For the male portrait, modern taste generally prefers bronze to marble; and just as the dead whiteness of marble may be relieved by color, so the severe darkness of bronze in statue or bust may be altered by the use of a harmonious patina. Many of our sculptors have given long and patient study to this subject of “patine”; others again trust all to the bronze founder. But sculpture still has much to learn from chemistry; and there are still a few artists who keep enough of the weaker side of craftsmanship to believe in the advisability of secret processes. Is it not true that art is the last field where such secrecies should exist? Do we not look upon art as the liberator of great things, not as the locker-up of little things like craftsmen’s receipts? For receipts that are not exposed to the air get mouldy with hugger-mugger and abracadabra; this is as true today as in good Cennino Cennini’s time of “mordant with garlic,” and “tempera with the yolk of the egg of a city hen.” VI A survey of the spirit of American sculpture should include, as a cause for joy, a glimpse at the single ideal figures in which many of our modern sculptors express themselves, more or less untrammeled by the demands of the world. The subjects for such figures are rarely new, yet they must be treated with perennial freshness. Take Diana: Saint-Gaudens, Warner, MacMonnies, Miss Scudder, McCartan and I know not how many others have done Diana in her phases, and each new portrayal should prove a new joy. Take Maidenhood: Rudolph Evans has chosen this ancient theme for his Golden Hour, one of the most delightful pieces in all American sculpture; Barnard has rendered it in marble; Sherry Fry’s classic bronze Maidenhood, in the guise of Hygeia, and Mrs. Burroughs’s On the Threshold are sculptural expressions of the same subject. Take the Ephebos: John Donoghue’s Young Sophocles, dated 1885, a masterpiece coming just half way, in point of time, between the arrival of the Greek Slave in America and the unveiling of MacMonnies’s Civic Virtue, is a gloriously conceived figure of youth in the abstract, rather than a full-length likeness of the Greek poet leading the chorus after Salamis. Surely in sculptural mastery, Donoghue is much nearer to MacMonnies than to Powers. Picking our way past the Slave and her kin, and coming at last upon a classic like this Young Sophocles, we may safely abandon the prefix _pseudo_. What a relief! It is as if one could at last leave off over-shoes, and walk abroad dry-shod, in fair weather. This example from the ’eighties points out once more the progress made between the Fairs of 1876 and 1893. Does it also, in its old-school seriousness of consecration to art, and in its reverence for “the nobler forms of nature” shame a little the easy slapdash of the battalions of sketchy figures now clamoring for space in print and in the galleries? Probably not. Other times, other ideals. “She certainly saved herself trouble,” was the