Useless Beast

Hard is the life of a portraitist. Bitterly did British sculptor Alfred Frank Hardiman realize this last week. Year ago he won a competition to design an equestrian memorial statue of the late Field Marshal Lord Haig. In his own mind Sculptor Hardiman decided that when he was ordered to make an equestrian statue of Lord Haig he was really intended to glorify the British armies which the Field Marshal-distiller led. Accordingly he designed a heroic figure, stronger, stockier than Douglas Haig ever was, astride a monumental beast like a horse of a Roman conqueror.

There was an immediate outcry. The British public apparently wanted a statue of Douglas Haig, Field Marshal, and no nonsense. This did not look like Lord Haig, it did not look like his horse. To the expert eyes of letters-to-the-Times writers, it did not look like a horse at all. Loudest objector was Lady Haig who found that Sculptor Hardiman had made her husband "much too fat."

Meekly Sculptor Hardiman made another model. Abundantly supplied with photographs from amateur critics, he gave the Field Marshal a slouching seat and set him on a nervous, long-necked racer. This second model was passed by the Office of Works, last week drew a second storm of protest from British horsemen.

Wrote His Grace the Duke of Portland, twice Master of the Horse under Queen Victoria: "The thing is a stargazing, ewe-necked thoroughbred." British Horseman G. G. Cross gave it as his opinion that it was "a cross between a giraffe and a four-legged ostrich." Loudest objector was Lieut-Colonel Maxwell Fielding McTaggart, author of numerous books on equitation, who for the past three years has been carrying on a bitter dispute in British newspapers and illustrated weeklies with a fellow horse-author, Lieut-Colonel S. G. Goldschmidt, on the proper method of jumping a fence.* Last week he dropped his feud with Col. Goldschmidt long enough to blast the Hardiman horse as a "fiddle-headed, peacocky, weak-necked, flat-sided, long-backed, straight-shouldered, herring-gutted useless beast."

While there could be no doubt whatever that the second Hardiman horse was a very bad horse, art critics regarded the controversy last week as part of the bitterness that seems always to follow equestrian sculpture. When the late great "'Marse Henry" Watterson, Confederate scout, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, first saw St. Gaudens' equestrian statue of General Sherman being led by an angel, he said: "Just like the -- -- to make the lady walk."

* The Goldschmidt-McTaggart dispute reached a climax year ago when both Colonels met at a steeplechase course for a trial by ordeal. In the presence of dozens of spurred, booted officers, newsreel photographers, both Colonels jumped many a fence, made perfect scores, resumed their argument.

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