the ethics of making craft and english sculptural aesthetics c. 1851 1900

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The Ethics of Making: Craft and English Sculptural Aesthetics c. 1851-1900 Author(s): Martina Droth Source: Journal of Design History, Vol. 17, No. 3, Dangerous Liaisons: Relationships between

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Journal of Design History Vol. 17 No. 3 ? 2004 The Design History Society. All rights reserved

The Ethics of Making Craft and English Sculptural Aesthetics c. 1851-1900

Martina Droth

The emergence in Britain in the 1880s of a new sculptural aesthetic that incorporated ornament, colour and craft-based modes of production signalled a radical departure from the austere, controlled appearance of the neoclassical sculptures that dominated the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet the decorative character of the New Sculpture and its intersections with debates associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement have also complicated its position in the history of sculpture. It is more readily absorbed into the discourse defined by craft reform than treated as a distinct sculptural phenomenon. This paper explores the divergence in visual and practical approaches that developed in sculpture- making between the first and second halves of the nineteenth century, and suggests that the deliberate fusion between decorative and sculptural qualities that emerged in the 1880s signalled not so much an attempt to align sculpture with craft, decoration and design, as a desire to reformulate the ways that sculptural aesthetics could be expressed and interpreted.

Keywords: Arts and Crafts Movement-Ford, Edward Onslow-Gibson, John-Great Exhibition-nineteenth century-sculpture

Introduction

Where . . . almost all English sculptors of today differ from sculptors of other countries, is in their close connection with the arts and crafts . . . under all circumstances, a decorative tendency governs their compositions.1

Writing in a German journal in 1903, the architect and theorist Hermann Muthesius identified a 'cult of the decorative' emerging in a specifically English sculptural aesthetic that had its roots in traditional crafts practices. Muthesius was describing a remark- able moment in English sculpture when the habitual hierarchies between fine and decorative art seemed to be dissolving. From the 1880s into the early twentieth century, sculpture in England was dominated by works that liberally mixed figurative conceptions with an eclectic repertoire of ornamental forms and materials. Characterized by a preference for metal over marble, an emphasis on modelling and casting instead of carving, and the introduction of polychromy through enamelling, patination, mixed

metals and coloured stones, this 'New Sculpture' drew on elements more typically identified with decorative art.2 A work such as Edward Onslow Ford's statuette The Singer (1889) clearly illustrates this aesthetic: drawing on an Egyptian motif for decorative effect, the nude figure of a young girl, cast in bronze and patinated to a green tone, is dressed in Pharaonic accessories, and embellished with gilded highlights, semi-precious stones and coloured resin paste [1]. Yet while such a playful, craft-orientated approach seemed deliberately to blur the distinction between sculptural and decorative qualities, the New Sculpture was nonetheless exhibited and criticized within the parameters of fine-art aesthetics, with its key figures, including Ford, Alfred Gilbert, Harry Bates, Frederick W. Pomeroy and George Frampton, accepted into the fold of the Royal Academy.3

For Muthesius, the New Sculpture categorically 'had its origins in the arts and crafts'.4 Although Muthesius's view must be seen in the light of the Deutscher Werkbund and the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Germany,5 it is also true

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that English sculptors engaged in certain issues cen- tral to crafts reform. Conscious of artists' alienation in modern systems of manufacturing, they took sculpture-making back into the studio-implicitly renouncing mass-production, division of labour and the devaluation of traditional working practices, while reasserting the importance of sculptors' direct involvement with the processes and materials of their art. Athough the New Sculpture was thus clearly seen to feed into important social and political debates around the ethics of making, it cannot, however, be understood solely as a reactionary development that sprang from a disaffection with industrialization. Sculptors did not reject industry outright, either from a moral standpoint or on a practical basis but, rather, intuitively understood that irreversible changes affecting art production had to be acknow- ledged and to some extent accommodated within their practice. Not only did they selectively borrow industrial techniques and materials (for example, aluminium, sand-casting, electro-plating), they took an active stake in the new consumer markets that were opening up to sculpture, by focusing on smaller, 'domestic' formats that could more easily be accommodated into ordinary middle-class homes. Although the production of life-size statuary and monuments by no means ceased, statuettes and smaller-scale groups became a significant hallmark of the New Sculpture.6 Adaptable in scale, varied and ornate in appearance, this domestic form of sculpture effectively took the consumer-friendly formula of commercial art, while competing on the basis of quality and craftsmanship as a luxurious and more seriously artistic alternative to mass-produced ornaments.7

Industrialization represented at least in part an inspiration to sculptors in that it offered an opportun- ity to reconfigure the parameters defining their discipline. Following a period of strict containment in the earlier part of the century, when sculpture was identified largely with classicizing principles, broader influences began to permeate its parameters, setting out new aesthetic preferences that opened up the critical discourse through which sculpture was perceived, articulated and described. By employing forms and characters drawn from decorative arts and

Fig 1. Edward Onslow Ford, 'The Egyptian Singer', bronze, semi-precious stones, resin paste, 1889

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The Ethics of Making: Craft and English Sculptural Aesthetics c.1851-1900

crafts, sculpture in the late nineteenth century began to be redefined on different terms. Unlike neoclassical sculpture, which operated within a rarefied, self- contained sphere, insulated by a narrowly-defined aesthetic reference system that underlined its separateness from the world, the New Sculpture reached outside conventional boundaries and actively engaged with the material world, thus addressing, rather than staying aloof from, contemporaneous political and critical issues affecting art practice.

