Summary
Wilde finds the best thing in the lecture its closing warning that 'an artist cannot be made.' Otherwise it is too elementary and too technical at once: Simonds describes modelling in clay and wax, casting in plaster and metal, working in relief and in the round, the kinds of marble, and the use of the point, drill, wire and chisel. He shows a clay bust of Mr. Walter Crane, moulds, and a diagram of the furnace Balthasar Keller used to cast an equestrian statue of Louis XIV.
What the lecture lacks, Wilde says, is ideas. Simonds treats his tools as instruments for the hand and never relates his subject to art or life, whereas Morris, the week before, never forgot he was lecturing on an art. Crane closes by noting that sculpture has hardly changed a tool despite modern machinery.