"Greatest"

In New Haven last week Lorado Taft, U. S. sculptor who was born the year before the Civil War began, declared, before the students assembled in Sprague Memorial Hall for the final Trowbridge lecture, that: "As Americans we have a perfect and inalienable right to our ignorance of art."

He then explained that since the American sprang from humble origins transplanted on a barren shore, it is of little wonder that he is artistically an ignoramus.

Mr. Taft, who is no relative of William Howard Taft, is listened to when he talks on native esotericism. His authoritative and exhaustive book, The History of American Sculpture, has become a text.

Pursuing his subject, the benign old gentleman ventured two statements to the effect that Augustus Saint-Gaudens became the greatest U. S. sculptor, and that the most noted living U. S. sculptor is Daniel Chester French, aged 76.

Daniel French did make a statue, at 23, that is as well known, perhaps, as any U. S. work in clay, "The Minute Man of Concord." The fact that the Minute Man in question was famed more by his appearance on thousands of boxes of Minute Tapioca than by universal acclaim does not alter the fact that he is a famed minute man and statue.

In Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston is another outstanding work by Sculptor French, his "Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor," a memorial for the tomb of Sculptor Martin Milmore.

But his real successes are the great "Lincoln" in Washington* and the beautiful "Angel of Death." Industrious as a boy making mud pies, Daniel French has fashioned statues which appear in most large U. S. cities, made during the two and a half score years since he quit M. I. T./-

*Not to be confused with Saint-Gauden's famed Lincoln in Chicago.

/-Common designation of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.