The following pages explore a transition in the history of sculpture in Britain, when the evaluation of sculptural objects began to be voiced in new terms that placed materials and making at the centre of aesthetics-a shift in focus that allowed sculpture to operate outside the classicizing sculptural paradigm. This paper argues that the inclusion of decorative references in sculpture points to a complex reaction not so much against industrialization as against neoclassical conservatism and its denial of the contemporary material reality that connected sculpture to the modem world.

Making neoclassical sculpture

Beginning very early in life the habit of constant and daily labour in the studio, the sculptor is very apt to grow only into the highly dextrous workman, the very facility of whose hand often prevents his duly realizing the extent to which, for his work to be of value, that hand should be constantly guided by a highly cultivated imagination.8

Matthew Digby Wyatt's comment, published in 1870, illustrates that debates about the sculptor's status, as mason or 'workman' on the one hand, and as an artist of 'cultivated imagination' on the other, were very much alive throughout the nineteenth century. Although such debates were sometimes articulated at a quite basic level, with an often naive and generalized understanding of studio-practice, the hierarchic distinctions they pointed to were very real issues within sculptural practice.9 These debates continued throughout the nineteenth century but, as we shall see, underwent a subtle shift in emphasis in the later decades, when earlier attempts to distance the conceptual side of sculpture (the work of the 'imagination') from the manual 'labour' of sculpting, by physically divorcing the two activities in the studio, increasingly gave way to a conscious

undertaking to link making with thinking, by elevating the craft of sculpture-making as a creative en- deavour.10

Neoclassical sculpture, like later forms of sculpture, was closely tied to the studio, but the processes that took place there were carefully negotiated, finely balancing the physical requirements of sculpture as a thing that is made from raw materials with its status as an intellectual expression of the classical tradition. The idea that sculptural beauty should transcend its material reality underpinned both its actual procedures and the ways in which it was presented to the world. Sculptors kept a certain distance from the physical activities required to make statues, articulat- ing the material implications of their work only insofar as they were embedded etymologically in the overall classicizing framework by which sculpture was defined. The sheer labour and logistics involved in producing marble sculptures (extracting the stone from the quarry, its transportation to the studio, hewing the block into sculptural form) were largely peripheral to the projected image of neoclassical art and expressed only in reductive terms, obscuring the origins of marble, the reality of the quarry, behind the intellectual associations of the sculptures with anti- quity and the Renaissance.

The studios of well-known sculptors such as Canova, Thorvaldsen and Gibson were important visitor-attractions in the early nineteenth century, and were widely documented in published accounts, drawings and paintings. Ostensibly private, yet in effect very public, the studio provided an arena in which sculpture and its processes were staged and performed. These accounts and visual records suggest that it was widely known and indeed expected that much of the labour of sculpture-making be delegated to assistants and pupils, and carried out in workshops attached to the studio. Established sculptors running busy ateliers often took in significant numbers of pupils and assistants, many of them aspiring sculptors themselves; the young John Gibson, for example, began his career under Anto- nio Canova's charge, before, as we shall see, matur- ing to become one of England's most renowned exponents of late neoclassical sculpture. In Francesco Chiaruttini's drawing of Canova's Studio (1786), we see the master's pupils diligently copying large statues in marble, their work conducted openly in front of visitors [2].11

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Fig 2. Francesco Chiaruttini, Canova's Studio, pen and wash drawing, 1786

Sculptors were understood and seen to limit their involvement to a series of specific tasks: principally to the initial sketch or bozzetto, and to the final finishing of the statue's surfaces.12 The intermediary stages required to work up the model to a near-complete statue-work not finally visible in the external surfaces-were largely regarded as 'mechanical copying',13 and the employment of hands other than the artist's own was not considered a breach in the sculptor's engagement with the work.14 These notions gained in momentum in the late neoclassical period, with generations of sculptors who came after Canova, such as the American sculptor Harriet Hosmer, an erstwhile pupil of John Gibson. She wrote unequivocally about the status of the sculptor as being above that of the workman:

those who look upon sculpture as an intellectual art, requiring the exercise of taste, imagination, and delicate feeling, will never identify the artist who conceives, com- poses, and completes the design with the workman who simply relieves him from great physical labor.15

The physical engagement of the 'master-hand' was considered necessary only in the drawings and boz- zetti that captured the conception (Eugene Plon described Thorvaldsen's clay sketches as 'the imprint of the thought which he had conceived'),16 and in the finishing of the sculpture's surface, which constituted the viewer's visual connection to the artist; as J. S. Memes observed of Canova's studio-practice: 'when its last superficies was to be formed-when all that finally meets the eye was to be created, the inspiring touches were trusted to the master-hand alone.'17

