARCEAUX—Genius guarding the Secret of the Tomb. |
A. MERCIÉ—Souvenir. | A. RODIN—The Kiss. |
This it is which accounts for the fact that romanticism then found so little acceptance among sculptors. But in the next generation the sowers of the seed might see their harvest. The pupils of Rude, of Barye and of Carpeaux, allied by school sympathies-the little drawing-school conducted by Lecoq de Boisbaudran, which, in despite of the studios of the Beaux Arts, created a group of independent and highly original artists—formed the centre of a distinct force which increased day by day. Young men, fresh from Rome, persistently kept up the spirit of the Antique. A galaxy of learned and refined artists was represented by such men as Hiolle (1833–1887) (“Arion,” “Orpheus”), Idrac (1840–1884) (“Mercury inventing the Caduceus,” “Salammbo”), Marqueste (“Galatea,” “Eros,” “Perseus beheading the Gorgon,” “The Rape of Europa”), and Coutan (“Eros,” “A Woman carrying Loaves,” “A Sergeant-at-Arms,” &c.), Lanson (“The Iron Age”), Longepied (1849–1888) (“Immortality”), Peinte (“Orpheus charming Cerberus to Sleep”), Gustave Michel (“In a Dream,” “Meditation”), Carlés (“Innocence,” “Abel”), A. Boucher (“Earth,” “Au but”), besides Carlier, Léonard and Turcan (1846–1895)—soon to be followed by another generation: Puech (“The Siren,” “The Muse of André Chénier”), Verlet (“The Monument to Maupassant,” “Orpheus”), Larche (“The Brook and the Meadow,” “Violets”), Sicard (“Hagar and Ishmael”), and Daillon, Escoula, St Lami, and many more. In opposition to these there stood a group of sculptors, young and old, who sought their subjects in mythology, legend, history or poetry, or merely in the scenes of daily life, and aimed at presenting the ideal of their time under its external aspects, but more especially the deepest emotions of the modern mind. It was Frémiet, with his striking and vivid conceptions, who led the advance with new and dramatic subjects: primeval man and the fierce beasts with which he disputed his rule (“A She-Bear and a Man of the Stone Age,” “An Oran-utan and a Savage,” “Gorillas”), or embodiments of the heroes of the past (“Joan of Arc,” “Saint Louis,” “Saint George,” “Louis of Orleans,” &c.); then followed lust Becquet (1829–1907), the excellent artist who represented the stricken figures of “Ishmael” and “Saint Sebastian”; Christophe (1827–1892), with his symbolical presentments of “The Human Comedy,” “Fortune” and “The Supreme Kiss”; Aubé (“Monument to Gambetta,” “Dante,” “Bailly,” &c.); A. Legros the naturalized English painter and sculptor, who executed some fine fountains for the duke of Portland; Injalbert, returned from Rome (“Hippoméne,” “Christ on the Cross,” “The Herald”); and, younger than these, Desbois (“Leda”), Dampt (“A Grandmother’s Kiss,” “Melusine”), Alexandre Charpentier, Carriès, Baffier, Pierre Roche, Madame Marie Cazin and many more.
The disruption of the Salons in 1890 showed very plainly the bent of this group, who seceded to the Champ de Mars, where the leaders were Dalou and Rodin, and where Bartholomé made an unexpected and original appearance. Foreigners added a contingent of the highest merit, such as the American St Gaudens, and, more especially, the Belgian Constantin Meunier, affiliated to France by their early training, to say nothing of descent. Meunier especially, with his statues and statuettes of labouring figures—miners, puddlers, hammerers, glass-blowers, and the like—gave to his art a keynote new to France, which found a response even in academic circles. A broad democratic current was swaying public feeling. The questions which turn on the status of the working man had become the programme of every party, even of the most conservative. Art being the mirror of society, the novel, the drama and painting devoted themselves to the glorification of a new factor in modern life, namely, Labour. Sculpture now, in rivalry with painting, through which Millet had immortalized the peasant, and Courbet the working man, also sought inspiration from such themes; and at the same time the demands of the democratic movement called for monuments to the memory and deeds of great or useful men.
Sculpture, under this modern tendency, assumed an unexpected aspect; its highest expression is seen in the work of three men very dissimilar: Dalou, Rodin, and Bartholomé. In Belgium, as has been said, where modern social questions are strongly felt, Constantin Meunier had interpreted the democratic impulse in a very striking manner, under the influence, no doubt, of J. F. Millet. In France, Jules Dalou (1838–1902), with a broader view, aimed at creating an art which should represent the aspirations and dreams of this phase of society while adhering to the fine old traditions of the art of Louis XIV., stamped with magnificence and grandeur, but applied with graver, simpler and severer feeling to the glorification of the people. He revived the older style of sculpture, giving it greater power and truer dignity by a close study of life, supported by a scholarly and serious technique. In his “Triumph of the Republic,” and the monuments to “Alphand,” to “Delacroix,” to “Floquet,” to “Victor Hugo,” and others, he strove to create a style apart from life, to which he is alien and indifferent, but based on life, the outcome of the needs of society, the impersonation of its characteristics, the expression in eloquent form of its nature, spirit, and moral idiosyncrasy.
Treading the same path, though in a different step, is Auguste Rodin. He disregards every contingent fact; even when he takes his subject from legend or history, whether “Eve” or “St John the Baptist,” “The Age of Bronze” or “The Burgesses of Calais,” “Victor Hugo” or “Balzac,” he avoids all the conventional details and attributes of his personages to embody the very essence of humanity as expressed in the quivering flesh. He, like Carpeaux, has gone back, to Dante and to Michelangelo to force the “Gates of Hell”—the subject chosen for the entrance to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs—and to read the deepest mysteries of the human soul. His is the art of suffering, anguish and terror, of cruel and despairing pleasure—a wild cycle of proud and bitter melancholy. All the efforts made in the past to infuse life into Art, all that Puget, Falconet, Pigalle and Houdon tried to effect, and that Rude, Barye and Carpeaux strove for in their turn—all this was part of the endeavour of these their successors, but with a clearer purpose and more conscious aim. By good hap or providence they were greeted on their way by the voice of the most devoted apostle who was to preach the new doctrine, namely, Louis Courajod, the founder of the French sculpture gallery in the Louvre. From his professor’s chair in the schools he cursed the Italian intruders of the 16th century for having debased French art with “noble attitudes,” extravagant gestures and allegorical antics; and he carried his pupils and his hearers back to the great national period of French sculpture, which, in the dark medieval ages, had created the splendid stone images of the noble French cathedrals.
A marked individuality now appeared in protest against academic traditions—Albert Bartholomé. He, after beginning as a painter, was tempted by sculpture, more particularly, in the first instance, by a wish to execute a monument to a comrade he had loved. From this first effort, carried out in his studio, without any school training, but with a firm determination to master technical difficulties and fulfil his dream, followed a broader purpose to execute a great expressive and vitally human work which should appeal to the heart of the populace. From this arose the idea of a “Monument to the Dead” in Pere Lachaise. Bartholomé had started without a guide, but he instinctively turned to the great tradition of Northern Christianity, which his mind subsequently associated with that of the antique race who had ever done most honour to Death, the people of Egypt.
Thus two currents contended, as it were, for the guidance of French sculpture, each claiming a descent from the historic past; one inheriting the classic tradition of the Renaissance, of Latin and Hellenic origin, to which the French school, since the time of lean Goujon, has owed three centuries of glory. This is the pagan art of the South; its marks are balance, reasonableness and lucidity; it was the composer of apotheoses, the preserver of the ideal of beauty. The other, reverting, after centuries of resignation or of impotent rebellion, to the genuine French past which produced the noble works of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries—to the tradition of Flanders and of Burgundy, which was smothered in the 16th century by Italian art–to the Christian and naturalistic art of the North, which renounced the canons of antiquity, and expressed itself by methods essentially human and mutable, living and suffering appeals to all mankind. The immediate result of this antagonism was no doubt a period of agitation. The outcome, on the whole, is confusion. Still, however vexatious the chaos of form and movement may be, it is Life, a true reflection of the tumult of modern thought in its complexity and bewilderment; it is the reawakening of sculpture.
Monumental and decorative statuary found an extended sphere through the founding or restoration of public buildings after the events of 1870. Memorial sculpture obtained constant employment on patriotic or republican monuments erected in various parts of France, and not yet complete. Illustrious masters have done themselves honour in such work. Dalou, Mercie, Barrias, Falguiére, and many others less famous executed monuments to the glory of the Republic or in memory of the national defence, and figures of loan of Arc as a symbol of patriotism, &c., as well as numberless statues erected in the market-places of humble towns, or even of villages, in commemoration of national or local celebrities: politicians, soldiers, savants and artists—Thiers, Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Carnot, Pasteur, Claude Bernard, Delacroix, Ingres, Corot, Millet, Victor Hugo, Lamartine and many more. The garden of the Luxembourg alone has become a sort of Elysian Fields, where almost every day some fresh statue rises up in memory of contemporary French poets. The funereal style of monument, in which French art was at all times conspicuously distinguished, was also revived in sympathy with that general sentiment which regards reverence for the dead as a religion, and gave rise, as we have seen, to some splendid work by Chapu (the monuments to Regnault, to Daniel Stern, of Mgr Dupanloup); by Paul Dubois (the monument to General Lamoriciére); by Mercie (the tombs of Baudry, of Cabanel, of King Louis Philippe and his queen Marie Amelie); by Dalou (the monuments to Victor Noir, to Floquet and Blanqui); and by many more, with Bartholome at their head. The cemetery of Pere Lachaise is indeed one of the best spots to visit for a review of contemporary sculpture.
