“In this matter it was deemed essential that we should find one who knew our friend. For while an artistic success might readily be obtained by a score of men, we were aware that that indefinable something--that quickening spirit animating a man’s whole being and constituting his personality--was likely to be in a measure lost without the immediate contact which artists seek. It was just here that our good fortune became again manifest; for our covetousness was rewarded by finding in Mr. Bush-Brown the sculptor of our search. Behind him stood the personal knowledge, and, what was equally fortunate, a most excellent photograph by Smales. I cannot regard this snap-shot picture other than a portion of our rare good luck, for it gives us Gibson as we knew him--in his out-of-door garb, and in the very act, too, of his devotion to nature. It has enabled the modeler to produce a likeness, which I believe future generations must instinctively feel as good--just as we of to-day looking at the engraving of Shakespeare in the original folio edition of his works instinctively feel it is scarcely more than a travesty of the poet, that man of infinite fancy and wit. But since Shakespeare’s time, the graphic arts of expression, more particularly of engraving have progressed to such a degree of perfection that it is quite possible now to attain to the subtlest degree of an artist’s thought. Likewise in sculpture is this attainable--so much so that we shall to-day be able to read in the unveiled bronze the individual characteristics of the one whom we would portray. “I was pleased in looking at the Medallion last week to discover a butterfly hovering over the convolvulus vine so accurately preserved and so gracefully worked into the composition--because as you will remember this was the emblem of immortality with the Greeks--a most appropriate symbol, too, in this instance; for when you come to think of it, Gibson was in spirit a good deal of an old Greek himself. He was one in his joyousness, in his large and passionate appreciation of out-of-door life, and more than all in his love of the beautiful. Beauty of form and color as he saw it in nature was a sort of visible divinity--a palpable happiness, heaven come down to earth; he viewed it in the conception of Gautier, the French poet--as an all-pervading yet delicate mantle let down by God to cover the nakedness of the world for the delight of his children. Of this mantle he always found enough to clothe his pictures with poetic truth, nay, more, for into the fine vesture of his thought he frequently wove a scientific fact of such intrinsic value as to win renown as a naturalist.