International studio (19.1903)

when his modelling is heavy and lumpy, but this
defect of inexperience wiil pass away, and the
assured strength will remain. In one group,
there is some disunion between the
hgures, for while the blind girl herself is in
repose, the boy against whom she leans walks
forward. This troubles the whole purpose of the

design and weakens the effect of the truthful and
rugged pathos. But if Mr. Wells invites criticism
here and there, he is none the less a true artist and
a gifted young sculptor. His statuettes never
seem too small or too large; his feeling for scale
and for weight of style has an impressive originality,
and his subjects are already varied in their range
of observation and sentiment. Motherhood and
childhood are admirably represented, as in the
A<2.M72/ the best group that Mr. Wells
has yet produced. There is something tragic in
the A<2.M72/ fn?77M73 <2726? which might well

be called Z>7'?2/2/&<27V.f IF2/9 ; and, again, remark
the humour in the Ci/iY/Ti.g'a &*2<rA The knife
is blunt, and the moment for bad temper has not
yet come ; but you may see by the lad's face that
it is coming, and that a curt word or two will soon
be a relief.
Then, as regards the general character of the
work of Mr. Wells, it is all the more
welcome on account of its rarity among
English artists, for the English genius,
when it has dealt with rustic subjects,
has ever had a great tendency to be
idyllic. Morland and Ibbetson, no
doubt, had a true feeling for rusticity,
but their art suffered from the lives
they led and never reached maturity.
Rowlandson, though usually known as
a caricaturist, is a better rustic than
either Ibbetson or Morland. He made
some admirable drawings of the English
peasantry, and it is with the Rowlandson
of these drawings that we feel tempted
to associate Mr. Wells. They differ much
in feeling, it is true, and yet they are
kinsmen, thanks to their frank manliness
and to their weight of style. Their work,
too, recalls to memory the essential aim
and purpose of Millet's art, which Millet
himself describes when he says that he
desires the women and men whom he
represents "to have an air of being bound
to their position, so that it should be
impossible to imagine them as having an
idea of being anything different." In
other words, Millet's aim was to represent
true peasants, bound by their whole
natures to the soil; and it is precisely
such true peasants that Rowlandson
makes real in many of his drawings, and
that Mr. Wells models for us in his
statuettes. But the afEnity between Mr.
Wells and Rowlandson is one, so to speak,
of distant cousinship, whereas that between Mr.
Wells and Millet is of a closer and more fraternal
kind. They are brothers in rustic art, these two, as
Scott and Dumas were brothers in the realm of
heroic romance. Dumas owed something to Scott,
Mr. Wells owes something to Millet; but this does
not account for their brotherhood of temperament
and genius. Some have spoken of Mr. Wells as
the English Millet of sculpture, and the phrase
seems apposite enough.
Perhaps the only real drawback to the modelling
of statuettes is the difhculty of making the art


"PEASANT WOMAN AND CHILD" BY REGINALD F. WELLS
f^<//'////JJ/</// <^f 7l<//'. W %Z72 ^2^/272^ j

21