While man has been diligently studied in every class of sculpture, more particularly in portrait sculpture, which finds a more practical adaptation to daily uses by a bust or small statue, such as Theodore Riviere was the first to produce, by medallions, or by medals, closely related to statuary, nature now holds a place in the sculpture of animals-a place created, so to say, by Barye and carried on by Fremiet, Mene, Cain, and, with even greater vigour and a closer study of character, by Gardet (“Panthers,” in the Luxembourg, “Lions” and “Dogs,” at Chantilly, &c.); Peter, Valton, Le Duc, Isidore Bonheur, Peyrol, Cordier, Surand, Virion, Mérite and others. Finally, the class of la petite sculpture—the statuette and small group—after long hesitation in the hands of the two men who first cultivated it, Fremiet and the painter Gerome, made a sudden start into life, due in no small measure to the success attending the charming and pathetic statuettes of Theodore Riviére (“Salammbo and Maltho,” “Ultimum feriens,” “Charles VI. and Odette,” “The Vow,” “Fra Angelico,” “The Shunammite Woman,” &c.). Riviere was wont to use—as Gérôme did in his “Bellona,” and subsequently in his small “Tamerlane”—materials of various colours, and even precious stones and metals, which he employed with great effect. A whole class of art was not, indeed, originated, but strongly vivified by this method of treatment. Claudius Marioton and Dampt, who always affected small and precious work, Agathon Leonard (e.g. a table decoration of “Dancers” in Sèvres china), Laporte Blairsy, Ferrary, Levasseur, Belloc, E. Lafont, &c., utilized every process and every kind of material—marble and metal, wood and ivory, enchanced by the most costly goldsmiths’ work and gems.
It would seem now that sculpture, thus endowed with new ideas and the most various means of expression, and adapted to every comprehension and every situation, was fully on a level with the other graphic arts. What it had chiefly to fear was, in fact, the wealth of means at its disposal, and its competition or collaboration with other arts. And this the later generations seem to have understood-the men who were the outcome of the two conflicting traditions: order and moderation on one side; character, life, and emotion on the other. Though very variously inspired by the facts or ideals of contemporary life, such young artists as Jean Boucher (“Evening,” “The Antique and the Modern”), Roger Bloche (“Childhood,” “Cold”), Derré, Boverie, Hippolyte Lefebvre, Desruelles, Gaston Schnegg, Pierre Roche, Fix-Masseau, Couteil has, and others seem to show that French sculpture is about to assume a solid position on a sound foundation, while not ceasing to keep in touch with the tastes, aspects and needs—in short, the ideal—of the day. Thus, while painting -engaged the attention of the public by, its new departures, its daring, and its very extravagance, sculpture, which by the conditions of its technique is less exposed to transient influences, has, since the close of the 19th century, developed normally but with renewed vigour. If the brilliancy of the school was not so conspicuous and its works gave rise to little discussion or speculation, it is not the less certain that at the beginning of the 20th century the younger generation offered the encouraging prospect of a compact group of sculptors who would probably leave works of permanent merit. Yet sculpture too had gone through a crisis, and been deeply stirred by the currents which so violently agitated all modern thought. We have already spoken of its “state of mind,” torn between the noble traditions of a glorious past which link it to the antique, and the craving to render in its own medium, with greater freedom and fuller force of expression, all those unuttered meanings of the universe and of contemporary thought which the other arts-painting, literature, the drama, and even music-have striven to identify and to record. But the acute stage of tentative and incoherent effort seemed in 1910 to be past; inspiration had returned# to its normal channel and purely plastic expression.
The powerful individuality which had the most vital influence on modern sculpture in France, and, it may be added, on many foreign schools, is that of Rodin. During the ten years which followed the Great Exhibition in Paris (1900) and the special display of his works, his reputation spread throughout the countries of the world and his fame was fully established. The state liberally contributed to his triumph by commissions and purchases, and in the Luxembourg Gallery may be seen about five and twenty of his finest works. His productiveness was unbroken, but it was chiefly evolved in relation to his first great conception, “The Gate of Hell”; its leading features were taken up again, modified, expanded, and added to by their creator. But besides the numberless embodiments of voluptuous, impassioned, or pathetic ideas—of which there is need to name only “Les ombres” (the Shades) and “Le penseur” (the Thinker), now placed in front of the steps of the Pantheon; several monuments, as for instance to Victor Hugo, to Whistler, and to Puvis de Chavannes; besides a large number of portrait busts. Enthusiastic literary men, and the critics of the day who upheld Rodin in his struggles, more from an instinct of pugnacity and a love of paradox than from conviction and real comprehension of his prodigious and fertile genius, have tended to give him a poetic and prophetic aspect, and make him appear as a sort of Dante in sculpture. Though his art is vehement in expression, and he has revelled in the presentment of agonized suffering and the poignant melancholy of passion, it is by the methods of Michelangelo and essentially plastic treatment than power of modelling. His modelling is indeed the most wonderful that modern sculpture has to show, the most purely plastic technique, and this characteristic is always evident in his work, combined with reverence for the antique. Rodin made his home in the midst of Greek statues, a museum of the antique which he collected at Meudon; and some of his own late work, such as the male torsos which he exhibited at the Salon, has a direct relationship to the marbles of the Parthenon—the Ilyssus and the Theseus. It is the fuller understanding of these
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| S. SINDING—The Captive Mother. (Danish.) |
(Photo, W. Titzenthalen, Berlin.) REINHOLD BEGAS—Statue and Memorial of Emperor William I. (German.) | ||||
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| ETTORE XIMENES—Revolution. (German.) |
A. QUEROL—Memorial to Alphonso XII. (From the Model.) (Spanish.) |
M. ANTOKOLSKI—Satan. (Russian.) | |||
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| JEF LAMBEAUX—The Human Passions. (Belgian.) |
C. MEUNIER—Uploading. (Belgian.) | ||||
characteristics of Rodin’s work, apart from some exaggeration of expression to which they have given rise, that has had the most valuable influence on the younger generation.
Nothing need be particularly noted as to the development of masters long since recognized, whatever branch of the school they belong to; such as Frémiet, Mercié, Marqueste, Injalbert, Saint-Marceaux and others already spoken of. The very distinct individuality of Bartholomé, after asserting itself in his crowning effort the “Monument of the Dead,” found very delicate expression in numerous works on a more modest scale, nude figures, monumental groups, and portraits. His monument to Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the Pantheon (1909) is a fine example of his art.
We must not omit, after the elder generation, the name of Alfred Lenoir, who particularly distinguished himself in portrait-statues by dealing successfully with the difficult problem of modern dress, as in the monuments of Berlioz, to César Franck, to Marshal Canrobert, in the bust of M. Moreau, &c.; nor that of Gustave Michel, a spirit loftily inspired in his decorative compositions and figures for galleries, “Le rêve” (the Dream), “La pensée” (Thought)—both in the Luxembourg Gallery,—“Au soir de la vie” (in the Evening of Life), and “Automne.” H. Gréber, after some realistic works, such as “Le Grisou” (Fire-damp) and portrait-statuettes, as the tiny full length figures of “Frémiet” and of “Gévine,” distinguished himself in the Salon of 1909 by a statue of “Narcissus” at the edge of a fountain-pool, very ele ant and Italian in feeling. And among the younger men of the school we must name Verlet, Gasq Vermare, Ernest Dubois, and Larche, all employed on important works.
It must indeed be said that in France, apart from the select committees Which have, with more or less success, peopled provincial towns with monumental statues, the government has always taken an interest in encouraging the art of sculpture. Any considerable work of that class could hardly be undertaken without its support. The former Council of Fine Arts in Paris foresaw the application of sculpture to the decoration of the park of Saint Cloud; the present council has encouraged a strong competition among our sculptors by decorating the squares of the Carrousel and of the Champ de Mars, by carrying on the decorative work in the Panthéon, &c. They have thus given commissions to a group of rising artists, who quickly made a distinguished reputation. The names of these younger sculptors have already been recorded here; in the ten years 1901–1910 they came into the front rank of their contemporaries by their conspicuous talent and the firm expression of their ideals. The first fact to be noted about them is their determination to be men of their time. Many artists before them were indeed possessed by this idea: Legros, Dalou, the Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier, the American St Gaudens, and among their immediate precursors Alfred Lenoir. But now this purposeful bias is more strongly marked; the new men do not restrict themselves to the merely monumental or commemorative aspect, to the picturesque treatment of the miners or the tillers of the soil. Every type of the people, even of the middle-class citizen, is included in the programme. Alexandre Charpentier (d. 1909) was one of the earliest of these younger realists, and he gave it expression not only in sculpture proper, but in medal work, and bas-reliefs introduced into architecture, in decorative furniture and in every form of ornamental sculpture. Thus he produced the “Woman suckling her Infant” (1883) and a large bas-relief of “Bakers,” executed in stone and placed in the square of St Germain des Prés, Paris; and, following in his footsteps, other artists gave expression to the same ideas. An instructive fact is that one off these men was a pupil of the École des Beaux Arts and of the academy at Rome. Hippolyte Lefebvre devoted himself to proving that the common aspects of modern life are not an insuperable problem for the sculptor’s art; nay, that the actually afford him new subjects most suitable to his methods. If; persisted in this purpose, and finally won the adhesion of his fellow-artists and the medal of honour for his “Jeunes aveugles” (Blind Boys), in the Luxembourg Gallery. We have also by him in this manner of the day, handled with truly synthetic breadth, “Summer,” a youthful female figure in an ordinary walking dress carrying a parasol, her straw hat tilted over her eyes; “Ninter”, an old lady wrapped in furs, coming down snow-covered steps; “Spring,” more accurately the “Age of Love,” a group of six figures, and others. His comrade Roger Bloche has gone even further, asserting with no little pugnacity the same ideas in figures derived from the people, and in episodes of daily life, as in the “Accident,” a recumbent figure surrounded by about twenty bystanders, drawn from every rank of society and rendered with that firm decision and breadth of treatment which alone constitute a work of art. This work earned him a first prize in the Salon of 1909. These awards are an unmistakable sign of official recognition of these tendencies, so long ignored and disapproved. Such encouragement has borne fruit. Francois Sicard and Henri Bouchard, who both had won the prix de Rome, started boldly on the new road, one in his monumental sculpture (a “Monument of the War of 1870” at Tours “Monument to Barbey”; “Monument to Bertagna”; a pediment for a college for girls at Tours), the other in works recalling the feeling of Constantin Meunier by subjects of labour, in town or country, small figures in bronze, or large and important decorative groups, as “La Carrière” (the Quarry) and “Le Défrichement” (Turning the Sod), a group of six oxen led by two men. This was intended to decorate the Champ de Mars.
