Another Sculpted Figure: Beyond Introspection

 

 

When I first saw this seated figure at Waterperry Gardens recently, when visiting with my wife and two old friends,  I knew nothing of its sculptor and still less about the subject. It was simply one of those discoveries that gardens occasionally reward: an object not placed on display so much as encountered unexpectedly. There was no dramatic revelation. The sculpture simply inhabits its place, asking no more of the visitor than a willingness to pause.

I researched a little. I learned that the piece   was Seated Figure (Meditation) by the Anglo-Israeli sculptor Nathan David (1930–2017). Born in London, he first worked in commercial art before dedicating himself to sculpture. Later, living in Israel, he developed a distinctive figurative style that won international recognition. He became particularly admired for his sculptures of dancers—Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev and Anthony Dowell among them—capturing movement with extraordinary grace. Alongside  these works Nathan David also made figures sculpted in repose, where expression arises not from action but from stillness.

Some years ago I attended and wrote about a talk about  Waterperry entitled A Year Behind the Scenes. [ See here : opens in new tab – accessed July 19^th 2026]. The Head Gardener, Rob Jacobs, spoke not only about the many spectacular displays but also about the patient work that sustains them: pruning fruit trees in winter, propagating plants for seasons yet to come, staking, dividing, dead-heading, nurturing young growth and accepting inevitable losses. What visitors admire for an afternoon is the visible outcome of countless hours of attentive labour carried out throughout the year.

Gardening demands a particular way of seeing. It cannot be hurried by enthusiasm or improved by impatience. The gardener learns to observe, to wait, to respond.  

So  Nathan David's Meditation seems  entirely at home at Waterperry. The sculpture is not merely situated within the garden; it participates in the same discipline. The figure asks for nothing dramatic. Its hands rest quietly together. Its posture is balanced but alert. It possesses no narrative, no symbolic attributes, no obvious story. Instead, it quietly embodies the same qualities upon which the garden itself depends - patience, receptivity and sustained attention.

The reason I am writing this now, is that   before I knew either the title or the artist's name, I had already sensed that this figure belonged to the same family as the Spong Man and Barlach's Lesender Klosterschuler, the subject of a recent entry [ here ] of this miscellany.  I find now,  in this light of gardening as attention, a relationship between the three sculptures begins to emerge

The Spong Man appears enclosed within himself. After  the uncertainties of post-Roman Britain, he remains mysterious, his folded posture suggesting an inner life which history will leave behind.

Barlach's Lesender Klosterschuler introduces another dimension. Here inwardness is nourished by reading, reflection and discipline. His bowed head is directed towards something beyond himself. The book becomes both object and companion, suggesting that contemplation is cultivated rather than merely experienced.

Nathan David's Meditation takes another step. There is no book. No explicit object of attention. The figure is simply present. It neither withdraws from the world nor engages with it actively. Instead, it inhabits a state of attentive stillness, perfectly suited to the quiet life of the garden that surrounds it. So here with the Waterperry sculpture , we have  something more, beyond introspection.

The Spong Man is introspective. Barlach's monk is contemplative. Nathan David's  Seated Figure (Meditation) suggests something gentler still: not looking into oneself but looking upon the world with patient openness. Perhaps the better word is attention.

Attention is being  present to what is before us without immediately seeking to possess, classify or explain it. Some truths disclose themselves if we are  willing to linger.

 

T.S. Eliot's Back Pages

I am reading a recently published  book by Paul Keers called 'A Lifetime of Old Age'. It is a study of the many references to 'age' in his poems . Prufrock - 'I grow old ', Gerontion, Tiresias, Ash Wednesday’s aged eagle, the Magi contemplating ‘All this was a long time ago’, Simeon  and many others.

Reading it, I recall how  later in life Eliot  was happily married. His second wife Valerie is known to have said that all his life 'the little boy in him' was trying to get out, and that his marriage to her for the last few years of his life allowed that to happen. ( See for example Sarah Begley’s 2016 obituary‑essay in TIME , and Aida Edemariam’s profile of Valerie Eliot in The Guardian (2012) - both open in new tab).

I think of the song 'My Back Pages' by Bob Dylan, with its refrain ‘I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now’.   The song appeared in 1964, only a year before Eliot died. 

