“Strength is from within, and one against the world will always win.” Born in 1854, Alfred Gilbert realized his vocation in early youth. As a boy it is said that he carved heads of walking sticks for his schoolmates. He confesses himself that he hired a small room near Aldenham School at 1_s_. a week as a studio. Coming up to London, he finally entered the Royal Academy schools and joined Sir Edgar Boehm—Queen Victoria’s sculptor in ordinary—as an “improver.” After losing the R.A. Gold Medal to Thornycroft, he crossed to Paris, studying at the École des Beaux Arts. Gilbert has put on record his reasons for leaving France. They are thoroughly typical of the sculptor. Finding the influences at work were too potent to allow of the due assertion of his own personality, he determined to go to Italy—a stronghold of individualism. “In Florence,” he tells us, “I saw, for the first time in my life, the works of the fathers of the Renaissance, and I was struck by the absolute independence and freedom of thought and truthful representation of the ideas they possessed. So impressed was I with the fact that their representations were not mere photographs and yet so true to nature, that they seemed to reveal to me what I then understood as style, but which I have since learnt to regard as the expression of an individuality.” This is the essence of the artistic philosophy of Alfred Gilbert. It adumbrates a high ideal, but allied with sane craftsmanship, it is one which has always served the sculptor who honestly strove to put its precepts into practice. What has been the outcome in Gilbert’s case? There is a strain of pathos in the answer. No sculptor of our day has had more abundant opportunities. Yet, somehow, Fortune has proved a fickle jade to Gilbert. This is particularly the case with his larger works. The Shaftesbury Memorial, in Piccadilly Circus, should be regarded by every Londoner as an epoch-making work. It compares with Stevens’s monument to the Duke of Wellington in the wealth, imagination and craftsmanship lavished upon it. In point of fact, it is held in universal disregard. Not one Londoner in a thousand even troubles to remember the name of the sculptor.