Meantime the study of beauty in the nude, far from being neglected, seemed to start on a new flight. Some students of the Roman school revived this tradition. Victor Ségoffin and Maximilien Landowski, each in his own nervous, vivid and characteristic manner, and, borne on an independent current, Louis Convers and Aimé Octobre show a feeling for grace and charm.
This is the normal and traditional heritage of the school; we see how strikingly it has renewed itself. In opposition to the followers of Rodin we find another group which represents an antagonistic school. Mademoiselle Camille Claudel, José de Charmoy and Henri Matisse typify the extremes of this manner; Emile Bourdelle, Aristide Maillot and Lucien Schnegg might be regarded as some of the artists who best deserved attention. With various characteristics and vehement or equable temperament they all reveal in the highest degree a fine sense of purely plastic qualities; in them we.find no lapse into the pictorial, no purpose or arrière-pensée that is not of the essence of sculpture. Emile Bourdelle has given us busts of Beethoven, Carpeaux, Heracles (in the Luxembourg Gallery), Pallas Athena, and the large group of “Wrestlers of Tarn et Garonne” for completion in bronze. Maillot for his part prefers to work in marble and stone with large surfaces, after the tradition of the ancients; he exhibited in the autumn Salons several heads of girls and of old women, a figure of a youth in bronze (1909) and a stooping nude female figure in plaster., Lucien Schnegg’s (d. 1909) reputation would have been assured by one bust only from his hand, that, namely, of his pupil “Mademoiselle Jane Poupelet.” This in marble is now in the Luxembourg Gallery, and is a masterpiece for grace and dignity in the best spirit of the antique.
Besides these there should be named Jean Boucher, who has executed a monument to Renan, the “Evening of Life” and “Ancient and Modern”; E. Derré, an inventive decorator, with social tendencies and grateful emotional feeling; Max Blondat, lively and witty, as is seen in a fountain with frogs entitled “Jeunesse” (exhibited in the Royal Academy, 1910) and “Love” in the Luxembourg, Gallery); Abbal, Pierre Roche, who loves to handle very various materials—marble, stone and lead; Moreau-Vauthier, D. Poisson, Fix-Masseau, Gaudissard, David, Jacquot, Despiau, known by some fine busts, Drivier, Niclausse and Michel Cazin.
Sculpture on a small scale was effectively carried on by L. Dejean, Vallgren, Carabin, who carves in wood, Cavaillon and Féomont-Meurice. The sculpture of animals, since G. Gardet and P. Péter, has been brilliantly executed by Paul Jouve, Christophe, Navellier, Bigot, Perrault-Harry, Marie Gautier, Berthier and others. (L. Be.)
The inevitable reaction in Belgium following upon the long period of dry and lifeless academic sculpture is difficult to trace to any particular pioneer or leader. Nevertheless the three men who certainly mark this period of revolt are Guillaume Geefs, De Bay and Simonis. There is, however, very little to be remembered of these men Modern Belgian sculpture. except that they were the best of their time. Geef’s work was marred greatly by his frivolous and unessential details and poverty of thought, together with a frigid coldness of expression in his modelling. In his statue of General Belliard at Brussels, however, he shows the tendency to search for a broader and truer interpretation that warrants his being mentioned as belonging to the movement against the academic school. De Bay was a sculptor of a more artistic temperament, and though some of his works are charming and sympathetic when judged by the standard of his own day, few show evidence of advanced ideas. The work of Simonis is very different. Beyond the mere endeavour to grasp something more true, his work is fresher and perhaps more honest, more bold and gifted with more life. Such qualities are shown in his “Young Girl,” in the museum at Brussels, and “Godefroid de Bouillon,” in the Place Royale. Besides these three sculptors there was no man of note to strengthen the revival of sculptural art until Paul de Vigne (1843–1901). His early work bears the unmistakable influence of the Italian Renaissance, but after studying in Paris and in Rome he became a follower of the true classic ideal, not of the so-called classicism of Canova and his followers. He was a prolific artist, and from his numerous works it is difficult to pronounce one as his masterpiece. Perhaps that most generally considered his best is the sepulchral marble figure of “Immortality” in the museum at Brussels. Almost its equal in beauty and truthful rendering are his two bronze groups, “The Triumph of Art,” on the façade of the Palais des Beaux Arts at Brussels, and the monument to Breydel and De Koninck at Bruges. Among his other works are “Fra Angelico of Fiesole,” the bust of Professor Moke, at Antwerp, “Heliotrope” in the museum at Ghent, “Portrait of M. Charles van Hutten,” the Wilson monument in the Musée Communal, Brussels, the statue of “Marnix de Sainte Aldegonde” in Brussels, the monument erected at Courtrai to Mgr de Hearne, the monument of Meddepenningen at Ghent, and the monument of the Gevaert family in the Communal Cemetery at Evere.
The art of Charles van der Stappen (b. 1843) is decorative in character, mostly applied to architecture, though he proved himself a versatile sculptor, producing many statues, reliefs, groups, monumental works, and statuettes. His works include a silver centrepiece executed for the town of Brussels, the statue of William the Silent in the Square du Petit Sablon, Brussels, a bust for the monument of Edouard Agneesens in the cemetery of St Josse-ten-noode, St Michael in the Gothic hall of the Hôtel de Ville, Brussels, the monument to Baron Coppens near Sheel, the Alexandre Gendebien monument at Brussels, statues for the Alhambra theatre and Caryatids for the architect De Curtis’ house in the same city, and the group of tired workmen, called “The Builders of Cities.”
The work of Thomas Vingotte is characterized chiefly by its vigour and vitality. Vingotte is classed by some authorities as belonging to the classic group, but his work is less graceful than that of de Vigne and more vigorous and life-like than Van der Stappen’s. There is perhaps more movement in his work than in that of any of his contemporaries. The many portraits he executed reveal the ability of grasping the essentials of portraiture as well as the discrimination necessary to discard everything that does not render the work alike and characteristic. Among his works are a statue of Giotto in the Brussels Museum, “Music,” on the façade of the Palais des Beaux Arts, the Godecharles monument in the Park, the bronze group of the “Horsebreaker” in the Avenue Louise, and the statue “Agneessens” in the Boulevard du Midi, all of them in Brussels. There is also a bronze group of horses and Tritons for the park of the Chateau d’Ardenne.
Few men have exercised such influence upon Belgian sculpture as Ief Lambeaux (1852–1908), the Flemish artist. He was born at Antwerp of (poor and obscure parents. At an early age he showed great aptitu e for drawing, and after a very meagre education he was apprenticed to a wood carver. While there he studied at the academy schools. At sixteen he completed his course and undertook his first important commission, that for two reliefs for the tympana of the French theatre. He was successful for a time in producing statuettes, but after a while his success waned and he was obliged to abandon sculpture and to take any work he could get. After a period devoted to odd employments—sometimes painting, sometimes modelling—he again saved money to enable him to produce some good works. The first of these, “The Kiss,” was finished in 1880. It had a great success and was bought by the Antwerp Museum. This discovery of a sculptor of talent led the town of Antwerp to find the means for sending Lambeaux to Italy. After studying in Florence he returned to produce “La Folle Chanson,” which by some is considered his masterpiece. The group of “Intoxication” produced later is less satisfactory. The figures show a curious and unpleasant development which the sculptor’s previous work scarcely hinted at. A work which may be placed with his “Folle Chanson” is the “Fountain of Brabo” in front of the Hôtel de Ville at Antwerp. This in fact is declared by many critics to be Lambeaux’s chef-d’œuvre; it is certainly his most imposing monument. Other works of his are “The Robber of the Eagle’s Nest,” the wonderful colossal glief, “The Passions of Humanity,” “The Wrestlers” and “The Orgy.”
Less bold and energetic than Lambeaux’s is the work of Julien Dillens (b. 1849). Though it does not possess that sense of life and the directness which is found in his brother sculptor, his standard of excellence was steadier. He will be remembered as one of Belgium’s finest decorative sculptors, for his best work has been done in architectural enrichment. His pediment for the Hospice des Trois Alliés at Uccle is a successful treatment of the difficult dress of modern times. Dillen’s masterpiece is without doubt the group of “Justice” in the Palais de justice at Brussels. He is responsible for many other important works, the chief of which are the busts of De Pede and Rubens in the Brussels Museum, a statue of Van Orley in one of the squares of Brussels, “The Lansquenets,” on the summit of the Royal Palace (before its reconstruction), a statue of Jean de Nivelles on the front of the Palais de justice at Nivelles, and the marble statues of St Victor and St Louis at Epernay.
There is yet another artist who ranks as one of the greatest sculptors of Flanders: This is Jules Lagaë (b. 1862). He was a pupil of Ief Lambeaux. His work does not call for further distinction from that of Dillens and Lambeaux, than that it is what may be termed “delicate” and possessed a distinctive charm of spontaneous freshness. His “Mother and Child,” shown at Florence in 1891, is a good example of the first quality, while “The Kiss,” a terra-cotta bust, shows his spontaneity.
In the Walloon provinces two sculptors have done much for the renaissance of the art. Achille Chainaye and Jean Marie Gaspar. Achille Chainaye (b. 1862) is not a prolific sculptor, but all his work is inspired, it would seem, by similar motives and ideas to those which inspired the early sculptors of Florence. The scarcity of his works may be accounted for by the fact that his productions were received with ridicule and derision. Meeting with scant success, he abandoned sculpture and devoted himself to journalism. The work of Jean Marie Gaspar (b. 1864) shows the inspiration of a whole gamut of emotions, but hardly the continuity of purpose necessary to carry to completion half of his conceptions. He studied under Lambeaux, and, while still in his master’s studio, he produced a wonderful group,” “The Abduction,” two men on furious, plunging horses wrestling for the possession of a struggling woman. This group was shown at the Paris Exposition of 1889, and brou ht immediate fame to the then unknown sculptor. Of his other finished works may be cited “The Brave,” an Indian on horseback; “Adolescents,” a charming group of two nude children embracing; “The Young Girl on a Rock,” and the “Panther,” destined for the botanical gardens at Brussels.
