Studio: international art (3.1894)

On Colouring Sculpture

as distinct from the painter who thinks of colour
only as a means to obtain faithful representation.

To go into the practical side of the matter de-
mands consideration of pigment, mediums, and
material generally with which to get colour. For this
climate and in outdoor use much of the colouring
must be in the hands of the metal-worker; but in
the case of stucco relief some use could be made of
mosaic. Within the limited range of pigments
available something might be done in stucco work
by using different powder-paint coloured plasters.
It is surprising how much colour plaster will hold
without losing its setting property ; and of course
you could employ it also with different coloured
gessos.

In these latitudes, still speaking of coloured sculp-
ture out of doors, there is very little that can be
said for colour laid on with the brush.

For use in interiors, tempera should go as well
over a gesso relief as it did over the old gesso
ground of the panels. Many of the subject wall-
panels, executed in England in the thirteenth cen-
tury, though not reliefs, were (with the exception
of the flesh) practically oil paintings.

Oil or varnish painting (for oil is used because
in effect it becomes a varnish) must from early
times have been the practice in the north-western
parts of Europe. Oil is now, and has been for
three centuries, the especial medium for painting,
so we may as well accept the fact that in spite
of shine, darkening, cracking, blistering, and
peeling, it will for many a day be in frequent
use even for colouring reliefs. But all these
dangers are increased to-day, for it is sudden
changes of temperature and condensation of mois-
ture that do most harm to paint; and paint had better
chances when a man took it for granted it was to
be cold in winter, and did not have his church
warmed for him. This danger applies to all paint;
but perhaps less so to encaustic, which does admir-
ably for absorbent surfaces and plaster. But I am
inclined to believe in driving it in with the appli-
cation of heat, when the substance itself is homo-
geneous a good way down • unlike gesso, where
the suction is stopped in different strata. En-
caustic can be very well manipulated for large
shapes, and will admit of after-touching upon it
with oil; it will also bear a certain amount of careful
washing, a consideration in our sooty cities. Ex-
cept in a museum, to put a coloured relief under
glass is unpleasant; for it seems then in a cup-
board, and not itself a decoration.

But mainly, I think, there is an aesthetic ad-
vantage in using a material by which it is difficult

to make a painting and so does not lend itself
to realism ; and for this reason oil, which is, so to
speak, instinct with the feeling of painting, is to be
used with suspicion. All these processes and media
harden the surface and render it less easily injured ;
but paint should be thin, the thinner the less likely
to blister and peel. You do not want to overload
the surface of your relief, or to fail to take advan-
tage of the white ground.

To speak of the actual modelling of the relief,
only individual practice enable a man to decide when
to carry out his work at once in gesso or stucco,
and when to employ clay or wax for his model,
and resort to casting for the finished work. For all
situations where the relief will be exposed to trying
conditions, gesso is perhaps the least safe, and a
plaster-cast or terra-cotta the safest. With regard
to the plaster-cast, if a man destroy the mould and
colour his relief, it is as unique as an etching after
the plate has been destroyed ; so that the objection
to a cast for this particular reason need not be
seriously considered.

There are several plasters (setting, of course, by
taking up water) now manufactured with a glutinous
substance incorporated in them; if they can be
used to cast with they would probably be more
durable than plaster of Paris, and being homo-
geneous throughout would be safer than gesso
elaborately manipulated with the brush. The old
stucco, depending on lime-putty for its setting,
must be the type of them all.

Lastly, regarding coloured relief as having rela-
tion both to the sculptor's and the painter's prac-
tice, it has another aspect in which it may well
interest us.

In coloured relief you may have beautiful and
good art from a man who has not that totality of
gifts which go to make exclusively the painter or
exclusively the sculptor, though he will fully justify
his devotion to art. In him, the inclination to-
wards one or the other is not strongly marked ; he
looks back, but with fuller knowledge, to that
earlier condition of the arts when the distinctions
were hardly recognised.

It is by the aggregate of the work of the men of
less conspicuous gifts that the wealth of a people's
art must be built up. Here in coloured low relief
is an opening for just such men, where they
might work and be happy. M. W.

In giving,, according to a previous promise, a re-
production of the drawing, St. Paul's from Watling
Street, we are enabled to speak more fully of the
book for the illustration of which both this and the