Yale Center for British Art
Hiram Powers, Greek Slave, 1847, marble, Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey, Gift of Franklin Murphy, Jr., 1926
The mid-19th century Victorians idealized ancient Greece so much that even their elegant, white marble Greek Slave (pictured) seems only a touch downcast. She even wears her chains with the lightness of a bracelet.
Near her, not three feet away stands the The American Slave, created 11 years later in the heat of the Civil War: She’s made of bronze, and her chains hang heavy and industrial from her wrists. Her feet even stand on a shell-strewn sea shore where she awaits the horrors of the Middle Passage.
George Frampton, Dame Alice Owen (detail), 1897, marble, alabaster, and bronze, Dame Alice Owen’s School, Potter’s Bar, Hertfordshire
That dramatic contrast – and how art, particularly sculpture, can proclaim an empire’s achievements while also highlighting its deep moral failings – emerges in a new exhibition, Sculpture Victorious, Art In An Age Of Invention, 1837 – 1901.
The revealing show of monumental sculptures, portrait busts, fabulous jewelry from the age of Queen Victoria includes many items that have never left British shores until now. Co-organized with Tate Britain, the show debuts at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) Thursday and runs until Nov. 30.
Click here for a more detailed overview of the exhibition.
In our image-laden era when states and state “actors” use grand and sometimes grisly graphics on the new social media to proclaim identity and power, it’s instructive to see how the Victorians did it with the old-fashioned media of stone and metal and the collaboration of artists, craftsmen, and the most high-tech manufacturers.
One of the show’s themes is the “crucial role sculpture plays in national British history, sculpture everywhere, British businesses and homes,” said Jason Edwards, a professor of art history at the University of York and one of the curators, during a press tour of the show on Tuesday in the run-up to the Thursday opening.
Credit: Anton Scharff, Medallion Commemorating Queen Victoria’s Jubilee of 1887, 1887, bronze, probably cast from the original full-size model, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Franklin B. Lord, 1906, © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY
While the most arresting objects in the exhibition are the many large statues and busts that occupied prominent public locales, Edwards said that more modest-sized images, for example cute mantle-piece busts of Queen Victoria or in forms such as medallions (pictured), sat in every British office — certainly the financial ones — as well as middle-class homes.
With plaster casts of the marbles from the Parthenon and other long ago eras, the Victorians, so the exhibition instructs us, also tried to embrace all of history’s eras showing, of course, how the British Empire of Victoria’s time has boldly risen as the new pinnacle.
Even when the 19th century figures, such as Dame Alice Owen (pictured), a prominent school mistress, are portrayed in medieval or Elizabethan collars, the bronze of her bodice is worked with metallurgical techniques that were the most high tech of the era.
One of the most imposing statues is Saher de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, by James Sherwood Westmacott. He was one of the 12 medieval barons who successfully urged England’s King John to sign the Magna Carta. This life-size statue in impressive chain mail and bearing a scary battle axe — alas, no image was permitted to be printed in this paper — normally hangs with his 11 brother barons 25 feet up in the House of Lords; it has never left home, until now.
It’s a coup that the YCBA has brought him to New Haven where he stands now guarding the entryway to the exhibit. “My heart went pitter-patter” when the statue was unpacked and stood up, said Michael Hatt, a professor of art history at the University of Warwick and another of the exhibition’s organizers.
William Reynolds-Stephens, A Royal Game (detail), 1906-11, electrotyped bron7.e and wood, stone,abalone, and glass, © Tate, London 2014
He pointed out that while the statue is wholly idealized and imaginary for the era, the baron’s attire has been created through an electrotyping process. That is, a zinc statue with a thin coating of copper, the latest technology of the Victorian era.
“Victorians don’t just reproduce the ancient cultures, they emulate it [in order] to produce something for the modern world,” Hatt added.
But of the all the cultures and eras admired, celebrated, and respectfully surpassed by the Victorians (hubris alert, America?), the curators suggested they admired ancient Greece most of all.
The Victorians idolized it, said Hatt, conceiving of it as “full of beautiful bodies and lovely weather.”
That’s why The American Slave, by John Bell, which was shown in the London International Exhibition of 1862, stood as a “riposte” to Hiram Powers’s white marble statue, said the Center’s Curator of Sculpture, Martina Droth, the third of the exhibition curators.
Edward Bowring Stephens, after John Gibson, produced by Copeland & Garrett for the Art Union of London, Narcissus, 1846, Parian porcelain, Collection of Stephen Parks
One of the pleasures of the exhibition — and the hindsight that is art history — is the creation of these evocative groupings that never in fact took place in their time.
The Yale University Art Gallery has its own version of of Powers’s Greek Slave on display in the American wing, but it was in too fragile condition to move even across the street.
