SKETCH OF CHIMNEY-PIECE IN HOUSE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT.

jection; as the painter varies the tone of his background, so does the sculptor, by slight undulations which catch the lights and cast pale shadows, vary his: he even uses outline and cuts fine trenches of shadow round the edges of his figures here and there, where greater definition seems desirable. . He can produce the effect of distance by flattening his modeling and so reducing both the light and shadow, and he can mark the importance of any part which is most interesting to him by giving it greater relief. His figures now lose themselves utterly in the background and now emerge into sudden crispness of form as may best suit his purpose. His relief is a picture which he fashions with delicate use of light and dark, thinking always of the effect of the whole, and never of the imitation of any one piece of form. Low-relief is thus an art nearly allied to painting and which deals with aspects rather than with facts, and its exercise calls for the highest powers of perception and execution which the artist possesses. The lower the relief the greater-the more marvelous - the delicacy of modeling required to give the proper relations of light and shadow. It is at the same time, for him who understands it, the most delightful resource against the sculptor's greatest danger, the matter-of-fact. Therefore it has been a favorite art with sculptors, and success in it is one of the best available measures, both of the power and purity of

artistic conception, and of the technical ability, of a given sculptor. St. Gaudens's success in it has been very great. Such reliefs as the portrait of a young lady, here given, or that of the two children, must be seen and studied in the originals to be understood, it being impossible for any illustration to give an adequate idea of the sweet fluency of modeling and of the marvelous economy of means (getting with an infinitesimal projection enough variety of shadow to convey a complete impression of nature) which place them among the most remarkable productions of our times. That they are lovely in themselves, full of sweet, pure feeling, of beautiful composition and subtle grace of line, the engravings may indeed help one to see, but the exquisite fineness, which is power, of the workmanship, the beauty of surface, caressed into delicate form, which in a direct light is invisible, nothing but the reliefs themselves can show one. They are masterpieces of skill and knowledge.

So far we have been considering Mr. St. Gaudens's work in professed portraiture, whether in the round or in relief, and have seen in it the two dominating qualities of the Renaissance, individuality of conception and delicate suavity of modeling. We have now to consider a more purely ideal class of works, such as the caryatides in the house of Cornelius Vanderbilt and the angels of the Morgan monument (so unfortunately destroyed by fire), and to see how in them the same qualities are combined and carried out together. At first sight the caryatides might seem more Greek than Renaissance in feeling. The costume, the large amplitude of form, the dignity and repose of the figures, are very Greek. But one soon sees that there is something there which is other than Greek. The modern mind has been at work, and in these ideal figures there is a vague air of portraiture. If they are not women who have lived, they are women who might have lived and have loved and, assuredly, have been loved. Serenely beautiful as they are, one does not feel before them, as before the great Greek statues, the awe and admiration of abstract beauty, but rather the kind of tender personal feeling that the Femme Inconnue of the Louvre inspires. They are not goddesses but women, alike yet different, each, one feels, with her own character, her own virtues, and, perhaps, her own faults. Here, then, is the note of the Renaissance, the love of individuality, and its complement in the manner of the execution is equally present. These figures are almost entirely detached, and yet in the paleness of the modeling and in the avoidance of deep hollows and dark shadows,the chisel never quite going into the depths of the form, but leaving, as it were, a diaphanous

CARYATID ("AMOR") OF THE C. VANDERBILT CHIMNEY-PIECE.

veil between it and our eyes and a mystery for the imagination to penetrate, we find even here the principle of low-relief.

We find this principle of low-relief even more readily in the angels of the Morgan tomb, and I think, to go back a little, we can find it even in the Farragut. For, though the ruggedness of the type, the material, and the necessity for distant effect demanded depth of shadow, we find in the very means of getting this shadow the lesson of lowrelief that it is the appearance of nature and not the absolute fact that is of importance. The figure was first modeled nude with great care, but, when Mr. St. Gaudens came to put the costume upon it, he found that in order to get the necessary accent he had often to disregard the actual form underneath and to cut folds of drapery deeper than they could possibly go. In order to get the look of nature he had to disregard the absolute fact.

I have dwelt at considerable length on the likeness of St. Gaudens's work to that of an epoch which he has deeply studied and deeply loves, because it seemed to me that in that way only I could show its great technical merit; but it by no means follows that his work is not original. On the contrary, he could not show the spirit of the Renaissance if he were not strongly individual. As I have said, the essence of the Renaissance spirit is individuality, and in nothing is St. Gaudens more like the great artists of the fifteenth century than in that he is eminently original and that the personal note is strongly felt in all his work. His figures are such as no other man than himself could have made them; his types of beauty are those that appeal most to his own nature and his own peculiar temperament. This temperament one cannot quite analyze, but one can readily. discover one or two elements that enter largely into it. Two of these are virility and purity. The manly directness and straightforward simplicity of such works as the Farragut and the Chapin are among their most readily visible characteristics, and the caryatides or the angels of the Morgan monument are as pure as