*KISS, AUGUSTUS, an eminent German sculptor, was born in 1802 at Pleas in Upper Silesia. Having completed his professional studies under Rauch—whose studio he entered in 1824—he for several years executed with much local success statues and groups of the ordinary order of classical subjects; at first, as is customary among German artists, from the designs of Rauch, Schinkel, and others, and subsequently from his own. It was not till the completion of his colossal group of the Amazon attacked by a Tiger' (the model of which was finished in 1839—it was cast in bronze by a public subscrip tion some years later) that his fame spread beyond Germany. That work has of late made the name of Kiss well-known in this country, a zinc cast of it, carefully bronzed after the original, having formed one of the most noticeable features of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Kiss
has slum executed a still more vast group of `St. George and the Dragon,' which at the French Exposition of 1855 occupied as promi nent a place as did the Amazon' in the English Exhibition. But the 'St. George and the Dragon' met with much severer criticism than its predecessor ; and generally it perhaps would not be too much to say that Kiss is more highly esteemed iu Berlin—where he is professor of sculpture in the Royal Academy—than elsewhere. It is impossible to deny that his works exhibit considerable knowledge, great elevation of style, immense vigour, and much skill in modelling, but we should hesitate to admit the presence of the higher exertions of mental power, or refined feeling. He is unquestionably a sculptor of a very high, but not, as has been somewhat rashly affirmed, of the highest order.