The Wounded Amazon
Gibson’s Wounded Amazon is a poem in marble, but how many of its admirers would ever suspect the grotesque suggestiveness of which it was the outgrowth? “Yes,” said Gibson to a friend who went to his studio to see the statue in clay, “I call it a Wounded Amazon, but that statue is a proof of how useful it is for an artist to keep his eyes open. Now, how do you think I found that pose? I was going along the street, and I found a girl catching a flea. Yes, I did; she was catching a flea! I stopped and said to myself, ‘That’s a pretty pose—a very pretty pose indeed,’ and I took it down. Then I thought it over; I sat up and worked it out, and there it stands now as my Wounded Amazon. But it is the very pose of the girl catching the flea, nevertheless. A very pretty pose it is, you see; and, as I said, it shows that an artist must not fail to keep his eyes always open.”