From the death in 1904 of Constantin Meunier (b. 1831) up to the year 1910 no man had advanced beyond the standard set up by that great sculptor. At the outset of his career Meunier had, like all pioneers, to contend with the hostility and derision of the public and of the press. His work touched a hitherto unawakened note. His sympathies lay all with the people who, obscure and unsung, work for the enrichment of the nation. Thus we find his energies and love of work wrapped around the iron foundry, the mine, the field and the factory. His art is not the art of the pseudo-classic, nor is he influenced by the masters of the Renaissance. His work is free and straightforward, true almost to brutality, but withal inspired by a love of doing homage to the workers of the people. He studied in the studio of Fraikin. But it is unlikely that he was much influenced by him, and he soon forsook sculpture for painting. He was for some years one of the group of independent painters, which included De Groux, Dubois, Boulanger, and Baron. When these artists fell apart, Meunier stood alone, painting where no painter had before ventured or given a thought, working amongst the machinery, the pits, and the great factory yards. He continued for twenty-five years to paint in this manner, ignoring public ridicule and neglect. Then Meunier suddenly returned to his old love and produced some small, statuettes. One of these—a puddler seated in an attitude of weariness, hard and rough and muscular, clad in little beyond his leathern apron—attracted much attention at the exhibition of the “Society of the XX.” at Brussels. The subject and the treatment, so different to the recognized precepts of the schools, created a vast amount of discussion. From that time Meunier continued on the road he had taken, and, produced works which gained to him new believers and new friends. Among his chief productions are “Fire-damp,” in the Brussels Museum, “The Mower,” in the Jardin Botanique at Brussels, “The Glebe,” and “Puddlers at the Furnace,” both in the Luxembourg Museum, “The Hammerman,” the statues on the façade of Notre Dame de la Chapelle, and the monument to Father Damien at Louvain.
Jacques de Lalaing is the author of the masterly monument erected at Evere to the English officers and men who fell at Waterloo, an elaborate work full of imagination and sculptural force and originality. His statue to Robert Cavelier de la Salle, at Chicago, is also a noteworthy performance, and important decorative works by him are to be seen embellishing public gardens in Brussels. Among the leading sculptors of to-day is to be reckoned Charles Samuel, who leans towards the traditions of yesterday.
Canova so dominated the world of sculpture at the beginning of the 19th century that the pseudo-classic style which he introduced remained typical of all the Italian sculpture of note until Bartolini led the movement which ultimately crushed it. In Rome Canova completely overshadowed all other sculptors except perhaps Modern Italian sculpture. Thorwaldsen, the Danish sculptor, who resided for some time in that city. It is true that Pompeo Marchesi (1789–1858) at the outset of his career enjoyed great popularity, but at the time of his death he was well-nigh forgotten. The interval between the death of Canova and the rise of Bartolini and the new school was filled in by men of mediocre talent, in whose work the influence of the leader of classicism is strongly marked. Francesco Carradori (1747–1824), Camillo Pacetti (1758–1826), Rinaldo Rinaldi (b. 1793) and Giuseppe Fabris (b. 1800) were all followers of Canova, the last three being pupils of that master.
Lorenzo Bartolini (1777–1850) became the leader of the movement towards naturalism. This was nothing more nor less than the servile copying of form-both in natural forms and in dress. Nevertheless Bartolini must be remembered as the pioneer of a different kind of naturalism which was of far greater importance than the manner of treating forms and texture. His true originality layi in his representations of character. In place of the classic subjects invariably treated in his time, he applied himself to the study of actual life. Instead of the expressionless faces of the pseudo-classic, he gave vitality and energy.
A sculptor who was much talked of in his day was Pietro Tenerani (1789–1869), a native of Torano near Carrara. He worked for some time as assistant to Thorwaldsen. Later these two sculptors jointly accepted a commission for the monument of Eugene Beauharnais, and as Thorwaldsen wished to suppress the younger man’s name, they quarrelled and finally separated. Tenerani visited Munich and Berlin, where he enjoyed the patronage of Frederick William IV. During the disturbances of 1848 and 1849 he was obliged to leave Rome with his family, in consequence of his sympathy with the Papists and his friendship for Count Pellegrino Rossi, who was assassinated in 1848. Amongst Tenerani’s works are a statue of Count Rossi, a monument to Pius VIII. in the sacristy of St Peter’s, “The Angel of Resurrection” in the Friedenskirche at Potsdam, a low relief in the church at Castle-Ashby, Northamptonshire, and “The Descent from the Cross,” in the Torlonia chapel in St John Lateran. The last-named reveals the close study of nature so characteristic of his work.
The most distinguished Piedmontese sculptor of this period was Marochetti, who is referred to above in connexion with the British school.
Although Vincenzio Vela (1820–1891) was Swiss by birth, he was Italian both by adoption and in his sympathies. In 1838 he won the prize offered by the government to the students of the Lombard-Venetian provinces of Austria, and became known by his statue of Spartacus. His chief works are a statue of Bishop Luinl at Lugano; Desolation, at the Villa Gabrina, Lugano; William Tell, at Lugano; the Alfieri and statues of Dr Gallo at the university, and of Cesare Balbo, all at Turin; the statues of Tommaso Grossi and Gabrio Piola at the Brera, Milan; Dante and Giotto at Padua; Joachim Murat at the Certosa, Bologna; and Cavour at Genoa. His masterpiece is the seated figure of Napoleon at Versailles.
After Bartolini, sculpture in Italy slowly developed along the lines of “naturalism” suggested by that leader. Perhaps the greatest activity and advance are to be recorded around Naples, a city till then of subordinate importance in art. Tommaso Solari (b. 1820), who may be regarded as one of the group belonging. to Naples, produced work which is hardly distinguishable from that of Vela. His statue of Carlo Poerio, which occupies an important position in Naples, is characteristic of his work. He was followed by several sculptors whose works betray but little originality except in some cases in the forcing of qualities they wished to accentuate, and the selection of darin or dramatic subjects—qualities which reveal the true character of the Neapolitan. The work of Raffaele Belliazzi, another Neapolitan (b. 1835), like that of Solari, is full of conscientious study, but his naturalism shows no genius. Among his works are “The Sleeping Boy,” in the Gallery of Modern Art, Rome; “A Woman and Child,” and two terra-cotta busts at Capodimonte. Emilio Franceschi (1839–1890) and Achille D’Orsi (b. 1845) both belonged to the Neapolitan group of sculptors. Though the former was not a native of Naples, he resided there from 1869 until his death. But while Franceschi was influenced to a very large extent by the Neapolitan school, D’Orsi, broke away from it and created a distinctive style of his own. He studied in Rome, and in 1876 returned to Maples, where he produced “Il Cabalista,” followed by “The Parasites,” the latter establishing his fame by its singularity both of subject and treatment. It represents two gluttons in a state of extreme intoxication. The group is remarkable as showing D’Orsi’s powers of characterization.
A man of perhaps greater original thought was Francesco jerace, who seems to have been entirely free from the “academic” smallness which characterized the followers of the naturalistic movement. He was born at Polistena in Calabria in 1853. His work bears the impress of his personality and his rather marked aloofness from his contemporaries. He is the author of the monument to Mary Somerville, the English mathematician, which is in the Protestant cemetery at Naples; Vittoria Colonna, exhibited at the Brera, Milan, in 1894;;and the Beethoven exhibited at Venice, 1895. At Bergamo there is a statue of the musician Donizetti, which was placed there in 1897.
Vincenzo Gemito was born at Naples in 1852 of parents in a very humble position. He picked up a living in various occupations until, at the age of fourteen, he entered the studio of Emanuele Caggiano (1866). He worked hard and to some purpose, for two years after he modelled “The Gamester,” which is at Capodimonte. This work shows evidence of astounding precocity. His work is realistic, but forcible and more alive than that of many sculptors of his day. Gemito was supremely confident of his powers, and in a manner this was justified b his early recognition both amongst critics and the public. He designed a statue of Charles V. for the façade of the Royal Palace at Naples. A small figure of a water carrier upon a fountain is now in the Gallery of Modern Art at Rome; in the same gallery are his statuette of Meissonier and a terra-cotta figure of Brutus.
A sculptor of quite a different class of subject is Costantino Barbella, born at Chieti in 1853, who gave his entire attention to pastoral subjects, dealing with the costumes, types and occupations of the folk among whom his early life was spent. In the Royal Villa at Monza is a replica of his three peasant girls—a group in terra-cotta. In the national gallery at Rome there are a group of “The Departure of the Conscript,” “The Conscript’s Return,” and another called “April.”
For some years the activity amongst what may be called the Sicilian group of sculptors was headed b Benedetto Civiletti (b. Palermo, 1846). Civiletti was a pupil of Dupré, but his work bears little impress of his master’s influence; it is characterized mostly by its force and meaning of gesture and facial expression. His statue of “The Youth Dante” at the moment of the first meeting with Beatrice, and his seated figure of “The Young Caesar” are both works which successfully show his power of ose and facial expression. He is the author also of the famous Canaris group, “Christ in Gethsemane,” “The Dead Christ,” a group of the siege of Missolonghi, and a group of seventeen life-size figures representing the last stand of the Italians at the massacre of Dogali.
The family of Ximenes of Palermo is noted on account of the three of its members who each became well known in the world of art: Empedocle, the painter, Eduardo, the writer, and Ettore, the sculptor. Ettore was a pupil of Morelli. His earliest work of note was a boy balancing himself upon a ball which he called “Equilibrium.” He also produced “La Rixe,” “Le marmiton,” “Cuore del Re,” “The Death of Ciceruacchio,” “Achilles,” and many others. His statue of “Revolution” is one of his best works.
