Bronze Bulls, Stone Sheep

The way to put the purest bull character into a bull of bronze, reasoned Sculptor Herbert Haseltine, is to model only from a champion. Furthermore, the owners of such prize animals are usually only too glad to pay for it. For 13 years Haseltine has been freezing champions into stone and bronze as accurately as a Stone Age man graphing a bison on his cave wall. Last week the results, tilling two rooms in Manhattan's swank Knoedler Galleries, were packed up and shipped to Chicago's Field Museum at Marshall Field's expense to go on permanent exhibition.

There was a pawing Suffolk Punch stallion in gold-plated bronze. Its eyes were of ivory and onyx and lapis lazuli bows tied its braided mane. Baroque in muscle and violence, it was Sudbourne Premier, Britain's famed champion (1921-24). There was Haseltine's first champion job, King George V's own shire stallion, Field, Marshal V, modeled in 1921 when he was still a prize winner. Red and sleek in Acajou marble was the magnificent champion Shorthorn bull, Bridgebank Pay master, winner of the British and Scotch championships three years, in a row. A Hereford bull champion, Twyford Fairy Boy, with grey-green coat of gold plated bronze, stood 18 in. high, 30 in. from rump to horns. There were two Lincoln rams, their fleece rendered in coarse-grained Burgandy stone. The great Middle White champion boar, Wharfedale Deliverance, beaten at last by his own daughters, showed his remote Chinese ancestry in pink marble, turned-up snout, stiff-flaring ears. There were conventional models of the famed racehorses Polymelus, Sergeant Murphy, Easter Hero, a polo pony, a Percheron mare and foal, a sleek black marble Aberdeen Angus bull, a cow, a ewe, a sow. Of each British champion Sculptor Haseltine had made exactly twelve small copies which sold for $450 to $1,700 each.

Herbert Haseltine looks like a British cavalry major, with waxed mustaches, compressed lips, erect carriage. A U. S. citizen, he was born in Rome in 1877, lives in Paris. Famed are his sculptures of gassed, War-worn horses, Les Revenants, in the London War Museum.

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