Isidore Konti’s groups at the Buffalo Exposition proved him to be a decorative artist of unusual versatility. He does not show the same varied familiarity with ornamental forms as Martiny, but his technique is scarcely less facile and sure than the Parisian’s, while touched with much of the Italian _naïveté_. Gay or serious, according to the subject, his inventiveness of fancy inclines toward that slightly idealised realism which characterises the work of many sculptors of the modern Neapolitan school; a realism that is less the product of any theory of art, than of the natural adaptability to impressions--a quick perception coloured by temperament. Thus Konti seems to me at his best when his fancy moves most simply. A first impression of his group, “The Age of Despotism,” was very satisfactory. Bold and simple in design, it represented a man seated in a chariot, erect and cold, with eyes fixed sternly ahead, and at his side a woman (a courtesan, I took her to be) lashing on the team of human cattle, while women were dragged in chains behind. Amid so much trite symbolism here seemed to be a touch of very naïve and forcible realism. But closer inspection discovered that the realism was impaired by artifice and artfulness; the woman in the chariot had wings, and one of the captives carried a pair of scales, a lapse into abstractions that for myself, at any rate, lessened the value of the group. On the other hand, in the group upon the Temple of Music, while abstractions were introduced, they had no other meaning than a decorative one. The youth with a lyre might represent Apollo, but there was no need to recognise the fact; he was simply one of a joyous band of figures, animated with the grace of gaiety, of music and the dance. These groups were as refined in composition as they were exuberant, exhibiting the genuine creativeness of an artist who has an instinct for decoration and a lively delight in the pure expression of line and form, regulated by an instinct also of artistic propriety. It is eminently a Latin trait, in which the American is as deficient as the Anglo-Saxon or Teuton.