Giulio Monteverde’s work is conspicuous for its gaiety and sparkle, but though he has had some influence upon the recent sculptors of Ital, his work follows the naturalistic precepts laid down by his predecessors. A group of his own children, full of vivacious merriment, is in the Palazzo Bianco at Genoa; a “Madonna and Child” is in the Camposanto, and a statue of Victor Emmanuel stands in the square in the centre of Bologna.
Ettore Ferrari of Rome (b. 1849) is another sculptor whose work shows remarkable care and love of what is called finish. He has produced the statues “Porcari,” the medieval revolutionist, “Ovid,” “Jacopo Ortis,” “A Roman Slave,” “Giordano Bruno,” in the Campo di Fiori, and “Abraham Lincoln,” in the New York Museum.
To the Roman group of sculptors also belongs Ercole Rosa (b. 1846). That he was a man of considerable talent is shown by his group of the Cairoli at Rome and his monument of Victor Emmanuel near the cathedral at Milan. Emilio Gallori, who studied at the Florence academy, is the author of the colossal statue of St Peter on the façade, of the cathedral at Florence. He won the competition for, and executed, the Garibaldi monument at Rome.
A sculptor who is looked upon as the leader of the Venetian school is Antonio dal Zotto (b. 1841), a follower of Ferrari, at whose hands he received much of his training. He won the prix de Rome offered by the academy, and in Rome he met and became a friend of Tenerani. Being a man of independent views, however, he was but little affected by Tenerani’s work. He was then twenty-five years old, and after spending two years in Rome and in other centres of artistic interest, he returned to Venice, where he produced a statue of St Anthony of Padua, one of Petrarch and another of Galileo. In 1880 he completed his statue of Titian for the master’s birthplace, Pieve di Cadore, and in 1883 he finished the figure of Goldoni in Venice. He, is author also of a statue of Victor Emmanuel and a monument of Tartini the violinist, the former in the memorial tower on the battlefield of S. Martino near Brescia, the latter in a public square at Pirano.
Turin boasts many sculptors who are known throughout the country. Chief of these is Odoardo Tabacchi (b. 1831). He is the joint author with Antonio Tantardini of the Cavour monument at Milan. He has modelled several subjects of a lighter type, such as “The Bather,” exhibited in Milan in 1894. Lorenzo Bistolfi, a younger man, conquered recognition chiefly by his composition of “Grief Comforted by Memory.” Amongst other Turin sculptors must be mentioned Luigi Belli, author of the Raphael monument at Urbino, and Davide Calandra, whose “L’Aratro” is in the national gallery at Rome.
As everywhere in western and central Europe, national sculpture in Austria during the first half of the 19th century was altogether influenced by the classicism of the Italian Canova—in Austria perhaps more than in other countries, since two of Canova’s most important works came to Vienna in the early years of the century: Modern Austrian sculpture. the famous tomb of Marie Christine in the Augustinerkirche, which was ordered by Duke Albrecht of Saxony, in 1805, at the price of 20,000 ducats; and the Theseus group, bought by the emperor Francis, in Rome, which is now in the Vienna Museum. Canova’s pupil, Pompeo Marchesi, was the author of the emperor Francis monument, unveiled in 1846, in the inner court of the Hofburg.
The first national sculptor of note was the Tirolese Franz Zauner (1746–1822), who was knighted in 1807 (the year in which his Kaiser-Joseph monument was unveiled) and became director of the Vienna gallery and academy. Among his works are the tomb of Leopold II. in the Augustinerkirche; the tomb of General Laudon at Hadersdorf; the tomb of the poet Heinrich von Collin in the Karlskirche in Vienna; and a number of busts in the Empire style, which are by no means remarkable as expressions of artistic individuality. Leopold Kiesling (1770–1827), another Tirolese, Whose first work on a large scale is the Mars, Venus and Cupid, in the Imperial gallery, was sent by his patron, Count Cobenzl, to Rome, where he was more attracted by Canova than by the antique or the late Renaissance. Joseph Klieber (1773–1850), also Tirolese, enjoyed the protection of Prince Johann Liechtenstein, who employed him in the plastic decoration of his town residence and country seats. His reputation as sculptor of colossal figures for imperial triumphal arches and lofty tombs was so widespread that he was given the commission for the catafalque of Louis XVIII. in Paris. Many middle-class houses of the Empire period in Vienna were decorated by him with reliefs of children. The elaborate relief figures on the Andreas Hofer monument in Innsbruck are the work of his hand. His followers were less favoured by powerful protection and were forced into a definite direction: among them must be mentioned Johann Martin Fischer (1740–1820), who succeeded Zauner as head of the academy. His best-known work is “The Muscle-man,” which still serves as model to students.
Of the greatest importance for the development of Austrian sculpture in the second half of the 19th century was the influence of Joseph Daniel Boehm (1794–1865), director of the academy of coin-engravers, and discriminating collector of art treasures. He was the father of Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, R.A. Emanuel von Max (1810–1900), who in conjunction with his brother Joseph modelled the Radetzky monument in Prague, wrote in his autobiography, concerning the year 1833 in Vienna: “Art, particularly sculpture, was at the lowest ebb. The appearance of a statuette or bust at an exhibition was considered an event.” But a strong movement began towards the end of the ’fifties. Professor Franz Bauer, of the Vienna academy (1797–1872), exercised a most stimulating influence upon the rising generation. Among the earlier artists, whose life overlaps into the new era, were Anton Dietrich (1799–1872), who is best known by “The Three Magi,” on the porch of the church of St John, and by a very beautiful ivory crucifix; and Johann Preleuthner (b. 1810).
The architectural rejuvenation of Vienna led to the rise of an original local school of sculpture. J. D. Boehm devoted himself almost entirely to goldsmith-work and medals, but with the aid of his great collections he taught the new generation and helped to develop original talent. Hans Gasser (1817–1868) owed him his introduction to society, for whom he produced many busts. He modelled the empress Elisabeth monument at the western railway station in Vienna, the Wieland monument in Weimar, and the famous “Donauweibchen” in the Vienna town park. His brother, Joseph Gasser von Wallhorn (b. 1816), was a sculptor of figures of saints, many of which decorate St Stephen’s Cathedral and the Votive Church in Vienna. Anton Fernkorn (1813–1878), born at Erfurt, was Austrian by his art. He started as a metal worker, and studied in Munich, but not at the academy. His talent was only fully developed after he settled in Vienna, which city owes to him the bold equestrian bronze monuments of Archduke Charles (1859) and Prince Eugene of Savoy (1865). He became director of the imperial bronze foundry, in which post he was followed by his pupil Franz Poenninger. Johann Meixner (b. 1819 in Bohemia) is the creator of the marble figures on the Albrecht Fountain, one of the most famous and imposing monuments in Vienna. Vienna received a few of her most important monuments from the strong personality of the Westphalian Kaspar von Zumbusch (b. 1830), the Beethoven monument, and that o Maria Theresa, an imposing and skilfully designed work, which solves in admirable fashion the problem of placmga. monument effectively between the heavy masses of the two imperial museums. Munich owns his monument of Kin Maximilian II. Zumbusch’s fame did not quite overshadow that of Karl Kundmann (b. 1838), to whose vigorous art Vienna owes the Tegetthoff monument (based on the Duilius column), the Schubert statue, the seated figure of Grillparzer, and the awkwardly placed “Minerva” in front of the houses of parliament. Joseph V. Myslbeck (b. 1848) worked under Thomas Seidaus (1830–1890), and is the author of the equestrian figure of St Vaelav, of “The Crucified Saviour,” and of the Sladkowsky tomb in Prague. The most successful of the younger school was Edmund Hellmer (b. 1850), who executed the group on the pediment of the houses of parliament; “Francis Joseph granting the Constitution”; the Turkish monument at St Stephen’s; one of the wall fountains on the façade of the new Hofburg (Austria’s land power)—the companion figure (“Sea Power”) is by Rudolf Weyr (b. 1847);—the animated Bacchus frieze of the Court Theatre; the statue of Francis Joseph in the polytechnic institute; and the reliefs of the Grillparzer monument.
Like Hellmer and Weyr, Victor Tilgner (1844–1896) was a pupil of F. Bauer; but he owed his training rather to Joseph von Gasser and Daniel Boehm. He produced a vast number of portrait busts of his most prominent contemporaries in Vienna. Among his most notable monuments are those to Mozart and Makart in Vienna, the Werndl figure at Steyr, Bürgermeister Petersen in Hamburg, and a war memorial at Königgrätz, in addition to numerous monumental fountains. Artistically on a higher plane than Tilgner stands Arthur Strasser (b. 1854), who excelled in polychromatic work on a small scale. In the ’seventies his Japanese figures excited considerable interest and attracted Makart’s attention. He excelled in Egyptian and Indian genre figures, such as a praying Hindu between two elephants. An Arab leaning against a Sphinx and a classic female figure with a funeral torch were strikingly decorative. His green patined bronze of “The Triumph of Antinous” with a team of lions was awarded a first medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1900.
Vincenz Pilz (b. 1816) was the sculptor of the quadrigas and caryatids on the Vienna houses of parliament, and of the Kolnitz and Türck monuments. Contempora with him were Karl, Costenoble (b. 1837), Alois Dull (b. 1843), Otto König (b. 1838), Anton Schmidgruber (b. 1837), the craftsman Franz Schonthaler, Johann Silbernagel (b. 1839) the author of the Liebenberg monument in Vienna, and Anton Wagner (1834–1900), whose “Goose Girl” is one of the monumental features of the streets of Vienna. Classic form was represented by Johannes Benk, who did good work in groups for pediments. One of his latest productions is the Arnerlin monument in the Vienna town park. Theodor Friedel (1842–1899) excelled in decorative work on a large scale.” His are “The Horse Tamers” in front of the Hof-Stallgebäude.
