246 



DISCOVERY 



\'I. at St. Thomas's Hospital from Holbein's picture, 

 his Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey from the 

 Chandos portrait ; modelled his Ancient Worthies at 

 Stowe on the Antique ; copied Michael Angelo, 

 Bernini, and Fiammingo for practice; and erected 

 countless monuments varying- in scale from the small 

 to the colossal, but never careless or negligible. 



John Michael Rysbrack (1693-1770), the greatest 

 historical sculptor whom England has seen, has a 

 finer sense of design and is a far finer craftsman. 

 His terra-cotta models in the Soane Museum are 

 works of art, and he succeeds in more fields than any 

 other English sculptor. Whether his subject is an 

 equestrian statue, an historical scene, an allegorical 

 bas-relief, a living man or a dead hero, he treats it 

 with originality, power, and that sense of style with- 

 out which art cannot exist. 



But if Scheemaker and Rysbrack were excellent 

 artists, Louis Francois Roubiliac (1695- 1762) was, 

 in Allan Cunningham's words, " a genius and a 

 gentleman." As I have elsewhere shown, he came to 

 England far earlier than is commonly supposed, and 

 never left it save for a brief visit to Italv. He 

 executed the best portraits of the greatest men of his 

 day. Swift, Pope, Handel, Hogarth, Garrick, Boling- 

 broke, and knew most of his sitters intimatelv besides ; 

 his monuments are masterly ; his statues, of which 

 the Newton at Trinity is only the most famous, noble 

 works of art. " Ruby," as Fielding affectionately 

 called him, was loved by all who knew him, and met 

 his death through devotion to his art. .Adequately to 

 deal with his work would need a volume ; but no 

 account of English sculpture during the century from 

 the Restoration to the death of George H. can omit 

 a tribute, however brief, to its last and greatest artist. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



The Vertue MSS. apart, the principal sources of information 

 are very few, and many of the dates and particulars here given 

 will be found to contradict those usually printed. The 

 authority of the MSS., however, is overwhelming, since Vertue 

 wrote from personal knowledge of all the sculptors here 

 mentioned. Pierce excepted. The relevant passages have been 

 printed in full by the writer in The Architect, 1921-2, and must 

 be accepted in place of the inaccurate and second-hand state- 

 ments found elsewhere. 



Architect, The. Studies of the English Sculptors from Pierce to 



Chanirey [by Katharine A. Esdaile] : July 1, July 8, 



September 2, September 16, September 30, October 7, 



October 21. December 9, 1921. February 10, March 3, 



.\pril 7, .April 21, June 16, June 23, 1922; in progress. 



Chancellor, E. Beresford: Lives of the British Sculptors, 1911. 



Cunningham, Allan: Lives of the English Sculptors, 1831. 



Dallaway: Anecdotes of the Arts in England, i%oo. Inaccurate 



and scrappy. 

 Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. Pierce, Cibber, Gibbons, 



Bushnell, Scheemaker, Rysbrack, RoubiUac. 

 Esdaile, Katharine k.: See The Architect. 



Faber, Harold: Danske og Norske in England. Copenhagen, 

 1915. By far the best account of Cibber, though omitting 

 one or two important works. 



Sainte Croix, Le Roy de: \'ie et CEiares de L. F. Roubiliac. 

 Lyons, 1SS2. An enthusiastic appreciation, whose value 

 is lessened by the author's ignorance of English and by 

 his constant inaccuracies. 



Smith, J. T. : Xollekens and his Times. Ed. Wilfrid 

 Whitten, 1920. (John Lane, £1 us. Gd.) Indispensable 



Walpole, Horace: Anecdotes of Painting in England. Ed. 

 Wornum. (Out of print.) 



Most indispensable of aU is the study of the monuments 

 themselves ; provisional lists of works by the various sculptors 

 will be found in The Architect. 



Notes and News of the 

 Month 



ARTIFICIAL DISINTEGRATION OF THE 

 ATOM. 



The attention of the public has been recently called 

 by a section of the Press to the unpleasant eventuali- 

 ties which recent work on the artificial disintegration 

 of the atom has made possible. Reports, of course, 

 have been greatly exaggerated, but many would like 

 to know whether or not any truth whatever lies at 

 their base. We have been told that " an atom may 

 blow up the Earth," that " the world is on the verge 

 of the greatest scientific triumph of the ages," that 

 hot stars may have evolved from cold earths like ours 

 because beings living on them " have been monkey- 

 ing with their atoms," and so on. It is a pity that 

 newspapers make stories out of a little of the latest 

 science, a few interviews with scientific men suitably 

 embellished, a vivid imagination and a breezy or a 

 forced breezy style. It is a pity, too, that there 

 should be such a great gulf fixed between the science 

 of anticipation — that glorious, exciting, gripping, and 

 romantic thing which really interests us all — and the 

 science of real things discovered in laboratories by 

 patient men, who fortunatelv escape being inter- 

 viewed, which by comparison is almost a thing' of 

 naught. 



It is well known that artificial disintegration has 

 been effected in the laboratory — a great and very 

 important advance in science. But the study of the 

 phenomena involved has taught how extremely 

 difficult a process it is, and on what an exces- 

 sively minute scale it has yet been effected. 

 -Special materials are required which are extremely 

 rare in nature, and which, apparently, cannot 

 be manufactured. The conclusion from these 

 experiments is that there is little or no hope 

 either of the process of artificial disintegration being 

 rendered possible on what is called a commercial 

 scale, or (what is nearly the same thing) that bound- 

 less quantities of energy can somehow be genera*^ed 

 by the process by which so far a little has bee^i 

 tapped. .And these are the only experiments which 



