Page:The Industrial Arts of India.djvu/152

 Clay Figures.

Figures in day, painted and dressed up in muslins, silks, and spangles, are admirably modelled at Kishnaghur, Calcutta, Luck- now, and Poona* Fruit is also modelled at Gokak, and other villages in the Belgauni Collectorate of the Bombay Presidency, and at Agra and Lucknow* The Lucknow models of fruit are so true to nature as to defy detection until handled. The clay figures of Lucknow are also most faithful and characteristic representations of the different races and tribes of Oudh ; and highly creditable to the technical knowledge and taste of the artists. They are sold on the spot at the rate of four shillings the dozen. Wall brackets, vases, clock-cases, and other articles are also manufactured out of the tenacious day at the bottom of the tanks in Lucknow ; but they are in a very debased style, being modelled after the Italian work which is to be found all over Lucknow, the old Oudh Nawabs having largely employed Italian sculptors in the building and decoration of their gardens and palaces.

It is very surprising that a people who possess, as their ivory and stone carvings and clay figures incontestably prove, so great a facility in the appreciation and delineation of natural forms should have failed to develop the art of figure sculpture* No- where does their figure sculpture shew the inspiration of true art. They seem to have no feeling for it They only attempt a literal transcript of the human form, and of the forms of animals, for the purpose of making toys and curiosities, almost exclusively fox sale to English people* Otherwise they use these sculptured forms only in architecture, and their tendency is to subordinate them strictly to the architecture. The treatment of them rapidly becomes decorative and conventional. Their very gods arc distinguished only by their attributes and symbolical monstrosities