By thus underplaying the manual engagement of the hand, the artist's work was presented not so much as a physical carving-out of form than as a quasi- conceptual process: the imprint of thought, the application of inspiring touches.18 The emphasis on the skin or 'superficies' meant that neoclassical sculpture essentially communicated through an aesthetic veneer conceived almost independently from the mass beneath-the mass that, nonetheless, constituted

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The Ethics of Making: Craft and English Sculptural Aesthetics c. 1851-1900

the bulk of the sculpture and, indeed, the locus of its materiality, embodying the hard toil of the quarry, the sweating labour of the studio. This discontinu- ity-from mass to surface, body to skin, metaphorically mirrored in the smoothness of the marble- permeated all aspects of the neoclassical ideal. It extended to the sense of remoteness around the artists who, residing in Rome, were physically transposed from their individual origins into the metaphorical home of the classical tradition. In an industrially- changing, politically restless, and culturally diverse world, an influx of foreign sculptors-England's John Gibson, America's Harriet Hosmer, Denmark's Bertel Thorvaldsen, Germany's Emil Wolff-were united, regardless of nationality, by the timeless concept of the eternal city.

By the mid-nineteenth century, this determined separateness was visibly unravelling. As commercial interest in sculpture grew, a burgeoning middle class began to enjoy greater access to sculpture at home, where new means of production and consumption were rapidly evolving, often independently from artists. Manufacturers took sculpture out of the studio, systematized its production, and made it available through commercial outlets such as furni- ture retailers and department stores. Within the neoclassical school itself, the aura of rarity cultivated around sculpture also had to disintegrate. Its hier- archical, essentially aristocratic system of production and consumption, which involved, for English patrons, private studio visits to Rome and expensive transportation between Italy and England,19 was increasingly displaced by more consumer-friendly ways of acquiring sculpture.20 The studios of Rome began to cater for a kind of art-tourism, as sculptors organized their production to varying degrees around the consumer, turning out replicas that could be bought off the shelf without having to be specially commissioned, and offering smaller statuettes and busts that could be carried by hand rather than requiring shipping.

These developments were innately incompatible with neoclassical values; commerce, with its worldly connotation of materialistic desire, disrupted notions of intellectual and moral purity. Statuettes were thought to trivialize the notion of sublime, statuesque grandeur ('downright drawing room art', one critic wrote in 1854), while sculptors producing replicas were felt to 'degrade sculpture into a trade-their

studio into a shop'.21 Although many sculptors, including England's John Gibson, explored commercial avenues to a greater or lesser degree, it was important for their artistic credibility to uphold, at least publicly, an image of traditional practice. The biographer of Gibson's Life of 1870, for example, insisted that the sculptor's 'thoughts never travelled in the money-getting direction', and made a frank correlation between commercial restraint and moral purity: 'indifferent to money's worth', his was 'a pure and beautiful . . . life, without one dark corner to conceal-the very beau ideal of the artist-career'.22

Using commerce as a yardstick for measuring sculptors' status and artistic credibility inevitably opened up a gap between those who were seen to shun the temptations of commercial art and those who openly participated in it. While such a gap was intellectually accentuated, however, it was difficult to maintain practically with any integrity, and neoclassical sculpture found itself compromised between the intellectual ideals to which it aspired and the prosaic reality it inhabited. Ironically, it was its fixation with immaterial beauty, its lack of firm, material grounding, that would finally leave it fragile: with its aesthetic so ineradicably built on intellectual and moral ideals, the unravelling of this symbiosis threatened to leave it, shell-like, a stylistic convention.

Neoclassical sculpture at the Great Exhibition The tension between notions concerning neoclassical aesthetics and actual modes of sculptural practice was perhaps nowhere made more apparent than at the Great Exhibition of 1851. A showcase for the 'works of industry of all nations', the Exhibition provides us with an exceptional case-study for exploring the material contexts to which neoclassical sculpture was exposed in the middle of the nineteenth century. Celebrating the convergence between commerce and the plastic arts, it represented art-making at both the high and the low ends of the market, with sculptural objects that ranged from mass-produced 'Parian' and ceramic statuettes, zinc figures and electrotypes to more expensive bronze casts, gold and silver work, hand-carved ivory figurines and marble statues. Although many objects still emulated classicizing themes, the look and texture of sculpture was

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diversified through the prominence of statuettes and smaller-scale objects, an interest in polychromy, and a preference for materials other than marble, signalling that the life-size marble statue (although very much present as the envoy of the classical tradition) no longer exemplified contemporary tastes. Of the works shown in 1851, it was those pioneered outside the perimeters of neoclassicism that were to stamp a lasting influence on artistic directions in the ensuing decades. The varied exhibits of both the commercial producers and the more exclusive crafts workshops encompassed not only reproductions of works by well-known sculptors-James Pradier's Leda and Swan, for example, reproduced as an exquisite statuette in ivory, silver, turquoise and bronze by the goldsmith Emile Froment-Meurice [3]-but other types of objects not normally identified as sculpture, such as candelabra, vases or table-ware. This inter- mixing of objects and materials foreshadowed the aesthetic later adopted by the New Sculpture-an aesthetic which increasingly drew sculpture together with decorative art and design.

