MEN I HAVE PAINTED
case was, Can a sculptor issue to the public comparatively indifferent work without being suspected of employing "ghosts" to do it for him? The action should not have been brought. Belt's subsequent conduct leads one to suppose that he expected substantial damages from the defendant, a sculptor whose father was a wealthy man. What the witnesses for the defendant, including the President of the Royal Academy and other artist members, could not see was that the work produced by Belt was of such a commonplace character, that anyone with an atom of ability could easily have done it all, therefore Belt could have done his own work, even if he did employ other men to assist him.
I had a studio next to Belt's, and was in the habit of visiting him frequently to watch the progress of a bust of Lord Beaconsfield, a good likeness, I imagine, but executed in a hard, tight manner. Perhaps he was fooling me, and only pretending to put his little pellets of clay on a head that had already been modelled by one of the "ghosts"; but as he modelled in court, during the trial, a bust that was kept under lock and key when he was not working on it, one must infer that a real spirit helped him, or else that one of those he employed obtained access to the room in which it was locked when the court was not sitting. The jury was satisfied that they saw the clay shaped and fashioned before their eyes into a semblance of the model, and so was I. But it took forty days to decide that a man of ordinary talent could easily model in clay without producing a work of genius. It is customary for busy sculptors to employ men to assist them, modellers, carvers, chisellers, metal workers, etc. The Austrian sculptor Boehm, who possessed no extraordinary ability, employed, I was
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