The English bronze statuettes, in the gallery above the Central Court, all represent the human figure, and express delicacy and charm, thoroughly imbued with French taste but not the massive style of Rodin and his followers. Most of these bronzes are pretty, mignonne. Thomas Brock’s ” Eve ” is a very graceful embodiment of adolescence. Alfred Drury, E. Onslow Ford and Alfred Gilbert are represented, while Lord Leighton’s ” Needless Alarm ” and his ” Sluggard ” which was called at first ” The Athlete Resting ” are characteristic of the national thought and feeling for dignified respectability. The slack-water period of English art, as year by year demonstrated in the Royal Academy exhibitions, has not yet been stirred by an upheaval of originality. The inevitable result is that decorous, accepted ideas become jaded, hackneyed, artificial until the exhilaration of discovery shall shake intellectual slothfulness by spontaneous inspiration.
The marble group by Arthur Lewin-Funcke, ” Mother,” is a fine example of the modern academic school of Germany, which in high finish and a certain sweetly flowing line possesses more sensuous charm than vigorous thought.