process was new in sculpture; but a style recommended at once by ease, inexpensiveness, and novelty-not to speak of the fine name, "generalization," which was bestowed on it-was sure of popularity; and the poorness of most of our sculpture since may be traced to its adoption.

ness.

Chantrey has given London three statues-Pitt, in Hanover Square; George IV., in Trafalgar Square; and Wellington, by the Exchange. The remarks just made on his style may dispense with a detailed criticism. The Pitt has considerable picturesqueness in its outline, and we need not grudge the sculptor the assistance of Nollekens' admirable bust, since he has turned it to good effect in the likeBut he disparaged bronze, from ignorance how to take advantage of its peculiar capacities; the Pitt would have been heavily designed, even for execution in white marble, and, as it is, looks overwhelmingly ponderous and gloomily conventional. The equestrian groups show taste, and avoid manifest errors, but are insipid; certainly, in the case of the City statue, not through the fault of the subject! The best point is the idea of modelling the horse standing; not so striking an attitude as when he is represented suddenly checked in his course, but a grateful variety of design, and free from the look of moving off the pedestal.

Gahagan, long employed under Nollekens, modelled the Duke of Kent, at the head of Portland Place-elaborate, but not effective; and an example how a statue may be dwarfed by the size of its own pedestal. Clarke of Birmingham, an artist selected, we may suspect, on political grounds, produced the seated bronze of Major Cartwright, one of the pioneers of the first Reform Act, in Burton Crescent, St. Pancras; a weak but careful figure. The name of Campbell (once fashionable in Anglo-Roman society) is assigned to the Lord W. Cavendish Bentinck, in Cavendish Square. This statue stands on a level with those of Westmacott, Adams, Noble, Theed, and Marshall Wood, in want of life, poverty of form, and inert heaviness. The unfortunate Havelock and Peel, by Behnes, have been already alluded to. The Jenner, in Kensington Gardens, is by Mr. C. Marshall, who has given us better work in the earlier days of his career.

George III. was more fortunate in his sculptors than his successors have hitherto been. The group by Bacon we have noticed. The equestrian figure, in Pall Mall East, showing him in his old age, appears to the writer very much the best of the London public statues. This is by Matthew Wyatt, who, in his monument to the Princess

Charlotte, at Windsor, produced a work which, if here and there attempting more than sculpture can effect, is still one of the finest sepulchral groups executed since the Renaissance. Wyatt was not, however, in the first rank of gifted men, and the figure of the king, though not in itself favourable to the artist, is hence somewhat deficient in style. But great taste is seen in the management of the dress and accessories; the figure is full of life, and admirably set upon the charger: nor have we anything elsewhere equal to the spirited modelling of the horse, who is thrown back on his hind-legs, as if the rider were giving some sudden order at a review. This attitude is a good illustration of that rule which points out the moment of arrested or suspended action as the right moment for sculpture: avoiding the tameness rarely conquered in representations of absolute repose, and the extravagance and sense of the impossible, rarely absent from gestures of display.

Wyatt was much less successful in his other group-the colossal Wellington over the archway by Apsley House. For the unfavourable public estimate of this work, however, the absurd position, with which the sculptor had nothing to do, is mainly responsible. So far as a judgment is now possible, the horse (though he looks rather heavy in parts) is carefully and powerfully modelled, but tame in attitude, and encumbered with too much headgear. The best feature is the spirit with which he seems to strain himself, neck, eye, and ear, towards the spot to which his rider is pointing. No such touch of nature redeems the rest; even upon the site intended by Wyatt, the massive treatment of the bronze would have half effaced the Duke's figure, which, as it is, from most points of view, forms little more than an ungraceful and inexpressive mass; whilst whatever force may be in the rendering of the features is concealed by the enormous beaver.

Such, when he attempts a task beyond his natural or acquired powers, may be the failure of an able and genuine artist. It must be noticed, but in the tone due to the non-success of one who has elsewhere proved his ability. Where power, natural or acquired, is hardly seen or altogether absent, the critic may dismiss the work with less ceremony; and, in truth, most of the sculpture by contemporary artists which remains, affords as little pleasure to the ordinary spectator as to the man of taste. Since Wyatt's death, the deterioration in our public statues, whether in London or our other cities, has been so marked as to become a sort of common-place in literature and in

Parliament; nor can we deny the correctness of a general sentiment, which, if not always critical, rests upon a true instinct of what effect a really fine statue would produce on the spectator.

In this later school the style of Chantrey's drapery, which wanted lightness, tends to become intolerably heavy, and the lines, no longer arranged either gracefully or in due accordance with the forms of the figure, are clumsy and unmeaning; whilst so little knowledge of the form itself is shown, that one is left in doubt whether there be any limbs beneath the dress or not. The heads want character and expressiveness; the attitude and pose reveal nothing of the man, and, in consequence, there is little look of character or life about the statue; it tells no story, which every such figure does, when well executed.