Placed in a context outside the sphere normally occupied by fine art (museums, private sculpture galleries, academic exhibitions), sculptures were treated as part of the industrial spectacle. While painting was specifically excluded from the Exhibi- tion, sculpture was regarded as an innate part of industry, an end product of raw materials 'connected with mechanical processes, which relate to working in metals, wood, or marble'."23 Here, the notion of reproduction, far from being read as a move to 'degrade sculpture into a trade', was supported as a vehicle for 'the diffusion of good taste'. The capacity for mass-producing sculptures commercially raised utopian hopes about the educational benefits that would be spread through society:

By the . . . adaptation of cheap materials and economical processes to the multiplication of works of art, the best models are daily brought more and more within the reach of all classes. New and pure sources of enjoyment, hitherto the privilege of the few, are thus opened to all the members of civilized society.24

The Exhibition reveals a neoclassical school torn between its commitment to intellectual principles on the one hand, and a desire to take a share in emergent aesthetics and in new commercial opportunities on the other. Thus, while John Gibson's life-size marble

Fig 3. Emile Froment-Meurice and James Pradier, Leda and Swan, 66 cm high, ivory, gold, silver, turquoise, bronze, socle in grey marble, 1849

group Hunter and Dog (sometimes also known as The Greek Hunter [4] attracted acclaim in the sculpture court ('a lively and imaginative conception . . . combined with an exquisite feeling for harmony of lines'),25 much less noticeable were the miniaturized copies of his statues in Parian porcelain, mass-produced by the commercial ceramic firm Copeland [5].26 Other neoclassicists were similarly represented: John Bell's marble Dorothea adapted for a light-fitting by Winfield of Birmingham,27 and his Eagle Slayer cast in iron by Coalbrookdale; Thorvaldsen's Ganymede reproduced as a porcelain statuette by Copenhagen's Royal Porcelain Manu- factory.28 Many of these productions were either made with modern techniques and materials (such as Parian porcelain or electroplating), or represented experimental and novel ventures for manufacturers normally engaged in other businesses (such as Coal- brookdale, better known for making bridges).29

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Fig 4. Hunter and Dog Fig 5. 'Statuary Porcelain-Narcissus, After Gibson'

That a revision was taking place not only of sculptural practice but also of the definitions of what constituted sculpture was both visually evident and critically articulated in the vast literature that accompanied the Great Exhibition,3 but these observations were largely kept separate from neoclassical discourse.31 The construction of this uneven discourse can be tracked in part through the Reports by the Juries, published in several editions in 1852, which brought into a public forum the critical debates of the Exhibition. In the Reports, neoclassical opinion was represented by a 'Fine Art Jury' made up of individuals at the heart of the academic establishment. The interests of sculpture were represented by John Gibson, Royal Academician and Britain's most eminent neoclassicist, yet whose own work quietly straddled the rifts opening up in sculptural aesthetics.32 Appointed to pass critical judgement on the exhibits of the fine-art courts, the Jury's often lengthy and discursive considerations suggest on the one hand an intense loyalty to neoclassical conventions, and on the other a pro-

found anxiety about the disintegration of sculpture's special artistic position in a realm separate from ordinary material things.33 Despite an ostensible embrace of diversity and inclusiveness, an underlying elitism was at work, upholding a very focused and narrow designation of sculpture's role-a contradiction reflected metaphorically in the vocal presence of Gibson's much-praised Hunter and Dog, and the muteness of his Parian statuettes.

The Reports by the Julries point to a considerable reluctance to associate neoclassical sculpture with materials and processes, drawing on this basis a sharp division between classicizing statues and other types of sculpture. Excluding the qualitative value of materials in their assessment, and instead invoking a classicizing notion of transcendental beauty ('The sculptor must have so treated the solid material . . . as not to remind the spectator of the nature of the substance employed'),34 the Reports subtly but systematically undermine new sculptural developments. For instance, in its evaluation of 'Sculpture on a small scale' from France, the

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Jury, although acknowledging the 'extraordinary abundance of small groups of human figures and animals', of which many 'are from the designs of distinguished artists', was nonetheless reluctant to esteem these as works of fine art: 'a great number of these specimens do not rise above the level of very pretty ornaments, executed without much style, and a notice of them here would occupy too much space.'35 Bronze sculpture proved similarly conten- tious, the jury conceding on the one hand that 'the art of casting in sculpture in different metals is obviously of the greatest importance for the diffusion of the finest works', while on the other stressing that 'the Jury . . . purposely abstained from judging of such metal-casts as they conceived to have been exhibited merely for the purpose of showing . . . a new process, or the novel use of a particular metal.'36 Bronze is not elevated above technical merit, with sculptures briefly summarized as 'specimens of mechanical industry', 'successful specimen of raw casting', or 'good example of casting and tooling'.37 In direct contradiction of the ethos of the Exhibition, the Jury insisted on traditional academic criteria with which to make their evaluations of 'sculpture proper':

the Jury . . . looked for the embodiment of ideas, thought, feeling, and passion; not for the mere imitation of nature, however true in detail, or admirable in execution. They have looked for originality and invention . . . expressed in that style which has for twenty-three centuries been the wonder of every civilised people, and the standard of excellence to which artists of the highest order have endeavoured to attain.38

