Captured emotion in bronze

Gustavs Šķilters (1903) was an active graphic artist working in etching and watercolour and wrote poetry, yet in Latvian art he is predominantly noted as one of the establishers of the Latvian national school of sculpture.

Having learned the principles of Auguste Rodin's school of Paris, in his oeuvre Šķilters modernised the academic approach to depicting the human body.

He retained a link with sensorial reality, yet through the use of form and texture imbued his works with greater psychological depth, emotional tension and symbolic mysteriousness.

Such psychological content was also given to the nude figure of the crying child, which has been given the fragment of the Latvian folk song Maziņš biju, neredzēju neredzēju [I Was Too Small to See] as title.

The sadness of loss and the longing of the child who is crying on the gravestone is expressed without unnecessary gestures, using the plasticity of the naked body to let viewers marvel at its beauty as well as giving a sense of fragility.

The impressionistically softened texture of the stone and the ground contrasts with the boy's smoothly-modelled skin, yet again underlining the conflict between brute matter and the fragile soul.