MEMORIAL TO A SCULPTOR

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 21987, 11 January 1937, Page 7

MEMORIAL TO A SCULPTOR

UNVEILING OF TABLET IN ST. PAUL'S SIR ALFRED GILBERT'S PLACE IN BRITISH ART (from our own correspondent.) ; ■ LONDON, December 16. In the crypt of St. Paul's, the sculptor, Sir Alfred Gilbert, has been commemorated by the unveiling of a memorial in his honour, designed by Mr Gilbert Led ward. It is in the form of a round bronze flying figure with a bow, *n compliment to Gilbert's Eros The tablet has been erected by the Royal Academy, through a grant from the Leighton Fund and by public subscription. The unveiling ceremony was attended by Sir Alfred Gilbert's family, with other relations, personal friends and members, and officers of the Royal Academy. After unveiling the memorial, Sir William Llewellyn, president of . the Royal Academy, said that few of the younger people of to-day, except artists,' students, and those especially interested in sculpture and goldsmiths' and silversmiths' work, could fully realise the high position Gilbert's work occupied, and would always occupy, in the history of the art of this country. He was an artist of high ideals and fine conceptions, and a craftsman of a prefection rarely to be found. He was an innovator and an enemy to mere convention, very versatile, and his deeply original work, which won for him a world-wide reputation, has undoubtedly a, permanent place in British art. Best-Known Work As an artificer, Gilbert had been compared with Benvenuto Cellini. To Londoners his best-known work was, of course, the Shaftesbury Memorial at Kiccadilly Circus. Everyone knew of the repeated controversies over that memorial, and he could only\ sav in fairness to Gilbert, that in regarding it, all should remember that it wai not seen now as he designed" it. Gilbert denied his art nothing. He was an ardent pursuer of the ideal and the beautiful. He fought his way, to the head of his profession, suffering poverty and other disabilities that any less determined man would have failed under; and even when his reputation was at its zenith, and riches might have been his, he chose to remain com-' paratively poor, seeking' perfection rather than reduce. his practice to commonplace commercialism. He possessed the supreme *gift of turning imagination into a beautiful physical reality-'. ..■•■