awkward statue, it aimed to reproduce exactly the body of his model, a Pompeiian named Antonio. It eschewed traditional compositional rules and the standard techniques sculptors used to pose and to render human bodies. Thomas deliberately made the work resistant to interpretation of its symbolism, gesture, or expressivity. Norman Douglas claimed to have suggested the name to Thomas so as to "convey no definite suggestion; he wanted something vague and yet distinguished. I hit upon Lycidas because it belonged to three or four persons in antiquity, none of any great importance." The statue was both unorthodox and rigorously Classical. It created a scandal when it was rejected by the Royal Academy in 1905. The sculptor Hamo Thornycroft — a contemporary of Thomas's and a long-standing academician whose innovations of the 1880s had calcified into a conservative narrowness by the twentieth century — was most likely instrumental in the statue's rejection. One newspaper described the rejection as "one of the most scandalous infringements of [the Royal Academy's] public duty of which they have ever been convicted." Lycidas was instead shown at the New Gallery in London and became a symbol of the renewed desire to reform the Royal Academy. This cemented Thomas's reputation as an alternative to the Academy, leading in a few years to his invitation to teach sculpture at the Slade School of Art in 1911 and being named as its first Chair of Sculpture in 1914. Thomas was instrumental in teaching a generation of women sculptors working with direct carving: at the Slade his students included Dora Clarke, H. W. Palliser, and Ursula Edgcumbe. Thomas' 1916 marble statue of Boudica for Cardiff City Hall was hailed as 'a masterpiece of modern sculpture' and 'a thing of extraordinary beuaty' by the Architectural Review. Thomas was an important foundation for the development of modernism in British sculpture, and his work contributed to the interest in direct carving and to the break with the expectations of the statuary tradition. Jacob Epstein, for instance, sought out Thomas soon after he moved to England. Roger Fry purchased a relief sculpture for the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and Michael Sadler purchased versions of Lycidas for Manchester and for the Tate. Though overlooked today, Thomas was a significant player in the debates around sculptural representation and the modernization of the Classical tradition in the early twentieth century. Bibliography Clausen, George. "James Havard Thomas." In