Studio: international art (18.1900)

Arts and Crafts

of design. It occurred, therefore, to Mr. Gaskin
and his wife to try and counteract the evil at its
source by starting, in the same place, the produc-
tion of jewellery on the best artistic lines. They
determined to set about this by keeping the design
at so high a level as to be always in advance of the
execution. Moreover, they determined that the
industry should^ consist of genuine silversmiths'
work, as distinct from mere vulgar stone-setting for
the ostentation of costly gems. Although they can
only spare time in their evenings to devote to their
common undertaking, and although they employ
none but the very humblest of appliances, the
success they have attained is most encouraging.

EMBROIDERED BANNER DESIGNED BY C. M. GERE

EXECUTED BY THE MISSES MUNN

I94

They have developed already a distinctive character
for their jewellery, with its stones chosen not for
their worth in money but solely on account of
their aesthetic value in composition, and set amid
delicate spirals in metal, wrought entirely by hand,
with none of the mechanically accurate symmetry
which, howsoever tasteless, is considered essential
in the trade. Mr. and Mrs. Gaskin began with
silver, but their most recent experiments have been
with gold. It only remains to point out that the
illustrations, exaggerating as they do the sharp
contrast between black and white, unfortunately
make the jewellery assume a look of hardness which
does not really belong to it.

Although it is scarcely yet four years since the
gifted young sculptor, Mr. Derwent Wood, passed
out of the schools, he has already been fortunate
enough to make his mark in the art world. In an
open competition for statues, allegorical of the arts,
to crown the four corners of the Central Pavilion
of the Art Gallery now being built at Glasgow,
Mr. Wood's designs were of such noticeable quality
as to be chosen by the selection committee. No
sense of their proportion is conveyed by the
examples here shown, which represent the pre-
liminary studies for the work. They have to be
carried out double the scale of life size and are to
be placed about fifty or sixty feet from the ground.
Consequently the artist has given them a monu-
mental character in keeping with their architectural
function ; and moreover has aimed at broad effects
in the mass as distinct from broken surfaces with
folds or other details, which would be lost or even
seem like defects at their destined elevation. The
work is to be finished by next June. Mr. Wood
has produced some decorative plaster panels,
modelled and coloured, for the front of an altar;
and he has designed, in his time, a certain number
of medals in relief, an exercise which, curiously
enough, is generally practised on the truest prin-
ciples by artists in their student days. For then
they are required to model their designs to
working size, as was done by the old masters of the
craft. The easier method, acquired later, of work-
ing on an enlarged scale, to be subsequently
reduced for execution, is most unsatisfactory,
because it impoverishes the bolder qualities of the
composition, besides contracting and diminishing
the value of the detail ornament. For the rest,
our illustrations prove quite clearly that Mr.
Derwent Wood is a large-handed sculptor, a
sculptor with a manly style, very bold and free,
and therefore admirably suited to the require-
ments of decorative work on a vast scale.