Referring contemporary artists to the antique was standard practice at this time, but the paradox of looking for 'originality and invention' in the classical style of 'twenty-three centuries' past reads as an incongruous anachronism in the context of an industrial exhibition celebrating progress and modernity- and as a strategic suppression of sculpture created outside classicizing paradigms.39

In elevating the emulation of a classicizing 'style' over 'admirable . . . execution'-in other words, by specifically dismissing the value of craft and making- the Jury effectively undermined the importance of the artist's hand in creating the work of art. Its emphatic division between 'ideas, thought, feeling' and their 'execution', intended to elevate sculpture

above worldly concerns, paradoxically created an alignment with the new commercial practices, where a similar reduction of artistic involvement was implemented: firms such as Copeland were taking existing 'ideas' (such as Gibson's statues) and applying them to new processes and materials (such as Parian porcelain). The emphasis was firmly on the practicalities of production, with innovation invested less into the conception of new designs.40 By pre- senting sculptures as end products of a series of 'economical processes' applied to sculptors' 'best models', commercial producers in a sense mimicked neoclassical practice: both separated the physical act of making from the intellectual conception or 'idea'. Stepping into the gap cultivated in neoclassical ideology, the new entrants to the arena of art-production led the systems of sculpture-making to a logical conclusion, by taking the processes away from the studio and eliminating the need for any physical input from the sculptor.

Rethinking sculpture and craft The decades that followed the Great Exhibition witnessed an extensive rethinking of the ethics of artistic practices.41 Reacting forcefully against industrial manufacture and modern systems of production, this process of re-evaluation and reform has tended to be identified with the decorative arts and the emergence of the Arts and Crafts Movement, where arguably some of the most important transformative consequences were felt.42 Artists and designers such as Walter Crane looked back upon the Exhibition as a lesson in the ethics of making, a timely warning that the 'break-up of old traditions in the crafts of design', 'division of labour, and . . . machine labour, have rapidly destroyed the art of the people, and are fast vulgarising and destroying all local characteristics in art' .43

The focused, critical attention on methods of production and materials that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century also informed other areas of art-making. Notably, it influenced the emergence of a sculptural practice deeply involved with the practical skills (based both in traditional crafts and modern methods) required to manipulate a wide range of materials other than marble, such as bronze, ivory and precious metals, as well as modem

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materials such as aluminium. While it is tempting to subsume this sculpture, with its overall ornamental look and craft-orientated approach, into the discourse around crafts reform-as did Muthesius and other critics in the 1900s and 1910s44-a closer look at its character suggests that it developed in ways that were often quite separate from, even antithetical to, such debates. The impetus behind the adoption of an approach apparently rooted in a crafts ethic seems to have been prompted not so much out of a desire to align sculpture with the arts and crafts as out of a need to articulate a sculptural identity separate from that of neoclassicism, by reconstituting sculpture as a vital, material presence in the modern world. Commercial, modern methods were neither wholly contested nor fully rejected, but rather selectively adapted to coexist with workshop-based crafts practices.

Retrospective reactions to the Great Exhibition among sculptors and sculpture critics were often quite different from those voiced by Crane and his circle. Despite throwing up some ostensible moral dilem- mas, the Exhibition also suggested fresh opportunities, not least by arousing a new level of popular interest in sculpture. As the English sculptor Morton Edwards remarked in 1879: 'previous to the year of 1851 there was but little sculpture to be seen by the public in London . . . There were no Parian or terra- cotta manufacturers (at any rate on their present scale) to bring out copies of. . . antique and modern sculptural art,' and the only works available to public view were 'A few busts and statues [in] the small sculpture-room at the Royal Academy at Trafalgar Square before its enlargement was carried out'.45 The Great Exhibition, Edwards implies, went some way to redressing the inadequate representation of sculpture, which tended to be treated as secondary to painting at the annual Academy shows.46 Having excluded paintings altogether on the basis that they were 'but little affected by material conditions',47 the Great Exhibition in effect offered the first large-scale public showcase of contemporary sculpture, lending artists unprecedented access to a vast, internationally diverse audience, awakening curiosity in their work and bringing it to public attention. The wide-ranging scope of the Exhibition, representing works of art that stood well outside the neoclassical paradigm, demonstrated that sculpture could be popular, pleas- urable and accessible, and forced a radical re-evaluation of the parameters that defined sculpture as a

discipline. Moreover, it unwittingly comprised an act of reconstituting sculpture as a physically-grounded, materially-informed art.

Amongst the important issues that occupied prac- tising sculptors of later generations was the question of putting forward a sculptural identity that would allow formal ambitions to coexist with material developments. The increasing diversity of practice, production and aesthetics needed to be accommodated formally in critical discourse. While neoclassical sculptors, in their denial of making as an intrinsic part of their practice, had inadvertently relinquished con- trol over their discipline to non-artistic producers, new generations of sculptors in the following decades began to embrace the interplay between sculpture and decorative art, materials and making, as elem- entary to their practice. By the 1880s, the question of how sculpture was made became interlocked with its aesthetic evaluation, and indeed formed the locus for developing new aesthetics-a shift in emphasis that is profoundly relevant to our understanding of sculpture's development away from classicizing conventions towards more modem forms by the end of the century.

