Figure 1 – Walker Hancock Figure from the Triton Fountain, Gloucester, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2020.

I love photographing sculpture! The kind of sculpture of Figure 1 lends itself to warm subtle sepia tone and you can play for hours gently coaxing specific area to perfect highlight. . So I was delighted to find this one-third-scale version of one of the triton figures figures by Walker Hancock (1901-1998) from the now destroyed Triton Fountain at the 1939 New York World’s Fair at Elizabeth Gordon Smith Park, along the waterfront at Gloucester, Massachusetts. The original was plaster of Paris and I am wondering with this one is really bronze. This was taken on a gloomy day; so the light was very even and filling. I liked this because the whole figure was well defined and I could work out the highlights carefully. And then there was the final reward of duo toning a rich chocolate color.

I will, of course, not hesitate to mention the way art gives us permission to welcome the mythic Greek and Roman figures back into our imagine reality. It is as if they never left us and we are immediately swept up into their pageantry of inner meaning.