Edmund Hofmann von Aspernburg (b. 1847) is the sculptor of the Friedrich Schmidt monument, of the bronze centaurs in front of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, and of the monument of Archduke Karl Ludwig. The works of Stefan Schwartz (b. 1851) are remarkable for their vigour. He excelled in a new technique of embossing portrait plaques in silver direct from life.” He counts also among the best Viennese medallists, almost equalling, Heinrich Natter (1844–1892). Hermann Klotz (b. 1850) became professor of sculpture in wood. The very talented statuette-maker Ludwig Dürnbauer (1860–1895) died almost at the beginning of what promised to be a brilliant career. Other distinguished sculptors of statuettes and works on a small scale were Hans Rathausky (b. 1858) and Johann Scherpe (b. 1855), who was entrusted with the execution of the Anzengruber monument. They all were pupils of Kundmann, as was also the animal sculptor Lax. Karl Schwerzek is the author of the Lenau and Anastasias Grün busts in Vienna, and Franz Vogl (b. 1861) of the poet Raimund’s monument. Among Zumbusch’s pupils were Anton Brenck, the creator of the emperor Joseph II. monuments in Brünn and Reichenberg; Emanuel Pendl, whose colossal marble statue of “Justice” is laced in the law courts in Vienna; and Hans Bitterlich (b. 1860), whose bust of Exner in the Vienna university is one of the most remarkable pieces of realistic portraiture in that city. Another work of his is the Gutenberg monument. Othmar Schimkowitz is remarkable for a strikingly original style.
In the other provinces under the Austrian emperor’s rule, the best-known sculptors are the Carniole Marcell Guigki (1830–1894), Lewandowski, Buracz, and the Tirolese Gurschner, who follows the modern French style of statuette sculptors.
In the art of the medallist, Professor Karl Radnitzky the elder (b. 1818) led the way after J. D. Boehm; but he was surpassed by his pupil Joseph Tautenhayn (b. 1837), whose large shield “Struggle between the Centaurs and Lapithae” was the cause of his appointment as professor. More important still is Anton Scharff (b. 1845), a real master of the delicate art of the medallist.
At the beginning of the 19th century the art of sculpture was practically dead in Spain—or at least was mainly confined to the mechanical production of images of saints. But towards the middle of the century the two brothers Agapito and Venancio Vallmitjana, of Barcelona, encouraged by the enthusiasm with which some of Spanish 19th-century sculptors. their works had been received by local connoisseurs, took part in the Paris Figaro competition for the figure which decorates the entrance to the offices of that journal, and carried off the second prize. They afterwards obtained the first prize in other competitions at Madrid and other Spanish centres. Their chief works are: “Beauty dominating Strength,” “St Vincent de Paul,” the large statue erected at Valencia to Don Taime Conquistador, and groups of Queen Isabella with the Prince of the Asturias, and Queen Marie Christine with Alfonso XIII.
Another sculptor of distinction is Andres Aleu, professor of the Barcelona School of Fine Arts, whose principal works are the “St George and the Dragon” on the façade of the Barcelona Chamber of Deputies, and Marshal Concha, the equestrian statue in Madrid. Kosendo Novas, of Catalan birth, like most modern Spanish sculptors of eminence, is best known by his masterpiece, “The dead Torero." Manuel Oms, another Barcelona sculptor who leans to the naturalistic school, is the author of the monument to Isabella the Catholic, erected at the end of the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid in 1883. Antonio Fabrés, who at the beginning of his career was an eminent sculptor, devoted himself subsequently to painting. Agustin Querol, and Mariano Benlliure, of Valencia, were for many years the official favourites of the Spanish government, who entrusted them with numerous important commissions, though their work was neither lofty in conception nor particularly remarkable as regards execution, and occasionally, as in Querol’s monument of Alfonso XII.—especially in the completed sketch of it baroque in the extreme. Indeed, the genius of the Spanish race at all times, and particularly in the 19th century, found its expression in painting rather than in sculpture. Querol’s group called “Tradition” is well imagined and expressive, and a good example of the best work achieved by a school in which freedom is the chief note.
Towards the end of the 19th and in the early years of the 20th centuries, Joseph Llimona y Brugena (“ The Communion ) and Blay, both of Catalan birth, were the most distinguished sculptors of Spain. The fame of Blay, who was a pupil of Chapu in Paris, has extended beyond the frontiers of his native country. His style has at the same time strength and delicacy. His chief works are the Miners’ monument at Bilbao, and a group of an old man seated on a bench protecting a little girl from the cold. He also produced a great number of delicately wrought marble busts before his career was prematurely cut short. Joseph Llimona is the most personal and distinguished of all modern Spanish sculptors. His art ranges from the greatest delicacy to real power. At the International Exhibition at Barcelona in 1907 he was awarded the grand prize of honour for a group intended for the monument to Dr Robert in that city; and for a small marble figure of Pain, a work in which he has been thought to rival the Florentines of the best period. José Alcoverro, Pages y Serratora, José Gragera, Fuxa y Leal, Miguel Embil, and the brothers Osle are prominent members of the younger school and aim at giving “the personal note.” The vigour displayed by them illustrates the revivification and rejuvenation of Spanish sculpture.
Russian sculpture has practically no past to record. In its beginnings Russian art was entirely ruled by the Church, whose laws were inspired by Byzantinism, and who forced all artists to submit to strictly fixed rules as regards form and formula. Before the 18th century, Russian sculpture was practically non-existent, except in the form of Russian sculpture. peasant wood-carving. The early stone idols (Kamenyia baby) and primitive bas-reliefs belong to the sphere of archaeology rather than of art. Real sculpture only appears at the end of the 18th century, when Peter the Great, to use his own expression, “opened a window upon Europe” and ordered, together with a radical change in Russian society, the introduction of western art in Russia.
From all European countries artists streamed into Russia and helped to educate native talent, and at the same time the tsar sent young artists abroad to study in foreign art centres. Among the foreign artists of this period were Conrad Hausner, Egelgrener and Schpekle; among the Russians Koulomjin, Issaeiv and Woynow. About 1776 Falconet and his wife arrived in Russia; then Gillet, whose pupil Schubin ranks among Russia’s most gifted artists. Among his best-known works is the monument of Catherine II. His fame was rivalled by that of Schedrine. Kozlovski is known by his Souvorine monument. Other early sculptors of distinction were Demouth-Malinowski, the sculptor of the Soussaniev monument; Pimenow, Martos, and the medallist Count Theodore Tolstoi, who is also -known as an able illustrator. Orlovsky, Vitali and the whole preceding group represent the pseudo-classic character acquired at foreign academies. Among animal sculptors Baron Klodt is known by his horses which decorate the Anitschkine bridge at St Petersburg.
About the beginning of the 19th century the sculptor Kamenski inaugurated a more realistic tendency by his work which was inspired by contemporary life. He entered the academy after having exhibited a series of sculptures among which the most interesting were “The First Step” and “Children in the Rain.” His contemporary Tschigoloff began his career in brilliant fashion, but devoted himself subsequently to the execution of commissions which did not give full scope to his gifts.
The greatest talent of all was unquestionably Marc Antokolsky (1845–1902), a Jewish sculptor permitted to work outside the Pale, of whom the Paris correspondent of The Times wrote, about 1888, that French sculptors would benefit by studying under Antokolsky, and by learning from him the power of the inspiration drawn from the study of nature. The artist himself held his statue of Spinoza to be his finest achievement. I have put into this statue,” he wrote, “all that is best in me. In the hard moments of life I can find peace only before this work.” Equally beautiful is “The Christian Martyr,” in the creation of which Antokolsky definitely broke all the fetters of tradition and strove no longer to express linear beauty, but intense truth. The martyr is an ugly, deformed woman, tortured and suffering, but of such beautiful sentiment that under the influence of religious extasis her very soul seems to rise to the surface. Among his other works few are better known than “Mephistopheles” (which he wanted to call “The 19th Century”) and the powerful “Ivan the Terrible,” which the Russian critic Starsoff called “The Torturer Tortured.” The whole strange psychology of this ruler, whose compeer in history can only be found perhaps in the person of Louis XI., is strikingly expressed by Antokolsky. Very beautiful is the statue of Peter the Great, which breathes strength, intelligence, genius and devouring activity. To the works already mentioned must be added the statues of Ermak and of Nestor. Antokolsky has left to the world a gallery of the most striking figures in Russian history, giving to each one among them his proper psychology. His technique is always marked by perfect sureness and frequently by dazzling bravura.
Antokolsky was twenty-one years of age when he left St Petersburg. The academy at that time was in a state of complete decadence, under the rule of worthy old professors who remained strangers to their pupils, just as their pupils remained strangers to them. When Professors Piminoff and Raimers died, soon after, the academy seemed quite deserted; but just at that time a number of very gifted students began to work with energy, learning all they could from one another, fired by the same purpose and spirit. Antokolsky was in close touch with his friend, the painter Repin, with whom he worked much; and so failed to come under the influence of the idealist M. V. Praklow, who soon began to deliver certain lectures on art which excited keen interest among the young workers. Antokolsky tried the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, but finding it ruled by the same routine, he returned before long to St Petersburg, where within a short time he executed the statue of “Ivan the Terrible” to which he owed his fame. This epoch became the starting-point of Russian sculpture, so that Antokolsky deserves an eminent position in the history of Russian art.
Among his pupils was his faithful follower and friend Ilia Ginsbourg (b. 1859), who devoted himself to genre scenes and portraits in the spirit of his master, but with a degree of sincerity and enthusiasm which save him from the reproach of plagiarism. Lancéré (1848–1887) is known by his military statuettes, Libérich (1828–1883) has left few remarkable works. Léopold Bernstamm always practised in Paris; among his works are a great number of portraits and a few monuments that are not without merit. Among contemporary sculptors, whose number is still restricted in Russia, and whose artistic merit remains stationary, without marked progress and with little evidence of evolution, are Beklemicheff, Bach, Brodsky, Mikechine, Tourgeneff, Auber and Bernstein. Prince Troubetzkoï, who is counted among the sculptors of Russia, though he was educated and worked in Italy, acquired some reputation by his skill in the rapid execution of cleverly-wrought impressionist statuettes of figures and horses as well as busts. heir value lies in the vivid representation they give of Russian life and types. Among the most original modern Russian sculptors is Naoum Aronson (b. 1872), whose best-known work is his Beethoven monument at Bonn. At Godesberg is his Narcissus fountain, whilst other works of his are at the Berlin, St Petersburg and Dublin Museums. (M. H. S.; P. G. K.)