Craft and the 'New Sculpture' [T]he present-day taste for decorative sculpture . . . has opened up a vast field of opportunities for artistic practice, and has aided materially to destroy the tradition which threatened a few years ago to make the art of the sculptor a thing without vitality or active capacity.48

Writing in 1898 on the sculpture of Frederick W. Pomeroy and his circle, the artist and critic Alfred Lys Baldry perceptively recognized that the decorative character of this work represented a fundamental shift in sculptural expression. Baldry, along with a small handful of other important sculpture critics who included Edmund Gosse, Cosmo Monkhouse and Marion Spielmann, saw this as a process of extending and loosening up sculptural language, rather than as a merging of, or confusion between, disciplines-a significant distinction often missed by more conserva- tive analysts.49 New forms, styles and characters derived from decorative patterning and ornamental design provided alternatives to classicizing modes of expression, opening up and transforming ideas about what sculpture was or should be. Works such as

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Fig 6. Harry Bates, lIorsJanna Vitae, 81 cims, bronze, ivory and mother-of-pearl, 1 899

Pomeroy's Love the Conqueror (1892-93), Edward Onslow Ford's The Singer [1], or Harry Bates's Mors Janiiia Vitae (1899) [6], mixed figurative conceptions with a rich, decorative feel through the use of ornate accessories, the introduction of colour, manipulation of scale, intricate detailing and handling of materials. The New Sculpture embodied a sense of informality, fluidity and sensitive expressiveness which challenged the neoclassical sentiment that simplicity of form,

broad handling and uniform surfaces were essential sculptural characteristics. As Edmund Gosse, a key supporter of the new artists, noted in 1890: 'we cannot pretend to go back to this colourless type. Mr. Thornycroft and Mr. Gilbert have opened our eyes to living possibilities, to splendid varieties in sculpture. '0

Crucially, subject matter was expressed not only compositionally, but also through the specificity of materials and their treatment. Neither genre nor classical mythology, neither realist nor idealised, the New Sculpture intoned imaginative fantasies through juxtaposed surfaces, colours and textures, creating dream worlds that hovered between the symbolist and the surreal. It was an aesthetic that relied on excellence of execution to convey the mood and feeling of the subjects represented. The employment of exquisite, often delicate materials called for skilful, sensitive handling, each substance requiring its own peculiar treatment, as a work such as Bates's large statuette group Mors Janua Vitae demonstrates. Meta- phorically offsetting light against dark, a pale figure of 'Love' in delicately-honed ivory is carefully set into the embrace of the dark bronze shadow of 'Death', its graceful, sweeping wings finely and elaborately mod- elled. Both figures appear to be floating off an intricately-undercut pedestal-a tiny fantasy world of spires and castles, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and protected by a pair of minute ivory angels. That works such as this, combining carving, modelling and casting, relied on a precise convergence between technical skill and aesthetic intent was well understood by some of the more perceptive critics at the time. Baldry, for instance, observed that such 'technical results . . . illustrate well-thought out conclusions on questions of real aesthetic moment'.5l Sculptural effects, in other words, were set in motion through an overt attention to decorative materials and accomplished craftsmanship.

It was this grounding of aesthetics in the physical materiality of a work of art that distinguished the New Sculptors from their neoclassical predecessors. Where neoclassical artists had relied on an intellectual signature, the New Sculptors highlighted the physical and visual imprint of the artist's hand. The neoclassicists' conscious distancing of themselves from the physical work of sculpture was seen as a fundamental failing by New Sculptors and their critics: 'the practical insight . . . into refinements of technique and

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execution . . . had been hitherto insufficiently considered by British sculptors', Baldry noted in 1900.52 The sharp decline in the critical estimation of marble and of marble-carving in the second half of the nineteenth century can be directly linked with this failure to honour the intrinsic value of making, as Ruskin noted in 1870: 'neither [the sculptor] nor the public recognize the touch of the chisel as expressive of personal feeling or power, . . . nothing is looked for except mechanical polish.'53 Drawing a subtle distinction between technical competence and a more sensitive, poetic 'feeling', Ruskin's words trans- form the notional refinement of surfaces by the 'master-hand' into a synthetic, perfunctory task, stripping neoclassical sculpture of the essential 'skin' that had embodied its sense of individual creativity.

This metaphorical denuding of classicizing aesthetics was reflected practically and visually in the preferences of the New Sculpture of the 1880s. The previously calm, even surfaces of carved marble ('the muscles should not be represented by prominences so ... as to impair the general breadth')54 were replaced by an animated, energetic modelling ('rhythm of line and mass, and the swelling contours of the human body'),55 often translated by casting into bronze and other metals so as to preserve directly the impressions of the sculptor's hand. Gosse understood this facility as a significant distinction from the neoclassicists: 'The new school have discovered the value and the charm of metal, in which their finest touch can be reproduced without any modification.'56 The rejection of neoclassical traditions not only allowed sculptors to broaden their repertoire, it also, as Gosse implies, brought to bear new material priorities that narrowed the gap between artistic conception and finished object.