These general remarks may, again, spare us the task of analyzing several figures which might have been left to silence, could we be sure that they were the last which hands so unequal to the great attempt of a public statue would have the chance of modelling. Such are the Napier in Trafalgar Square, by Mr. G. G. Adams (not to be confounded with the Mr. J. Adams who made such a terrible mess of Mr. Gladstone's head in the Exhibition of 1865), and the Franklin in Waterloo Place, by Mr. Noble; statues in both of which, besides the absence of grace or sculpturesque dignity, one looks in vain for anything about the features or action characteristic of the two distinguished men thus doomed to disfigurement. The sailor, who in life was all modesty and decision, struts, under Mr. Noble's hands, like a third-rate tragedian who does not know what to be at next; the General appears to be rearing backwards, and supporting himself by the tail, so badly is his vast robe managed. We have seen many other figures by these artists, none of which showed greater capacity for their art; they might have been in the mind of Mr. Punch, when he said the best way to honour one of our heroes would be "to take down his statue." In the same class must be rated Mr. Durham's large group of Prince Albert, within the Horticultural Gardens, where that Prince, whose simplicity of manners and devotion to useful labour were conspicuous, has the air of a man under the hands of his tailor, and is so heavily weighted with masses of drapery and court decorations, that we lose all sight of the human being beneath the garments.-The "Guards' Memorial," by Mr. Bell, is not free from conventional allegory; a large Victory, holding out crowns in the air, as if to decorate the passengers upon every passing omnibus, here surmounts three soldiers, who

stand on guard before the enemy. The idea of this latter group is really fine it was true, as well as generous, to select these privates as the representatives of Crimean glory; but there is a great deficiency in animation and the look of repressed energy, without which the figures cannot "tell their story." The execution, although superior to Mr. Durham's, is blunt, and the masses, as usual in English bronze, are far too heavy-an error particularly perceptible in the Victory.

The bronze-work of Baron Marochetti follows that of the French school, in which he was trained, and is hence in some measure free from the fault just noticed, and he occasionally appears to aim at greater spirit and picturesqueness in his dress and attitudes than the average of our sculptors. Unhappily, we have here again to lament, with the French critics of some pieces which he once produced in Paris, the absence of sufficient mastery over natural form, whether of the figure or of the draperies, to enable him even approximately to realize his intentions, whilst the poverty of his ideas is brought into stronger relief by the attempt at originality. It is no gain in art to exchange meagre tameness for barren extravagance. The artist's two statues exemplify these criticisms. Richard I., before the Palace of Westminster, is an equestrian group, in which a picturesque, as opposed to a classical, effect has been attempted. But the result is only a mantelpiece statuette on a colossal scale. The features of Cœur de Lion are a mere mask, utterly without character or energy; what was meant for chainarmour is a monotonous series of indentations, nowhere lapping over, or forming itself into the folds which such a dress must assume if there were a body beneath it,-which, however, the artist has not been able to indicate. The horse, again, is so inaccurately modelled as to seem like two animals run into one; and any one can perceive the immense interval between the vague and, as it were, accidental forms of the muscular portions, and the firm knowledge displayed in Wyatt's charger. The same difference exists between the action of the riders. George sits his horse; Richard has only been seated on him.

Similar qualities reappear in the Clyde memorial at Waterloo Place, although, on the whole, a favourable specimen of the artist's powers. Here the General's figure is stated to be little more than a copy in bronze of his portrait by Sir F. Grant; and as what looks well in a picture may have no effect, or even a bad one, in sculpture, the result of this easy receipt for making a statue is that the man disappears beneath the uniform, the features lose their natural effect, and the general air is altogether without character or dignity: doing

nothing, and seeming incapable of more-like the "Portrait of a Gentleman" in an exhibition. This is to go to work in the spirit of a tailor, rather than of a sculptor; it raises dismal anticipations what the colossal Albert in Hyde Park is likely to turn out. The worn-out allegorical group, Britannia and her lion, appears below, but is not redeemed by any merit in the workmanship. Feet, arms, features, here are as coarse and unfinished as if they were the work of an unpromising amateur, or were intended to represent physical malformation; the draperies, a series of "careless furrows and unmeaning masses, like the exploits of a boy with his first pen-knife;" while the attitude is that of a vulgar milliner's girl, dawdling and stretching herself on a garden-seat, and ogling the passers-by. What an impersonation of a mighty empire!

Sculpture is eminently an art in which high finish must be and has always been required; yet we may look upon the incomplete first thoughts of a real artist with great pleasure. But there is nothing suggestive in slovenliness, and we decline altogether to accept a "sketchy" style, when it only serves to conceal ignorance of the first elements of a sculptor's profession, or impose upon an ignorant spectator.

In most of the cases just reviewed, there was little in the former works of their respective authors to raise rational expectations that they would "know how to do it," nor, indeed, to furnish much hope for their future. Money spent on such art is truly money worse than wasted. It is otherwise with the bronze of Lord Herbert, in Pall Mall, by Mr. Foley, one of the few sculptors, in the present low state of the art, who deserves the name of artist. The writer of this notice has, indeed, more than once given proofs in support of a conviction which the sculptor's works, as he developes his great natural gifts, have deepened, that Mr. T. Woolner stands preeminently at the head of our school-reaching equal success in power of portraiture and tenderness of poetical invention, in force of idea and in mastery over the many elements which unite to form "execution" in this most difficult of the arts. He has also seen busts by Mr. Butler which showed greater skill in the modelling and penetrative power over life and character than Mr. Foley's, whose ability, besides his recognized success in modelling the horse, seems to lie rather in capacity to deal with figures as a whole, than to carry out the work into those exquisite and remoter subtleties which nature only reveals to the inventive or penetrative genius. But for sound, if not imaginative, work, with a considerable sense of grace, and