Someone promptly asks what are the rules of relief. But are rules of much use here? Rules of relief are seldom mentioned by the sculptor; never until after they have been patently transgressed. He has of course his standards; he allows to his reliefs some of the privileges of painting, such as perspective and distance, but he does not presume too far with these borrowings, lest his work lose its sculptural style. A relief is largely a matter of innate artistic feeling, as well as of trained taste. And quite as much as a work in the round, it tells the personality of its maker. A Saint-Gaudens relief, whether the monumental bronze Shaw, or the marble portrait, slightly under life-size, of Mrs. Stanford White, or the little reduction, “about as large as the hand of a child of twelve years,” made from the bas-relief of the baby Homer, reveals the artist’s temperament, shows his principles and prejudices in art. Many of this master’s pupils have made memorable reliefs in various styles from medallic to monumental. The medals and portrait-reliefs of Martiny, Flanagan, Fraser, and Weinman are well-known. Less familiar to the general public because kept in private collections are the admirable bronze or marble portrait-reliefs by Frances Grimes. After the mechanical roughing-out of the pointing-machine is over, Miss Grimes herself finishes all her marbles, whether created in the round or in relief. She does this oftener in her studio than in the Sunday picture papers; and because her designs for marble are from their first rude beginnings in the clay imagined with a full realization of their final possibilities in marble, they naturally have an integrity not always attained in the work of sculptors unfamiliar with the chisel. IV Most artists would probably agree with Saint-Gaudens that “the great coins are the Greek, ... just as the great medals are those of the fifteenth century by Pisanello and Sperandio.” [Illustration: VICTORY MEDAL BY JAMES EARL FRASER] But he who designs the modern American coin, however enthusiastic he may be in his admiration of the Greek high relief masterpieces of monetary beauty, must take serious and constant thought of the curiously un-Greek conditions confronting him. His coin must work harder than the Greek coin; it must “stack” properly; it must be struck in numbers undreamed of in Hellas. Our difficult modern ideal calls alike for quantity and for quality. Comparatively limited as was the circulation of our recent Victory medal, four million copies were considered necessary. One of the good precedents introduced by Roosevelt, in consultation with Saint-Gaudens, was that of entrusting the designing of our coins to our most talented sculptors; the resulting improvement in our coinage, on the æsthetic side, has been one of our twentieth-century triumphs. And the “great medals” Saint-Gaudens loved are still influencing the medallic art of the Western world.