Studio: international art (14.1898)

Tanagra Terra-cottas

Museum, at South Kensington, through the loans
of Mr. Salting and Sir Gibson Carmichael, and at
the Burlington Fine Arts Club, through its Exhibi-
tion in 1889, every opportunity has been afforded
of acquiring a thorough knowledge of the subject,
and yet the result is as just stated.

The remarkable side of the matter is this, that
no one with instincts for beauty, or interest in
antiquity, or in the evolution of art can fail to be
at once captivated by these terra-cottas. Mr. A.
Ionides, who is the fortunate possessor not only of
a house full of artistic creations, as readers of The
Studio of December last are well aware, but of
a remarkable collection of these statuettes, has
assured the writer that of all his beautiful things
none have so quickly appealed to all, no matter
how varied their tastes, as these groups and
figures, and concerning none has he been so ques-
tioned as to their origin, meaning, and use. May
be this ignorance is in the main due to the fact
that written information on the subject is but
scantily given in any English treatise on Greek

NO. 3.—A YOUNG WOMAN SEATED ON A ROCK
(Ionides Collection)

TANAGRA

art,'* although French, German, and Russian
authors, to whom the writer is largely indebted
for his facts, have compiled important and beauti-
fully illustrated treatises upon them.

In acceding to the editor’s request to write upon
them, I have at the outset felt how much there is
to say, and how impossible it will be to do more
than deal with them here in the most perfunctory
manner.

Few customs have more universality than that of
furnishing mankind after death with companionship
in the solitude of the grave. Originating in human
sacrifices, which surrounded the deceased with the
slaves who had companied with him in life, the
idea passed, with advancing civilisation, into effigies
to take their place, a change which may be traced
all the world over.

In the countries with which we have immediately
to do, namely, those bordering on the Mediter-
ranean, we find the earliest instances in Egypt.
There religion taught a belief in a life after death,
but the need of companionship and sustenance
during the sojourn in a tomb which was re-
garded as a permanent abiding-place for the
various forms which the deceased then
assumed. To that end doubles were pro-
vided who not only assisted in tilling the
fields of Hades, garnering its crops and
making them into food, but also doubles of
the gods of immortality who would transform
the dead into a younger life. These figurines,
made for the most part of clay upon which a
silicious coloured glaze was superimposed,
were manufactured by thousands, and, did
space permit, might be traced as the origin
of the types, whether secular or divine, found
later on in Greece, passing thereto through
transmutations effected by the succeeding
Assyrian and Phoenician races. It was the last
named which, as the carriers of the East,
brought them under the notice of the Greek
race. The Phoenician was a disseminator of
art rather than an artist. His ships carried
the art products of other lands and his own
imitations and adaptations of them, but he
did little else, and the interest attaching to
his work is only historical, as containing an
instructive exposition of the blending of
Aigypto-Assyrian products. In the hands of
the Greeks, however, the art rapidly advanced,
from an archaic to a highly matured phase,

* The exception is Dr. Murray’s “Handbook of
Greek Archaeology,” and the Burlington Fine Arts
Catalogue of the 1889 Exhibition.

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