The Miniature Sculptures of Louis Rosenthal Stunned the Art World
In 1923 King George V of England changed the charter of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters to the Royal Society of Miniature Painters and Sculptors solely to allow in one American, Louis Rosenthal, whose tiny miniatures had startled the art world.
First Studio
On them one feels the artist has lavished all his skill as a craftsman, and into them he has put, with an almost reverential hand, all his love and understanding as a man. That is why they seem so satisfying to the spectator. They look as perfect as if there had been no struggle between the stages of first conception and ultimate execution. That, of course, is not the case; on the contrary, there has been and still is a very hard struggle for the artist in executing his little masterpieces, but the proverbial midnight oil during these struggles does not show at all in them. 
|
Louis Rosenthal's beautiful small sculptural works make us realize, perhaps more than anything else could, that mere size means nothing in art; spirit, conception, and vitality is everything. Here are figures and groups, an inch or two high, but conceived with a bigness, filled with a spirit, and pulsating with life as only creations of great masters are.  The Awakening
For a long time the artist tried the old ways in order to get his small statuettes cast, but neither he himself nor anyone else, was able to do so, and recourse to chasing, as is always done in larger pieces of sculpture, in his case with such small sized objects, meant the loss of the finest bloom from his tiny wax models. Just because of the smallness of his works he must see to it that all the forms are not only "correct" but, at the same time, fully charged with character and life, and, for that reason he employs the yielding wax as medium for his models which, under his sensitive fingers, take on the most fleeting impressions, as it were, as if one could feel the pulse beating underneath the skin. |
(Reprinted from the 1926 Catalogue of the Miniature Sculptures of Louis Rosenthal as displayed by The Gallery of P. Jackson Higgs, 11 East 54th Street, New York).
