International studio (16.1902)

The Cult of the Statuette

endeavour to popularize his products had to be
abandoned through lack of patronage.
A more recent trial of public taste has just been
made by means of an Exhibition devoted to
statuettes, and the originators, the Fine Art Society
of New Bond Street, would seem to have met with
a sufficiency of encouragement to, perhaps, tempt
them to further effort. Should they do this, they
may well ask, and expect, to receive from the
sculptors a more serious support than, it is evident,
has been afforded in the exhibition under review.
For whilst it is self-evident that an advertisement
such as they have lately received from the exhibi-
tion must now, and in the future, be of assistance
to their altogether insufficiently recognized art, it
is also clear that their part therein has consisted in
contributing little that has not
been previously seen and is
already known to those who
have busied themselves at all
with their productions.
This apathy is perhaps con-
stitutional in the artistic tem-
perament, but is hardly of
good augury to those of us
who wish well to the profes-
sion, and believe that it only
needs encouragement to hold
its own with the foreign
schools, to which it has been
so erroneously the fashion to
believe it to be altogether
inferior.
It will be the greater pity
if the attempt to popularise
the Art should once more
fail, because the time would
certainly seem to have arrived
when the man of taste in
England should follow the
example of those in other
countries who do not always
lead him. Not only would
the aspect of the wall-space,
which he has so amply occu-
pied with pictures, be bettered
by being interspersed with
bracket-held statuettes, but the
monotony of his table orna-
ments would be varied by the
intrusion here and there of a
well - modelled statuette. It
must not be forgotten that,
whilst a picture presents but “the victor”—bronze by david mcG>iP
276

one and the same face for observation and
study, a well - modelled statuette should be of
interest from every point of sight, and should in
consequence appeal to the senses in a far more
varied manner than any work in the flat. For it
lends itself to change with every hour that the light
passes round it and to every differing aspect from
which it is viewed. It has been said that an
appreciation for form is the last taste to be acquired,
and requires the longest education. Our lack of
appreciation may therefore be only due to lack of
opportunity which such an exhibition as this must
have done much to dissipate.
Comment upon the works exhibited must be
brief. In the first gallery attention was at once
arrested by statuettes by Alfred Gilbert, Perseus