British Sculpture and Sculptors of Today (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 edition. Excerpt: ...achievement, it is easy to see that it is the form and action that interest the artist--the expression of the body, not that of the face. This may be seen by examining his statuettes of male and female figures. They are intensely sculptural in a quattro centist feeling an 1, unlike what is not infrequently the characteristic of the smaller works of smaller men, they never suggest the " ornamental bronze." The daring pose of "Orpheus" expresses the feelings of the music-making beast-charmer better than any face could do. Adapted from the artist's picture with the same motif, this tripping, careless youth steps it amid the beasts he leads with his song, not unconsciously but deliberately. Audacious as it is in arrangement, it is a very perfect piece of modelling of its kind. Similarly, in the beautiful "Fata Morgana," modelled and cast in silver for Mr. Stuart M. Samuel, M.P., the unusually fine type of the girl who sat for it and the effect of her pose have interested the artist vastly more than the face and head. In such a case, it would appear, the sculptor comes forward and the painter recedes. The characteristic of Mr. Swan's work, then, is the fact that he does not force his anatomical knowledge upon the spectator. Indeed, he partially conceals it and, as has been suggested already, he passes from the movement of the animal to the movement of its surface. If this be true, he is herein a disciple of Ruskin, who protested against the over-elaborate study and display of anatomy, which is apt soon to degenerate into posturemaking, and the result of it gives us science rather than art. The artist who knows something of science must forget it when he begins his work, or, like the dead objects of his study, his...