Art: Epstein

Ragged Pecksniffs and old women; gentlemen out for a constitutional; bright-cheeked British children who had run away from their Nannas, paused to stare and listen, moved along, were replaced by others. So all day, in Hyde Park, people came and went, but the voice of Somerville Hague, sculptor, went on forever. Ensconced before Jacob Epstein’s Memorial for W. H. Hudson* (TIME, June 1), fortified with a box of assorted sandwiches and mobled in a large ulster, he stated that he did not like Sculptor Epstein’s conception of Rima, the wood nymph. “Look at it. … Did you ever see such a thing in the name of art? . . . It has a head like a criminal and its arms . . . monstrosity . . . frighten the sparrows. …”So the sweet and often feeble voice of old Somerville Hague trickled like lymph through the June day. At 8 in the morning he began. At 8 in the evening, feeling that he had expressed himself, he bundled off home. Next day, Mr. George Bernard Shaw used a spare five minutes to write a letter to the London Times. Said he: “The Memorial is unquestionably the real thing, with all the power of stone, the illusion of strenuous passion, that live design can give. . . . I’ve a great deal of sympathy with the people who hate the Epstein sample. Why should not these people have a sanctuary all to themselves? … If Fay Compton or Gladys Cooper would pose as Rima with a stuffed pigeon on each wrist, the artist who touches up the photosculpture could throw in a few swallows. . .”

*British naturalist and man of letters. Rima, whose sculptured likeness is the subject of the controversy, is a character in Green Mansions, most famed of his books.