The early names in American sculpture-Shem Drowne, the maker of weather-vanes; Patience Wright (1725–1785); William United Rush (1765–1833), carver of portraits and of figure-heads for ships; John Frazer (1790–1850), the stone cutter; and Hezekiah Augur (1791–1858)—have the interest of chronicle at least. Hiram Powers (1805–1873) had a certain technical skill, and his statues of the “Greek Slave” (carved in 1843 in Rome and now at Raby castle, Darlington, the seat of Lord Barnard, with a replica at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, and others elsewhere) and “Eve before the Fall” were important agents in overcoming the Puritanic abhorrence of the nude. Horatio Greenough (1805–1852), Joel T. Hart (1810–1877), S. V. Clevenger (1812–1843) and Clark Mills (1815–1883) all received many commissions but made no additions to the advancement of a true art-spirit. Thomas Crawford (1814–1857) began the bas-reliefs for the bronze doors of the Capitol, and they were finished by William H. Rinehart (1825–1874), whose “Latona” has considerable grace. Henry Kirke Brown (1814—1886) achieved, among less noteworthy works, the heroic “Washington” in Union Square, New York City. It is one of the noblest of equestrian statues in America, both in breadth and certainty of handling and in actual majesty, and reliects unwonted credit on its' period. Erastus D. Palmer (1817–1904) was the first to introduce the lyrical note into American sculpture; his statue, “The White Captive,” and still more his relief, “Peace in Bondage,” may be named in proof. There is undeniable skill, which yet lacks the highest qualities, in the work of Thomas Ball (b. 1819). William Wetmore Story (1819–1896), whose “ Cleopatra,” though cold, shows power; Randolph Rogers (1825–1892), best known for his blind “Nydia,” and for his bronze doors of the Capitol at Washington; John Rogers (1829–1904), who struck out a new line in actuality, mainly of an anecdotal military kind; Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908), a classicist, whose recumbent “Beatrice Cenci” is perhaps her most graceful work; J. S. Hartley (b. 1845); Launt Thompson (1833–1894) are among the leaders of their day. The works of Olin L. Warner (1844–1896) and J. Q. A. Ward (1830–1910) reveal at times far greater originality than any of these. Warner’s two graceful classical igures for a fountain in Portland, Oregon, and his admirable portrait statue of William Lloyd Garrison, reveal a nice discernment of the fitness of manner to matter. He was also successful in modelling medallions. Ward has a sturdiness, dignity, and individuality quite his own, and may be considered at the head of his own generation. In addition to these should be mentioned Larkin G. Mead (b. 1835), George Bissell (b. 1839), Franklin Simmons (b. 1839), Martin Milmore (1844–1883), Howard Roberts (1843–1900), Moses Ezekiel (b. 1844), 'all of whom are prominent in the history and development of sculpture in America. By their time the sculptors of America had wakened completely, artistically speaking, to a sense of their own nationality.
It was however later that came that inspired modernity, that sympathy with the present, which are in some senses vital to genuinely emotional art. American sculpture, like American painting, was awakened by French example. The leading spirit in the new movement was Augustus St Gaudens (q.v.), a great sculptor whose work is sufficiently dealt with in the separate article devoted to him. Two other Americans stand out, with St Gaudens, among their contemporaries, Daniel Chester French (q.v.) and Frederick Macmonnies (q.v.). French’s “Gallaudet teaching a Deaf Mute” is an example of how a difficult subject can be turned into a triumph of grace. His “Death and the Young Sculptor” is a singularly beautiful rendering of the idea of the intervention of death. In collaboration with E. C. Potter he modelled various important groups, particularly “Indian Corn” and the equestrian “Washington,” in Paris. The “Bacchante” of Macmonnies, instinct with Renaissance feeling, is a triumph of modelling and of joyous humour; while his statue of “Nathan Hale” in City Hall Park, New York, his “Horse Tamers,” and his triumphal arch decorations for the Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial at Brooklyn, show the artist’s power in the treatment of a serious theme.
The strenuous achievements of George Grey Barnard have both high skill and deep sincerity. His “Two Natures,” his “Brotherly Love,” his “Pan” and the design for a monumental Norwegian stove are among the strongest efforts of modern American statuary. Ranking with him, though different in thought and method, stands Paul Wayland Bartlett. Success, too, artistically has been accorded to the fine works of John J. Boyle, William Couper, twenty years of whose life were passed in Florence, William O. Partridge, Hermon MacNeil and Lorado Taft. The beautiful busts of Herbert Adams; the thoroughly artistic miniature figures of Mrs Clio Hinton Bracken; the graceful figurines of Mrs Potter Vonnoh; Edwin F. Elwell’s “Egypt" and “Orchid ”; and the work of F. Wellington Ruckstuhl should also be mentioned; also J. Massey Rhind, a Scotsman by birth and artistic education, John Donoghue, Charles H. Niehaus, Roland H. Perry (“Fountain of Neptune ), Andrew O'Connor, lerome Conner, John H. Roudebush, and Louis Potter. Equally noteworthy are Bela L. Pratt (“General Benjamin F. Butler memorial), Cyrus E. Dallin (with Wild West subjects), Richard E. Brooks, Charles Grafly (“Fountain of Life ”), Alexander S. Calder, Edmund A. Stewardson (“The Bather”) and Douglas Tilden (“Mechanics’ Fountain,” San Francisco). The leading “animaliers” include Edward Kemeys (represent in the Southern states), Edward C. Potter, Phimister Proctor, Solon H. Borglum, Frederick G. Roth, and Frederick Remington. Among the women sculptors are Mrs Kitson, Mrs Hermon A. MacNeil, Miss Helen Mears, Miss Evelyn Longman, Miss Elise Ward, Miss Yandell and Miss Katherine Cohen. (M. H. S.)
Literature.—On the general history of sculpture, see Agincourt, Histoire de l’art (Paris, 1823); du Sommerard, Les Arts au moyen âge (Paris, 1839–1846); Cicognara, Storia della scultura (Prato, 1823–1844); Westmacott, Handbook of Sculpture (Edinburgh, 1864); Lübke, History of Sculpture (Eng. trans., London, 1875); Ruskin, Aratra Pentelici (six lectures on sculpture) (London, 1872); Viardot, Les Merveilles de la sculpture (Paris, 1869); Arsenne and Denis, Manuel . . . du sculpteur (Paris, 1858); Clarac, Musée de sculpture (Paris, 1826–1853); Demmin, Encyclopédie des beaux-arts plastiques (Paris, 1872–1875), vol. iii.
On Italian and Spanish sculpture, see Vasari, Trattato della scultura (Florence, 1568, vol. i.), and his Vite dei pittori, &c., ed. Milanesi (Florence, 1880); Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen (Leipzig, 1827–1831); Dohme, Kunst und Künstler Italiens (Leipzig, 1879); Perkins, Tuscan Sculptors (London, 1865), Italian Sculptors (1868) and Hand-book of Italian Sculpture (1883); Robinson, Italian Sculpture (London, 1862); Gruner, Marmor-Bildwerke der Pisaner (Leipzig, 1858); Ferreri, L’ Arco di S. Agostino (Pavia, 1832); Symonds, Renaissance in Italy (London, 1877), vol. iii.; Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Hist. of Painting in Italy (London, 1903) (new ed.), vol. i.; Selvatico, Arch. e scultura in Venezia (Venice, 1847); Ricci, Storia dell’ arch. in Italia (Modena, 1857–1860); Street (Arundel Society), Sepulchral Monuments of Italy (1878); Gozzini, Monumenti sepolcrali della Toscana (Florence, 1319); de Montault, La Sculpture religieuse à Rome (Rome, 1870), a French edition (with improved text) of Tosi and Becchio, Monumenti sacri di Roma (Rome, 1842); Cavallucci and Molinier, Les Della Robbia (Paris, 1884); Cicognara, Monumenti di Venezia (Venice, 1838–1840); Burges and Didron, Iconographie des chapitaux du palais ducal à Venise (Paris, 1857) (see also Ruskin’s Stones of Venice); Richter, “Sculpture of S. Mark’s at Venice, “Macmillan’s Mag. (June 1880); Temanza, Vita degli scultori veneziani (Venice, 1778); Diedo and Zanotto, Monumenti di Venezia (Milan, 1839); Schulz, Denkmäler der Kunst in Unter-Italien (Dresden, 1860); Brinckmann, Die Scul tur von B. Cellini (Leipzig, 1867); Eug. Plon, Cellini, sa vie, Ere. ggaris, 1882); John Addington Symonds, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (London, 1887); Moses and Cicognara, Works of Canova (London, 1824–1828); Piroli, Fontana and others, a series of engraved Plates of Canova’s Works, s.l. et a.; Giulliot, Les Artistes en Espagne (Paris, 1870); Carderera y Solano, Iconografia espanola, siglo XI-XVII (Madrid, 1855–1864); Monumentos arquitectonicos de España, published by the Spanish government (1859), passim; Lord Balcarres, The Evolution of Italian Sculpture (London, 1910); L. Freeman, Italian Sculpture of the Renaissance (London, 1901); A. . Willard, Hist. of Modern Italian Art (London, 1898). The recent literature on the subject is too copious to be catalogued here; every phase of the art has been critically dealt with and nearly every sculptor of importance has been made the subject of a biography; e.g. John Addington Symonds, The Life of Michelangelo Buonarrati, 2nd ed. (London, 1898); Sir Charles Holroyd, Michael Angelo Buonarroti (London, 1903); Lord Balcarres, Donatello (London, 1903); and G. H. Hill, Pisanello (London, 1905). For repertoires of sculptural works, see collections such as Reale Galleria di Firenze: Statue (3 vols., 1817), and F. von Reber and A. Bayersdorfer, Classical Sculpture Gallery (4 vols., London, 1897–1900).