In their intense concentration on materials and methods of making, the New Sculptors shared some ground with the Arts and Crafts Movement,57 and also joined in, if patchily, some of the ethical debates that became topical at this time. Some, like George Frampton, used the label 'all-round craftsman' or 'art worker', and took membership of the Art Workers' Guild and Arts and Crafts Society.58 Others, like Ford, deliberately associated sculpture making with a craft-orientated mode of production: 'A school of sculpture should include masonry, stone carving in all its branches, designing and modelling, and every minor trade that is in any way connected with

Fig 7. Edward Onslow Ford in his studio

art.'59 A photograph taken of Ford in 1895, to mark his election to the Royal Academy, sums up the interdisciplinary image cultivated by the New Sculptors [7]. In the studio, alone, the artist is surrounded by well-known examples of his work- The Singer and Folly prominently to the fore, a maquette for the Ralph Ward Jackson Memorial in the background, a glimpse of General Gordon on a Camel to the right. A tool in his hand, as though pausing from modelling his Folly, Ford presents himself as master and craftsman of an eclectic range of sculpture, suggesting the diversity of his skills, and a refusal to privilege the grand monumental project over the small ornamental statuette."

The New Sculpture was however not an exclu- sively crafts-based practice. Although trained in a broad range of skills and techniques required to handle different materials, sculptors also adopted processes and materials drawn from modern industrial sources;61 at the same time, they drew on commercial strategies to enhance the appeal of their work. In

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focusing on statuettes and smaller groups, the New Sculptors tapped into the growing demand for decorative art-objects, enabling them to exploit a consumer market driven by the interior decorating movement.62 Although English sculptors largely avoided the kind of mass-production of statuettes commonly practiced in France,63 they were nonetheless alert to opportunities afforded by those markets. Thus, while the New Sculptors were very much associated with a crafts ethic, they were also alert to commercial opportunities. Ford, for example, publicly called for a 'publishing company' to produce and disseminate statuettes:

There is a very great demand for cheap bronzes such as would come within the reach of those whose means will not permit of their purchasing anything more expensive than first-rate etchings . . . We are very anxious that the demand should be supplied.64

Ford's stance suggests that, far from leading consumer taste, as crafts reformers set out to do, sculptors were at least partly following the impulses of the market (even if targeting its upper end) by adapting their output to the demand that had sprung up for domestic sculpture.65

Conclusion While fostering some persuasive links with the ethics of late-nineteenth-century crafts reform, neither Ford, Bates, Frampton nor Pomeroy can be aligned with one fixed ideology. Rather, these artists can be described as eclectically participatory, identifying emergent trends and partaking of opportunities as they arose. The qualities that attracted sculptors to decorative art-the freedom to combine invented, fantastic forms with figurative ideas, and the sheer visual indulgence in rich, colourful materials-were qualities that ran exactly counter to those cherished by crafts reformers, as indeed they ran counter to the aesthetics of neoclassicism. The vibrant, often flam- boyant luxuriousness of the New Sculpture shared its aesthetic with both earlier and contemporaneous styles, where the sculptural liberally intersected with the ornamental and decorative, as in the rococoesque look of Second Empire art,66 the emergent European Art Nouveau and symbolist art.67 Thus, while we can identify in Harry Bates's Mors Janua Vitae traces of James Pradier's Leda and

Swan shown at the Great Exhibition almost half a century earlier, and find echoes of Charles von der Stappen's Sphinx Mysterieux (1897) in George Frampton's near-contemporaneous Lamia (1899), few parallels can be drawn between the New Sculpture and the designs of C. R. Ashbee, Archi- bald Knox or Christopher Dresser. While arts and crafts designers understood ornament as something that must be contained, controlled and, to a degree, suppressed, the New Sculptors seized it as an expressive, transformative energy that, as some critics were able to recognize, represented an 'awakening' of their art.68

By admitting decorative influences into a discipline previously limited by classicizing principles, figurative conception began to be defined by different criteria, which reconfigured, and sometimes undermined, modes of expressing the figure. Harry Bates's 'Love' [6] appears more as a cipher, a figurative streak of pale ivory set into a flourish of bronze, than as a concrete female body. Edward Onslow Ford's The Singer [1], with its green skin and fanciful Egyptian dress, is more puppet-like than a formal bodily presence. Originally paired with a figure of Applause, each presented on a tall, ornate plinth, the work func- tioned as much as a complete, decorative ensemble as an autonomous sculpture. By privileging the decorative value of materials and subjects, the New Sculp- ture established a set of reference points that relied not on form, outline and classicizing themes (as did neoclassical works such as Gibson's Hunter and Dog), but on an internal compositional complexity and a material multiplicity that was evocative, mythic, and even surreal.