Dylan’s verses about 'abstract threats / too noble to neglect,' about defining good and bad 'quite clear, no doubt, somehow,' could have been written for the  Eliot of masks, of high seriousness and of spiritual vigilance. The Eliot who lived behind a wall of refinement, who felt  he had 'something to protect', when deciding for example that his faith precluded any notion of divorce from his first wife Vivienne. And for example, after years of a declared spiritual and emotional connection to Emily Hale,  he could not marry her either. And yet the man Valerie describes — drinking Drambuie, playing Scrabble, leaving her weekly love letters — seems to have stepped out of those old pages entirely.

Whether he ever heard the song seems unlikely, though not impossible. It is pleasant to imagine someone playing it to him, if only to watch the faint smile of recognition.

Audio here: 

Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin’ high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud ’neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Full Lyrics here: 

A Little Greek, a Little Curiosity, and a Rejected Stone

 I was nudged into this little exploration by a recent episode of Daily Dose of Greek. I follow these episodes more out of curiosity than any claim to scholarly expertise. I enjoy seeing how familiar Biblical passages have come to us. The Daily Dose of Greek is exactly that – a study each day of a single  Biblical verse, examined expertly in a 2-minute dose of grammatical study, with incidental theological pointers.

 Daily Dose of Greek - Sample 

The passage under discussion was Matthew 21:42, where Jesus quotes Psalm 118 and speaks of ‘the stone the builders rejected’ becoming the cornerstone. The commentary on this phrase —κεφαλὴ γωνίας—sent me down one of those gentle rabbit holes that Biblical study often opens up.

 I often ask myself why I spend time poking around in old Greek words, but for me it’s simply an adventure. The Bible is full of layers. Of course it is, and sometimes a small detail turns out to be a surprisingly rich one.

In this episode we encounter  Matthew’s report of  Jesus’  use of Psalm 118:22–23.  The phrase Jesus quotes can mean either ‘cornerstone’ or ‘capstone.’  That is, the meaning can reflect the first stone laid—the foundation that sets the alignment of the whole building. Or it might be the last stone —the keystone that completes an arch and reveals the building’s final form. That ambiguity, far from being a trivial detail, turns out to be a doorway  into an intriguing architectural metaphor.

So,  the cornerstone was the first stone set in place, the one that determined the orientation and stability of the entire structure. Everything else took its line from that initial act of placement. When Jesus invokes Psalm 118, he is drawing on this logic: God’s new work begins with a stone that human builders have dismissed. The rejected stone becomes the point of origin, the fixed reference by which everything follows. Early Christians instinctively reached for this image when they spoke of Christ as the foundation of the new community. In this logic, Christ is the stone upon whom all other stones depend for coherence and direction.

Yet the phrase in Hebrew can also refer to the capstone—the keystone that crowns an arch or completes a building—and this ambiguity is not incidental. It is one of the reasons Psalm 118:22 has attracted such sustained attention from biblical scholars. And here I had to dig around for references, encouraged by the Daily Dose and a few searches into the material. Here they are:

1. The Hebrew rosh pinnāh, as commentators from Hermann Gunkel to Hans‑Joachim Kraus have pointed out, can signify either the foundational stone set first or the topmost stone set last. The Greek translators of the Septuagint preserved this duality with the phrase κεφαλὴ γωνίας, “head of the corner,” which in Koine Greek can equally denote the chief cornerstone or the keystone at the apex.

2. Modern scholars such as R.T. France and Ulrich Luz note that Matthew’s use of the phrase deliberately keeps both possibilities alive, allowing Jesus’ words to resonate with both architectural images at once. This is not just a linguistic curiosity. It means the rejected stone becomes not only the foundation of God’s new work but also its crowning element. Because of this, the capstone reading has become an important strand in Christian interpretation. It allows the image to speak of completion, fulfilment, and the moment when the building’s true shape becomes visible.

3. Scholars such as Richard Bauckham and Craig Evans have shown how Second Temple Jewish traditions already associated the “stone” motif with both humiliation and vindication, and how early Christians drew on this duality to express the paradox of Christ’s story: the one rejected by the builders becomes the one raised above all others..

So, this is quite an  image. The  same stone is both the first and the last, both the grounding and the completion of God’s new creation. The one cast aside becomes the decisive element at both ends of the structure. This duality mirrors the idea of  Christ as Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the root and the offspring of David. The architectural metaphor becomes a way of holding together how life in the Spirit begins in him and ends in him.  The stone becomes a representation of those layers of meaning

I don’t pretend to have exhausted the meaning of this image, or to have reached the bottom of it. But it’s enjoyable and rewarding to  follow such threads, and I’m struck again by how a single phrase—one stone—can carry so much history, imagination, and theological possibility.