On French sculpture see Adams, Recueil de sculptures gothiques (Paris, 1858); Cerf, Description de Notre Dame de Reims (Reims, 1861); Eméric David, L’Art statuaire (Paris, 1805) and Histoire de la sculpture française (Paris, 1853); Guilhebaud, L’Architecture et la sculpture du Vᵉ au XVIᵉ siècle (Paris, 1851–1859); Ménard, Sculpture antique et moderne (Paris, 1867); Didron, Annales archéologiques, various articles; Félibien, Histoire de l’art en France (Paris, 1856); Lady Dilke- (Mrs Pattison), Renaissance of Art in France (London, 1879); M-ontfaucon, Monumens de la monarchie française (Paris, 1729–1733); Jouy, Sculptures modernes du Louvre (Paris, 1855); Reveil, Œuvre de Jean Goujon (Paris, 1868); Lister, Jean Goujon (London, 1903); Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire de l’architecture (Paris, 1869), art. “Sculpture,” vol. viii. pp. 97-279; Claretie, Peintres et sculpteurs contemporains (Paris); Gonse, La Sculpture française depuis le XIVᵉ siècle (Paris, 1895); W. C. Brownell, French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture (London, 1901); Male, L’Art religieux du XIIIᵉ siècle en France (Paris, 1902); Vitry and Briere, Documents de sculpture française du moyen age (Paris, 1904); Lady Dilke, French Architects and Sculptors of the XVIIIth Century (London, 1900); Lanislas Lami, Dictionnaire des sculpteurs de l’école française du moyen age au règne de Louis XIV (Paris, 1898), a useful book to consult for the sake of the bibliographical references to nearly every artist entered; L. Bénédite, Les Sculpteurs français contemporains (Paris, 1901); E. Guillaume, “La Sculpture française au XIXᵉ siècle,” Gaz. des beaux-arts (1900).
On German sculpture, see Foerster, Denkmale deutscher Baukunst (Leipzig, 1855). For an adequate but brief and concentrated account of recent work see A. Heilmeyer, Die moderne Plastik in Deutschland (Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1903).
On Austrian sculpture, see Camillo List, Bildhauer-Arbeiten in Öesterreich-Ungarn (Vienna, 1901).
On Belgian sculpture, see Olivier Georges Destrée, The Renaissance of Sculpture in Belgium (London, 1895).
On Spanish sculpture, see Paul Laforid, La Sculpture espagnole (Paris, 1908).
On English sculpture, see Carter, Specimens of Ancient Sculpture (London, 1780); Aldis, Sculpture of Worcester Cathedral (London, 1874); Cockerell, Iconography of Wells Cathedral (Oxford, 1851); Stothard, Monumental Effigies of Britain (London, 1817); Westmacott, “Sculpture in Westminster Abbey,” in Old London (pub. by Archaeological Institute, 1866), p. 159 seq.; G. G. Scott, Gleanings from Westminster (London, 1862); W. Bell Scott, British School of Sculpture (London, 1872); W. M. Rossetti, “British Sculpture,” in Fraser’s Mag. (April 1861). The subject of recent British sculpture has been curiously neglected, except in newspaper notices and occasional articles in the periodical press, such as Edmund Gosse’s “Living English Sculptors” in the Century Magazine for July 1883. The only volume published is M. H. Spielmann’s British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-day (London, 1901).
For American sculpture, see Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists: American Artist Life (New York, 1870, and later editions); Lorado Taft, American Sculpture (New York and London, 1903); William J. Clark, Jnr., Great American Sculptures (Philadelphia, 1877); Charles H. Caffin, American Masters of Sculpture (New York, 1903); Sadikichi Hartmann, Modern American Sculpture (New York).
- ↑ Moulds made in one or few pieces, from which the cast can only be extracted by destroying the mould, are called “spoil-moulds.” A large number of casts can be made from a “piece-mould,” but only one from a “spoil-mould.”
- ↑ Other effigies from Limoges were imported into England, but no other example now exists in the country.
- ↑ In the modern attempts to reproduce the medieval polychrome these delicate surface reliefs have been omitted; hence the painful results of such colouring as that in Notre-Dame and the Sainte Chapelle in Paris and many other “restored” churches, especially in France and Germany.
- ↑ On the tomb of Aymer de Valence (d. 1326) at Westminster a good deal of the stamped gesso and coloured decoration is visible on close inspection. One of the cavities of the base retains a fragment of glass covering the painted foil, still brilliant and jewel-like in effect.
- ↑ The Victoria and Albert Museum possesses a magnificent colossal wood figure of an angel, not English, but Italian work of the 14th century. A large stone statue of about the same date, of French workmanship, in the same museum is a most valuable example of the use of stamped gesso and inlay of painted and glazed foil.
- ↑ A partial exception to this rule is the scene of Christ before Pilate, which sometimes occurs.
- ↑ See Dionysius, Sac. Vat. Bas. Cryp., and Bunsen, Besch. d. Stadt Rom (1840).
- ↑ There is no ground for the popular impression that this is an antique statue of Jupiter transformed into that of St Peter by the addition of the keys.
- ↑ Various dates have been assigned to these interesting reliefs by different archaeologists, but the costumes of the figures are strong evidence that they are not later than the 5th century.
- ↑ On early and medieval sculpture in ivory consult Gori, Thesaurus veterum diplychorum (Florence, 1759); Westwood, Diptychs of Consuls (London, 1862); Didron, Images ouvrantes du Louvre (Paris, 1871); William Maskell, Ivories in the South Kensington Museum (London, 1872 & 1875); Wieseler, Diptychon Quirinianum zu Brescia (Göttingen, 1868); Wyatt and Oldfield, Sculpture in Ivory (London, 1856); Alfred Maskell, Ivories (London, 1905), one of the best treatises in the English language; E. Molinier, Les Ivoires; Die Elfenbeinbilder (Berlin Museum, 1903).
- ↑ See O’Neill, Sculptured Crosses of Ireland (London, 1857).
- ↑ The other finest examples of this early class of sculpture exist at Pisa, Parma, Modena and Verona; in most of them the old Byzantine influence is very strong.
- ↑ In Norway and Denmark during the 11th and 12th centuries carved ornament of the very highest merit was produced, especially the framework round the doors of the wooden churches; these are formed of large pine planks, sculptured in slight relief with dragons and interlacing foliage in grand sweeping curves,—perfect masterpieces of decorative art, full of the keenest inventive spirit and originality.
- ↑ See Richardson, Monumental Effigies of the Temple Church (London, 1843).
- ↑ The effigy of King John in Worcester cathedral of about 1216 is an exception to this rule; though rudely executed, the head appears to be a portrait.
- ↑ See Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens (1878).
- ↑ See Félibien, Histoire de l’Abbaye de Saint-Denys (Paris, 1706).
- ↑ See A. Kleinclausz, Claus Sluter (Paris, 1908).
- ↑ See Baader, Beiträge zur Kunstgesch. Nürnbergs; Rettberg, Nürnberger Kunstleben (Stuttgart, 1854), and P. J. Rée, Nuremberg and its Art to the end of the 18th Century (London, 1905).
- ↑ The sculpture on the Paris opera house is a striking instance of this; and so, in a small way, are the statues in the reredos at Westminster Abbey and that at Gloucester cathedral. Another is afforded by the figures of modern soldiers inserted in the beautifully-designed Gothic oer War Memorial (by G. F. Bodley, R.A.) set up in the cathedral close in York.
- ↑ On the whole, Westminster possesses the most completely representative collection of English medieval sculpture in an unbroken succession from the 13th to the 16th century.
- ↑ A kneeling portrait-statue of Mateo is introduced at the back of the central pier. This figure is now much revered by the Spanish peasants, and the head is partly worn away with kisses.
- ↑ See Ruskin, Stones of Venice; and Mothes, Gesch. der Bauk. u. Bildh. Venedigs (Leipzig, 1859); also H. v. d. Gabelentz, Mittelaltert. Plastik in Venedig (Leipzig, 1902).
- ↑ See Carl Cornelius, Jacopo della Quercia (Halle a. S., 1896).
- ↑ See Yriarte, Rimini au XVᵉ siècle (Paris, 1880).
- ↑ This class of large wooden retable was much imitated in Spain and Scandinavia. The metropolitan cathedral of Roskilde in Denmark possesses a very large and magnificent example covered with subject reliefs enriched with gold and colours.
- ↑ See Waagen, Kunst und Künstler in Deutschl. (Leipzig, 1843–1845).
- ↑ There were once no fewer than 107 statues in the interior of this chapel, besides a large number on the exterior; see J. T. Micklethwaite in Archaeologia, vol. xlvii. pl. x.-xii.
- ↑ For the earlier history of Spanish sculpture, see Don Juan Augustin Cean Bermudez, Diccionaria historian de los mas illustres professores de las bellas aries en Espagna (Madrid, 1800, 6 vols.). or the later sculptors, see B. Händke, Studien zur Geschichte der spanischen Plastik (Strasburg, 1900).
- ↑ The Ludovisi group of Pluto carrying off Proserpine, now in the Borghese Gallery, is a striking example, and shows Bernini’s deterioration of style in later life. It has nothing in common with the Cain and Abel or the Apollo and Daphne of his earlier years.
- ↑ In the 19th century an Italian sculptor named Monti won much popular repute by similar unworthy tricks; some veiled statues by him in the London Exhibition of 1851 were greatly admired; since then copies or imitations of them have enraptured the visitors who have crowded round the Italian sculpture stalls at every subsequent international exhibition.
- ↑ See Arendt, Chateau de Vianden (Paris, 1884).
- ↑ The Villiers monument is evidently the work of two sculptors working in very opposite styles. These monuments, however, are not included in the list of his works drawn up by Stone himself and printed in Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting, i. 239-243. This sculptor’s receipts, recorded by his kinsman, Charles Stoakes, amounted to £10,889—an enormous sum for an English sculptor and “tomb-maker” of those days.
- ↑ In size, but not in merit, this enormous statue was surpassed by the figure of Liberty made in Paris by Bartholdi and erected as a beacon in the harbour of New York city.