For in Bauer’s work delicate fancy alternates with sadness, as one may see in his two statues in the Library of Congress. “Religion” is represented as a young girl peering into the far beyond with wistful, visionary gaze and holding before her a poppy flower with leaves and seed-pod. In her grasp is the pride of life and the narcotic with which the world lulls its pain; but she looks beyond them to the ideal and to the balm of spiritual ecstasy. In the “Beethoven,” however, is expressed the world-wearied yearning of the artistic soul. The well-known face, rugged and graven with the lines of time and suffering, is slightly bowed, and the right hand is held to the ear as it listens intently for the far-off strain of inspiration, while the other hand is poised as if above a keyboard, the fingers searching to express the music in his brain. A heavy cloak with high-standing collar gives breadth and picturesqueness to the figure. It is, indeed, too picturesque, one may feel--with too expanded a composition and too much play of movement, to satisfy its architectonic function of relieving by a vertical line the horizontal of the balustrade. But, however that may be, as the portrait of a great musician and an idealisation of his art, it is a statue full of suggestion--a work of imagination, elevated, tender, deep and true. Bauer had long pondered a series of four groups, representing “The Tragedy of the Sphinx”; her awakening to love, her passion, disillusion and death; and in one of the buildings of the Chicago World’s Fair, amid the chaos of the construction period and in a winter of unusual severity, a winter of veritable discontent to him, he worked upon the first of these, “The Sphinx and the Cupid.” During the exposition months it stood in a retreat of foliage near the Art Palace unnoticed. Yet, even unfinished as it was, it exerted an extraordinary fascination. The little Love God was whispering in the creature’s ear, and as the honey of his words sweetly melted her slow imagination, a smile of aroused appetite began to play upon her lips, hunger shone in her eye; a passion hot and cold, eager with desire, callous to everything but its own satisfaction; a cruelty that would not be appeased until it had consumed itself. I have said that Bauer is painfully hindered by a lack of facility in the handling of his medium; but I doubt if it is from lack of skill in technique, as is sometimes said. He is, in fact, a very rapid and sure worker up to a certain point, that of bodying forth his conception in its broad, general aspect; and the subsequent embarrassment is due to the subtlety of the expression for which he is striving; a kind of subtlety, often alien, I expect, to the expressional capacity of his medium. For Bauer has long wished that fate had made him a painter instead of a sculptor, and there is no doubt that the quality of his imagination is more suited to the medium of colour.