Willow Tree

The Byrds famously sang, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven.” (And of course, Pete Seeger sang it and the Bible said it before them.) Beautifully carved figurative sculptures can help people commemorate every season and special time in their lives. To understand how they work, it might be helpful to turn to literature. One of the most beautiful—and, at bottom, saddest—poems in the English language is “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats. Most people probably know its famous conclusion: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The “beauty” that he is talking about is the figures painted on the titular urn. They are frozen in time far above “all breathing human passion… That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d.” Figurative sculptures and figurine ornaments work in a similar way. They are not completely detached from all feeling and experience, though. In fact, the exact opposite is true—...

Carved figures , figurines and figurative sculptures may seem unremarkable. However, what matters is not so much these gifts in themselves as what they represent to the people who have them. There is a passage in Marcel Proust’s great novel In Search of Lost Time in which the narrator dips a small, soft biscuit known as a madeleine into tea and bites into it. As soon as he does, he feels a wave of emotions and memories wash over him. It is a truly wonderful bit of writing—indeed, it is one of the most famous passages in all of world literature. It is all the more extraordinary when one considers that it hinges on such a tiny thing. “For some who have tasted a madeleine,” writes Fine Dining Lovers contributor James Brennan, “it may come as a surprise that something so simple – and, admittedly, so plain – could trigger such a gushing deluge of memories that would fill seven long and ponderous volumes.” Figurines and figurative sculpture scan do something similar. They can s...