vases. Now and again, amidst an environment of artificial rococo design, there peeps forth a touch of simplicity. A Chelsea candelabrum with the flowery background displays a demure country child with a wooden bird-cage. Nor were the Staffordshire potters deficient in native touches. Some of the little figures, albeit somewhat crude, attempted to keep realism alive, and stand as landmarks beside the classicism of Wedgwood and his school. We realize that such "images of clay" depicting rustic character have been fired by old English potters in English kilns. When the gods and goddesses descended upon Staffordshire from Olympus, the cottager and the farmer became classic in spite of themselves. An old Staffordshire figure of a boy, by Wood and Caldwell, is finely modelled; this subject is sometimes found in silver lustre. These and other classic subjects came into being to comply with fashionable ideas in lieu of those in contemporary costume-the field labourer, the cottage child, and other rustic characters of those days which we all should love to see, but which are, unfortunately, non-existent. It was old Benjamin West, the American Quaker, the second President of the British Royal Academy, who first painted British soldiers in uniform in his "Death of Wolfe," exhibited in 1762, instead of in Roman costume. He broke the shackles of historic painting. The statues in Westminster Abbey show eighteenth-century soldiers and sailors as though they lived in the time of the Cæsars. In regard to children on the china shelf, some of the fairest are Danish. In reproducing types of Copenhagen porcelain this will be readily seen (illustration, p. 279). The child studies of Miss Beuter, the Danish artist modeller, are inimitable. There is the demureness of the peasant children caught at the right moment and imprisoned in clay. These figures with their quaint costume in colours, not yet disappeared in the North, are worthy of the highest admiration. The potters have too often endowed childhood with artificiality. The china shelf is accustomed to a row of dancing Dresden children in richly painted costume. They represent nothing suggesting the spirit of innocence, the æsthetic ideality of that visionary, William Blake, who, when a child, saw an angel following the reapers in the corn. His Songs of Innocence were written, to quote himself: When the voices of children are heard on the green, And laughing is heard on the hill. The idealism of lovers of childhood is noticeable. It is hardly necessary to gild the lily; the chronicler has simply to repeat the whispered message; but to how few is given the genius to catch childhood's message aright. |