From Stone to Life
William Calder Marshall, RA
1877
Marble
Source: the 1878 Magazine of Art
The magazine’s commentator explains, “Pygmalion has cast aside mallet and chisel as the marble on which he has wrought so long, the child of his brain, wakes to life in answer to his prayer. The eyes have all the dreamy, far-looking forecast of the babe; the limbs, formed and shapely, seem in their motion to feel as yet all childhood’s dread of peril; but under all one can see the dawn of self-consciousness in the woman. Mr. Calder Marshall recalls in this admirable statue, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1877, the lines of Wordsworth;—
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
Tlie soul that rises with us, our life’s star.
Hath had elsewhere its setting.
And cometh from afar.”
Other Versions of Pygmalion
