Monumental
Marc Jordan
Victorian Sculpture Benedict Read (Yale, published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art £30) ("N ne photograph in Benedict Read's V superbly illustrated new book is par- ticularly eloquent about modern attitudes to Victorian sculpture. Wellington sculpted by Matthew Noble in frock coat and trousers, looking like one of Baudelaire's `croque-morts', and flanked by bronze per- sonifications of War and Peace looks down sternly on Piccadilly, Manchester. His feet are a good 20 feet from the ground. I wonder how many shoppers stop to look up and ask who he was or who fashioned his image? Their attention is more likely to be caught by the spray painted slogan at eye level `M.C.F.C. Rules OK ' — autres temps, autres heros.
Other photographs witness the neglect of the 19th-century's national and municipal heroes whose immortality in bronze and marble has often been shortlived. Most stay put, irrelevant to the life below. Some have been moved on from plum sites in civic centres to dank municipal parks. Others, acquiring unexpected symbolic potency in a post-colonial age have, like J. H. Foley's equestrian statue of Viscount Hardinge in Calcutta, been quietly dismantled and put into store. Yet others, less lucky, have gone out with a bang. Foley's Viscount Gough in Dublin was the victim of IRA bombers. With their well- known sensitivity, Read tells us, they placed their explosives so as to bring the statue down without completely. destroying it. Gough's body is now in a yard at the Dublin Works Depot. His head is kept separately in a cupboard.
These pompous memorials to the living or the recently dead were the most prestigious and lucrative commissions that a Victorian sculptor could hope for. The two grandest are the outrageous High Vic- torian Albert Memorial (a collaborative ef- fort between the architect Gilbert Scott, the ubiquitous Irish sculptor Foley and several lesser hands) and the Victorian Memorial outside Buckingham Palace, the 'supreme achievement' of the French-influenced `New Sculpture' of the end of the century, and again a collaboration between an ar- chitect (Sir Aston Webb) and a sculptor (Sir Thomas Brock). The most interesting and controversial, the Wellington Memorial in St Paul's (designed in 1856 but not com- pleted until 1912), is by Alfred Stevens, an artist who (like Watts and Leighton) though chiefly a painter made a major contribution to British sculpture.
But this sort of commission was the icing on the cake and as always with British art small-scale portraiture was the bread and butter. As Victorian Sculpture reveals, many superb portrait busts were produced in a period which, for most of us, is a murky blank between Chantrey and Eps- tein. Thomas Woolner's boldly modelled and forceful 'Tennyson' and Baron
Marochetti's polychromed 'Princess Gouramma of Coorg' from the beginning of the period and Alfred Gilbert's striking and original bronze of Dr Hunter and Onslow Ford's wearily grand 'Queen Vic- toria' from the end of the century show that certain artists had a high degree of psychological penetration or were prepared to experiment outside the conventions.
If a monumental public commission was what the ambitious sculptor was after, with a good portrait practice to keep his studio busy, he still yearned to make ideal works, which he thought of as the highest branch of his art. This meant, for the most part, nude or semi-nude human figures singly or in groups with titles from mythology or literature, or at any rate going under the names of abstractions like 'Charity' or `Motherhood' or `Physical Energy'. The prevailing aesthetic demanded adherence to the great Classical tradition of High Art (what else for High Victorians? Gothic sculpture was almost exclusively confined to architectural schemes). Imaginative sub- jects from modern life like Woolner's 'The Housemaid' and Thornycroft's 'The Mower' were very rare and as limited in their realism as a Pre-Raphaelite painting.
Here Mr Read comes into his own, writing with a clarity which sometimes
escapes him elsewhere in this book. Unlike many enthusiasts he knows that the donnees of his subject are likely to be obscure to the rest of us. His account of the worlds of Victorian patronage and exhibi- tions, of the training of sculptors and the stages and techniques involved in the realisation of a statue like John Bell's 'Eagleslayer' or Woolner's 'The Lord's Prayer' will be essential background for a revaluation of Victorian sculpture.
A major ideal work, for instance, might begin with innumerable drawings followed by small 'sketches' in wax or clay. Then there would be a full-size clay model (which brought its own problems; one unfortunate artist working on a group for the Albert Memorial apparently developed a fatal pleurisy from working for hours sitting on the wet clay limbs of the principal female figure). From the clay a white plaster `original' model was cast. The heavy cost of marble or casting in bronze meant that unless it was a commissioned work the sculptor could go no further until he had found a patron. This was usually done by exhibiting the plaster at the Royal AcademY under conditions which were, Mr Read tells us, cramped and crowded for most of the century until Lord Leighton's enlightened presidency. All this took time and a work could be in the making for many years. Bell's `Eagleslayer was first shown in plaster at the R.A. in 1837, then at Westminster Hall in 1844 in a marble ver- sion for Lord Fitzwilliam and at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in bronze and iron ver- sions. Inevitably many promising works never found patrons to pay for the transfer to a durable material and over the years the plaster models have been lost or broken LIP. Survivals like Foley's plaster for 'Youth at the Stream' at the Royal Dublin Society are rare.
As a pioneer in the serious study of Vic- torian sculpture Benedict Read obviously feels under a certain obligation to gather as much factual information as he can bet; ween the covers of his book. Accurate 'lists (attributions, dates, locations, versions) are of course essential before criticism can begin. But even the great list-maker Beren- son used appendices to manage his raw material. At times Mr Read shows a cons- cientious reluctance to part with any of the hard-won fruits of his research. The result is an opacity in certain parts of Victorian Sculpture where sentences are peppered with sub-clauses and parentheses until the meaning disappears. More editing could easily have banished a lot of information to the back of the book and made room for the comparative and evaluative judgments which Mr Read is too modest or possibly too cautious to deliver. I can see from the excellent photographs (many of them taken during the time Benedict Read was in charge of the 19th-century section of the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute) that certain bright stars, Foley, Woolner, Gilbert, Boehm and Ford for instance, stand out from a mass of competent but dull artists, but I would like to have known how Mr Read rates them. And most readers will want to know how he sees them in rela- tion to their European, particularly their French contemporaries. But despite these reservations Victorian Sculpture can be described without irony as a monumental work not likely to be superseded as an in- troduction to its subject.
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