# The Strand Magazine/Volume 5/Issue 27/Hands

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Hands.
By Beckles Willson.
II.
Casting a hand from life. (Studio of Mr. Onslow Ford, A.R.A.)
he sculptor's practice of casting plaster the hands of his client is of comparatively recent growth. The artist of the old school—and he is followed in this by many of the new—disdained so mechanical a means to fidelity. Very few, indeed, among the British painters and sculptors of the past will be found who took the pains to see that the hands or even the figures of their counterfeit presentments on canvas or in marble tallied with the originals. Sir Joshua Reynolds, as we know, would have regarded this as the essence of finical vulgarity.
Thomas Carlyle's hands.
The principal drawback in making casts from life is to be found in the discomfort, not to speak of the actual torment, it often causes the sitter by the adhesion of the plaster to the hairy growth of the skin. Various methods are resorted to with a view to obviate this, and in some cases successfully.
The hands of Thomas Carlyle—stubborn, combative, mystical—which appear in the present paper, will amply repay the closest scrutiny. These hands are unwontedly realistic, and emphasize their distinctiveness in every vein and wrinkle. They appear to be themselves endowed with each of those various qualities which caused their possessor to be regarded as one of the most puissant figures in the century's literature. The hand is not one, to use Charles Lamb's expressive phrase, to be looked at standing on one leg. It deserves a keener examination.
Mention has been made of the hand of a distinguished prelate, Cardinal Manning, ​It will not be out of place to compare it with the hands of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, which were cast posthumously. Scarcely anything could be more antagonistic. The nervous personality of Manning is wanting here. The hands of the Archbishop seem more to belong to the order of the benevolent Bishop Myriel than to that of the enthusiast and ascetic.
Plenty of opportunity to study the hands of statesmen is afforded in those of Lord Palmerston, Count Cavour, Sir Stratford Canning, and Lord Melbourne. The fallacy of attaching special qualities to any distinctive trait in the hand of an eminent person is most readily discernible here. One should avoid à posteriori reasoning. It would be the same for a physiognomist to argue a man a statesman from a facial resemblance to Mr. Gladstone, or that he is fit to write tragedies because he owns the exact facial proportions of Sardou.
Among these the hand of Lord Palmerston will stand forth mnost prominently to the reader. Its characteristics are, on the whole, sufficiently obvious, in the appended cast, to be thought accentuated. It might not unprofitably be noted in connection with those of Stratford Canning, Viscount de Redcliffe (for fifty years British Ambassador in India), whose statue by Boehm, with Tennyson's famous epitaph:
Thou third great Canning, stand among our best
And noblest, now thy long day's work hath ceased,
Here, silent in our Minster of the West,
Who wert the voice of England in the East!
is in a nave of the Abbey. With these should be joined the hand of Viscount Melbourne, the predecessor of Sir Robert Peel in the Premiership, and the great statesman after whom the city of Melbourne was named, in order ​to range this British galaxy against the hands of the Ialian patriots, Count Cavour and Joseph Garibaldi, whose labours resulted in that master stroke of latter-day politics, the unification of Utaly. Those of the former were cast separately in different positions, it being the intention of the sculptor for the right hand to rest lightly upon a column and the left to grasp a roll of parchment. Garibaldi's hand may be described as both virile and nervous.
Lord Melbourne's hand.
Hand of John Burns, M.P.
Hand of Joseph Arch, M.P.
Garibaldi's hand.
Sir E. Boehm's hand.
Hand of John Jackson, R.A.
Another type of hand is exemplified in the hands of Messrs. Joseph Arch and John Burns. Both of these belong to self-made men, accustomed to hard manual labour from childhood. Their powerful ruggedness is admirably set off by the exquisite symmetry and feminine proportions of the hand of John Jackson, a Royal Academician and great painter of his time. For symmetry, combined with grace, this hand is not surpassed.
The hand of Sir Edgar Boehm was cast by his assistant, Professor Lantéri, for the former's statue of Sir Francis Drake. It will be observed ​that the fingers grasp a pair of compasses, the original of those which appear in the bronze at Plymouth.
