(Pall Mall Gazette, November 9, 1888.)

The most satisfactory thing in Mr. Simonds' lecture last night was the
peroration, in which he told the audience that 'an artist cannot be
made.' But for this well-timed warning some deluded people might have
gone away under the impression that sculpture was a sort of mechanical
process within the reach of the meanest capabilities. For it must be
confessed that Mr. Simonds' lecture was at once too elementary and too
elaborately technical. The ordinary art student, even the ordinary
studio-loafer, could not have learned anything from it, while the
'cultured person,' of whom there were many specimens present, could not
but have felt a little bored at the careful and painfully clear
descriptions given by the lecturer of very well-known and uninteresting
methods of work. However, Mr. Simonds did his best. He described
modelling in clay and wax; casting in plaster and in metal; how to
enlarge and how to diminish to scale; bas-reliefs and working in the
round; the various kinds of marble, their qualities and characteristics;
how to reproduce in marble the plaster or clay bust; how to use the
point, the drill, the wire and the chisel; and the various difficulties
attending each process. He exhibited a clay bust of Mr. Walter Crane on
which he did some elementary work; a bust of Mr. Parsons; a small
statuette; several moulds, and an interesting diagram of the furnace used
by Balthasar Keller for casting a great equestrian statue of Louis XIV.
in 1697-8.

What his lecture lacked were ideas. Of the artistic value of each
material; of the correspondence between material or method and the
imaginative faculty seeking to find expression; of the capacities for
realism and idealism that reside in each material; of the historical and