An equally illuminating example of Gibson’s style can be seen at the Tate Gallery. This is the group, “Hylas and the Nymphs,” modelled in 1826. The technical industry of the sculptor and his feeling for sculptural form are obvious at once. But no one, comparing the “Hylas” with the modern works of the British school which surround it, can fail to see the sickly conventionalism with which it is imbued. Notice, for instance, the modelling of the limbs of the two nymphs, and compare them with those of the boy. Surely any imaginative sculptor of the modern school would insist, above all, upon the obvious contrast between the male and the female form, seeing that the story of Hylas itself depends upon this very point. Gibson, however, practically models the male and the female limbs, the male and the female flesh, alike. Hylas has not the legs of a youth, nor have the nymphs, who have been smitten by his beauty, the legs of women. Gibson has chosen to adopt a conventional compromise, unrelated to anything in nature, and selected for no other reason than a fancied resemblance to the Greek style. The three figures are graceful enough. But they are unsatisfying in the last degree to all who have felt the far more potent emotions arising from a rigid adherence to nature. Hence “Hylas and the Nymphs” and the works in the Gibson Gallery remain as perpetual memorials of all that the artists of our own day had to rid themselves before the rebirth of English sculpture was possible. Matters improved very little during the thirty years following the production of Gibson’s “Hylas.” What can we learn from the exhibitions of 1851 and 1862, which may be fairly taken to represent the apotheosis of mid-Victorian artistic taste?