Lady Blessington's hand.
Reverting to the ladies again, interest will, no doubt, centre upon the hand of the celebrated Lady Blessington, accounted the wittiest hostess of her day; and not least attractive will appear Mrs. Carlyle's and those of Mrs. Thornycroft and the celebrated Madame Tussaud. The wife of the Chelsea sage was herself, as is known, an authoress of no mean repute.
Mrs. Carlyle's hand. Mrs. Thornycroft's hand. Mme. Tussaud's hand. Mr. Bancroft's hand.
A comparison of the hand of Mr. Bancroft with that of Mr. Irving, given last month, will prove interesting, if not instructive.
It has been said that the hands of Carlyle are characteristic; that they possess, with those of Wilkie Collins, the merit of being precisely the sort of hands one would expect ​to see so labelled. We now present a third candidate for this merit of candour in casts of the hands of the notorious Arthur Orton, better known under the sobriquet of the Claimant. They are pulseless, chubby, oblique: yet they are remarkable. In scrutinizing them, it is difficult not to feel that one looks upon hands very remote indeed from the ordinary.
Hands of the Tichbourne Claimant.
Next we look upon the hand of a giant even superior to Anak, in Loushkin, the Russian. But physically great as was the Muscovite, it is to be doubted if he really attained the world-wide celebrity of the little American, Charles Stratton (otherwise known as "Tom Thumb"), whose extremity serves as a foil to his rival for exhibition honours.
Richard Grosvenor be found the posscessor of many beautiful and interesting traits.
The Duke of Wellington's hand.
Another Boehm relic requires some explanation. Every visitor to the Metropolis has doubtless seen and admired the heroic equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, opposite Apsley House. They may even have noticed the right hand, which is represented as lightly holding the rein of the animal. The appended was cast from the original model in clay of the hand of the Duke, no cast direct from life ever having been executed.
It is sufficient to say that the subjoined hand and arm of Lady Cardigan, wife of the noted Crimean warrior, was one greatly admired by Sir Edgar, in whose studio it hung for many years. In like manner will the hand of lady ​ Lady Cardigan's hand.
A member not altogether dissimilar to that of the musician Liszt is the hand of Carl von Angeli, Court painter to Her Majesty, and like that also in setting at naught the conclusions too often arrived at by the chirognomist. For there is here breadth without symmetry, and an utter absence of the poise which we look for in the ideal hand of the artist. It is instructive to compare it to the hand of the painter, John Jackson.
Lady Richard Grosvenor's hand. Carl Angeli's hand. Professor Weekes' hands. Lord Ashburton's hand.
Observe the massive, masculine fingers and disproportionately small finger-nails in the hands of Professor Weekes, the sculptor. There is scarcely any perceptible tapering at the third joint, and the fingers all exhibit very little prominence of knuckle or contour. It is anything but an artistic hand, and yet its owner was a man of the keenest artistic perceptions.
In Frederick Baring's (Lord Ashburton) we find the thick-set fingers, and what the chirognomist calls the "lack of manual repose," of the great financier. But as his lordship was statesman with a talent for debate as well as man of commerce, it will not unlikely be found that the hand presented combines the both temperaments.
I have been enabled, through the kindness of Mr. J. T. Tussaud, to embellish the present collection by an ancient cast of the hand of the Comte ​de Lorge, a famous prisoner in the Bastille. This cast was taken, together with a death mask, after death, by the great-grandmother of the sculptor, to whom both relics have descended.
Comte de Lorge's hand.
The Queen's hands, which appeared in the last issue of this Magazine, were cast by John Francis, a famous sculptor of the day. Mr. Hamo Thorneycroft, R.A., writes me to say that "While the moulds were being made Her Majesty removed all the rings from her fingers except the wedding ring. This she was most anxious should not come off, and was in considerable fear lest the moulding process might remove it."
[The original drawings of the illustrations in this Magazine are always on view, and on sale, in the Art Gallery at these offices, which is open to the public without charge.]