ART AND ARTISTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2059, 10 August 1893, Page 49

ART AND ARTISTS.

The entire gallery of pictures collected by the late Henry Field, of Chicago, estimated to be worth £60,000, has been presented by his widow to the Chicago Art Institute. Miss Mary Redmond, the Irish sculptress, whose colossal statue of Father Mathew was recently unveiled in Dublin, is a young woman scarcely over 20, who won the commission for the statue in competition. According to the last report of the Science and Art department, there were in existence in Great Britain, under its auspices in 1892, no fewer than 207 art schools, with 47,316 art students; 1063 art classes, with 52,715 student?, and 6212 elementary schools, at which 1,170,340 children are taught drawing. During the long years in which Michael Angelo was at work on the Sistine chapel, he sat perched on a scaffold of dizzy height, with his head turned upward. His sight suffered cruelly from this unnatural position, and for long years aEterward he could only read or examine a drafting with his eyes raised toward the ceiling. To Philadelphia belongs the credit of being the pioneer American city in the field of industrial art training, and it owes this worthy precedence to the enthusiastic interest of a woman— Mrs Sarah Peter. In her own house she formed a class of young girls, for whose instruction she employed and paid a teacher. This formed the nucleus of what has grown to be the "Philadelphia School of Design for women, a large and useful institution, which has since been generously aided by both men and women. - Harper's Bazaar. The excavations of the French school at Delphi have resulted in bringing to light the remains of an important building, which is thought to be the treasury of the Athenians described by Pausanias. It is in the form of a small temple of Doric style, with metopes, of which latter five fragments have been found. On these can be seen a figure of Athena, a Heracles, a centaur, and several figures of combatants and animals, the whole being executed in fine and accurate workmanship, though in style somewhat rigid and of archaistic tendency. The walls of the building appear to have been covered with Attic inscriptions, of which about 150 have been recovered so far. AN AMBBIOAN SOULPTBESS. Mhne Beveridge at the age of 17 not only has the distinction of being the most talkedof woman sculptor of the day, but of her an eminent sculptor has said that in all the | essentials of her art she is more largely endowed than any woman who has ever lived. The essential quality of sculpture— which is so simple an art, so limited in its diversity of expression — is gravity, weight. A painting may be bad in colour, in composition, even in drawing, but may still have some quality of atmosphere, of tone, which will be a source of pleasure, the picture itself always capable of improvement. Thus, painting has a wider range of expression than sculpture, and women, for this reason, have achieved more in the hospitable art and less in the sterner. For this quality of gravity is the one in which all women, according to the best authorities, have fallen short. No woman in fact up to this time ha 3 done anything in sculpture which demands or commands more than ephemeral notice. In the case of Miss Beveridge this quality, according to these same authorities, is so noticeable that the crudest of her work compels alike the respect of men grown gray and famous in the art and of those who are ignorant of technique, but responsive to power in any form. — Gertrude Atherton, in May Lippincott's.