ARTISTS' MISTAKES

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 119, 12 January 1932, Page 6

ARTISTS' MISTAKES

MANY AND VARIED PRIMITIVE BLACKS MORE ACCURATE THAN SCULPTURES. i SOME AMUSING EOWLERS. i ; The technical accurary of the native 1 cave paintings discovered recently near Canberra should make some civilised artists ponder. ; Having taken stock of its statues, London has just found them to be full of howlers. The statue in honour of Wellington at Hyde Parlc has flintlock guns such as Waterloo never knew. Near the National Gallery a statuesque George Washington leans on a Roman bundle of rods, known as "fasces," but bereft of the- axe that ought to accompany that symbol. Is the omission a refiection on the legend of Washington and his little hatchet? Then there is the fine group commemorating Boadicea near the House of Commons, with charioteer and galloping steeds, but no reins connecting one with the other. London' newest statue of Lord Haig is so full of martial faults that indignant former soldiers want it scrapped or remedied, just as the Returned Soldiers' League in Sydney recently desired that the chinstrap of the bronze warrior guarding the Cenotaph in Martin Place should be rearranged in correct position. Trousers Offend. Sculptors have diffieult problems to solVe. When the late Sir Bertram Macke'nnal was commissioned long ago to carve a statue. of the late Mr. J. T.- Ryan, a Premier of Queensland, he pointed out "the appalling lack of artistry in his subject's trousers." He overcame the difficulty by hiding the offending legs beneath a convenient barrister's gown. His difficulty recalls. that G. K. Chesterton confessed himself to be unable to draw a cow for fear of "going wrong in the hind legs." So ' instead he drew a soul of the cow. Sculptors have to reckon with reactionary critics. The statue of Adam Lindsay Gordon in Melbourne offended some people because he was made to hold a pipe in his hand. Nor was that the first protest against a pipe in art. It was a similar tobacco pipo in the statuesque hand of the late Mr. Manifold, M.H.R., that brought down aesthetic curses on the head of its carver, Nelson Illingworth. Why a pipe should offend some critics is diffieult to understand. Statues, may hold scythes, swords, hour-glasses, or even bits of fossilised lightning, but pipes are taboo unless they be the pipes of Pan. A famous basrelief of R. L. Stevenson holds a cigarette. The cigarette became a pencil when the figure was copied for a church memorial. Psalmist as Critic. Perhaps the futurist sculptors deserve all the kicks they receive. Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick says in a recent novel ; that looking at a futurist figure always makes one think of the 22nd Psalm, "I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up." Some futurist paintings ; are worse even than an Epstein nightmare in bronze. A hanging eommittee pointed out recently that the directions for hanging a weird canvas

had unhappily beeip lost, but that it was inclined to believe that it depicted a Holstein cow chasing inehriated dolphins in the forest of Fontainebleau. "The Tailor and Cutter" often condemns the conventional canvasses oi the Royal Academy. It remarked not long ago that many of the painted portraits in the Academy showed coats vithout any seams and with only i smudges for button-holes. It is common for one trouser-leg to be longer than another. Perhaps, like Chesterton, portrait painters should paint only the souls of their sitters. That would put the "Tailor and Cutter" in its place. If would also avoid the type of howler the famous Frank Salisbury commited when painting the latest portrait of the King. Having given his Majesty an admiral's uniform, the artist added a field-marshal's sword. Columbus Grows a Beard. The issue of a special postage stamp for the first Australia-Eng-land airmail recalls that many howlers have enlivened philately. There is a much admired stamp picturing Columbus peering through a telescope. It may seem pedantic to point out that telescopes were not invented until after the death of the great voyager. Besides, does not Shakespeare make the docks in the play strike the hours ages before striking docks were thought of ? Columbus seems to be fated to provide fun for stamp collectors. In a series of pictorial stamps commemorating the so-called discovery of America, one stamp shows a cl'ean-shav-en Columbus sighting land. The nexi stamp in the series shows him landing on the following 'day, with a fullgrown beard. Apart from adding to general gaiety such howlers help stamp collectors. To-day a philatelist ,will give pounds 'for an old stamp that has been wrongly pietured or even unusually pei'forated. Long ago one of the West Aus-

tralian colonial stamps was printed with its swan design topsy-turvey. Did the collectors say "Tut, tut!" at such ofiicial carelessness? On the contrary. They kept track of the rare bird, and when it was offered for sale the other day the bidding reached £1065. Even more was paid by the King for a sample of the famous "twopenny Post-office Mauritius." It was engraved by a well-meaning watchmaker. who inscribed "post-office" instead of "post paid," a misprint which brought Eim censure, but made his stamp immortal. Even Needleworkers. Even needleworkers sometimOs make mistakes. The -latest biography of King Edward tells how he entrusted the making of the n6w Royal banners for St. George's Chapel to the Royal School of Art Needlework, presided over by most austere ladies. These good women were shocked at the female figure on the Irish Harp, and they asked might they disregard such nudity, reproducing instead a stringed harp with no figure, The King

consented. How he must have chuckled! So proud were the needleworkers of their reform that they publicly exhibited the banners. Then the fun began. The Lord Chamberlain, who had no hand in the reform, was flooded with letters and wires from anxious patriots and societies demanding to know whether and why the Royal Standard had been altered and when would he "gazette" the alteration. The result was that the censored banners were returned to the needleworkers, who had to pluck out their primly stringed harps and work instead the traditional instruments — mermaids and alk