NEW NOTE IN STATUARY

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 15, 18 January 1930, Page 20

NEW NOTE IN STATUARY

From Calcutta comes a new not© in public statuary. A wealthy Bengali market gardener is to erect in the central market, at his own expense, a statue.to himself (says the "Star," London). •This is not to bo the conventional figure wearing its best Sunday suit. It is to be a statue that will tell future generations the story of the Cabbage King's life and why he became famous. All the vegetables will be shown*. The .statue in fact, will be a harvest festival in miniature, with (it is understood) the cabbage and the brussels sprout especially prominent. Although he is- prepared to spend money freely upon.',the. best available Italian or British sculptor, the Cabbage King may find hiruSelf up against a technical difficulty. '■ Sculptors, ,in the main, are limited in their ideas. Give them, a woman in sun-bathing costume and they will thro.w clay about feverishly. Produce a cabbago and ask them for a'model in marble "and they are apt to dither. On the face of it, therefore, this is not to be an easy commission. If you are not in .practice, a cauliflower wants doing,"a curly kale has it* complexities, the artichoke requires a delicate chisel: and with tho best inten-

CABBAGE KING'S. PLANS

tkm in the world, it is hard to make a vegetable, marrow look aesthetic. But the idea is too good to bo lost. London, for "example, is full of statues I* that everybody agrees ought to be bombed. Why should we put up giant ] effigies of statesmen and soldiers who 'got more publicity than was good for them during their lives'? Statues to heroes of peace are a much saner ideal, and would, as in the present instance, lead to full pictorial treatment. Always providing, of ■ course, that we kept Epstein out of it. " . . While we are on the subject of agriculture,, for example, it is scandalous, but true, that in this country there is not a. single monument to the man who first: discovered basic slag. One who made three vitamins grow where only one grew before, and not a single statue to him! Think of the fancy a really soulful sculptor'could got into his study—the pioneer sitting on sacks of slag, and on one hand a field of corn, and on the other a pig-iron foundry, to show the connection. The Farmers' Union ought to start a fund for the erection of this memorial in the Agricultural Hall or at Covent Garden.