While the New Sculpture is characterized by its decorative, often playful and even abstract qualities, these same qualities have also problematized its place in the history of sculpture. Its intersections with issues associated with crafts reform have frequently caused its contributions to sculptural aesthetics to be over- looked. Despite being largely received, in its own time, within the context of sculpture, rather than that of decorative or applied art, the implications of its decorative references have seldom been recognized, casting it as a somewhat anomalous and isolated phenomenon in sculptural terms.69 Its absorption into arts and crafts discourse happened more easily, as Muthesius's article of 1903 suggests, but to conflate the New Sculpture with the issues of crafts reform is

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to miss its radical transformation and modernization of sculptural aesthetics. The decorative character and crafts-orientated materiality of the New Sculpture not only served to introduce a fresh, colourful look to an art previously cast as plain and austere, it also eroded a series of prerequisites that had determined how sculpture was conceived, produced and understood. By firmly anchoring sculpture in the material reality of which it was part, and admitting commercial as well as industrial influences into its parameters, the New Sculptors developed their discipline into one that participated in and contributed to, rather than avoided, contemporary debates and modern issues.

Martina Droth Henry Moore Institute

Notes 1 My translation. Hermann Muthesius, 'Kunst und Leben in

England', Zeitschrift fur Bildende Kunst, 1903, p. 75. 2 Three key sourcebooks are A. Bliihm et al, The Colour of

Sculpture, 1840-1910 (exhibition catalogue), Leeds, Henry Moore Institute, and Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, 1996. S. Beattie, The New Sculpture, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1983. B. Read, Victorian Sculpture, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1982. See also Edmund Gosse, the writer and critic who coined the label 'New Sculpture' in an article that attempted the first survey of this work: 'The New Sculpture 1879-1894', Art Journal, 1894, pp. 138-42, 199-203, 277-82, 306-11.

3 For the Royal Academy's promotion of New Sculptors under the stewardship of Frederic Leighton, see Read, Victorian Sculpture, p. 292.

4 Muthesius, 'Kunst und Leben', p. 74. 5 Further reading includes F. Schwarz, The Werkbund: Design

Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1996.

6 Muthesius correctly observed that English sculptors focused on 'more intimate, smaller effects', yet his assertion that they left the field of the 'monumental mainly unploughed' was inaccur- ate ('Kunst und Leben', p. 74). The late Victorian era generated a prolific programme of monumental and architectural sculpture. See Read, Victorian Sculpture, chapters 9-10; Beattie, The New Sculpture, chapters 3, 4 and 8.

7 For more on 'domestic' sculpture, see my 'Small Sculpture c. 1900: The "New Statuette" in English Sculptural Aesthetics', in D. Getsy (ed.), Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, London, Ashgate, 2004. See also Beattie, The New Sculpture, chapter 7.

8 M. D. Wyatt, Fine Art: A Sketch of its History, Theory, Practice, and Application to Industry, Being a Course of Lectures Delivered at Cambridge in 1870, London & New York, Macmillan, 1870, p. 176. Wyatt, an architect and writer, was an influential figure in the academic establishment. Secretary of the Great Exhibi-

tion of 1851, he received a knighthood for his work on the India Office with Sir George Gilbert Scott in 1855, and was first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge from 1869.

9 See H. Honour, 'Canova's Studio Practice', Burlington Maga- zine, vol. 114, 1972, pp. 146-59, 214-29. Honour's seminal and illuminating study underlines the gap between perceptions about sculptors' practices, and actual procedures that went on in the studio.

10 This shift can be traced through contemporary writings, in particular sculptors' biographies. Francis Chantrey's biography provides one of many examples that could be cited here: 'Of course, it scarcely need be mentioned, that few, if any, of these figures were actually and wholly chiselled by Chantrey, propries manibus; he employed several first-rate assistants' (J. Holland, Memorials of Sir Francis Chantrey, RA, Sculptor. In Hallamshire and Elsewhere, London, Longman, 1851, p. 294).

11 Count Cicognara claimed Canova established the custom of using assistants: 'the practice. . . he ... introduced for lessening the labour of the sculptor, by employing inferior workmen to reduce the block to the last stratum . . ., was not then in use' (L. Cicognara, The Works of Antonio Canova in Sculpture and Modelling, 1824, London, Chatto and Windus, 1876, p. 13).

12 Of course, not all sculptors employed the same procedures. I am here referring to widely-held perceptions about sculpture making, rather than attempting to pinpoint actual practices, which is beyond the scope of this essay. That these perceptions were partly generated by the public image presented via sculptors' studios is suggested by Hugh Honour, who shows that Canova was much more physically involved in marble carving than was widely presumed. That Canova carried out his own work in a private room, concealed from the many visitors attracted to his public studios, indicates the crucial role played by the open studio in disseminating notions about sculptural practice. I am grateful to Alex Potts for discussing this point with me. See Honour, 'Canova's Studio Practice', pp. 147-8. For a more recent analysis of sculpture making in the late eighteenth century, see Malcolm Baker's compelling study, Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth Century Sculpture, London, V&A Publications, 2000, chapters 3, 5 and 6. See also A. Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 42-59. Contemporary critical and fictional accounts of studio visits include Florentia, 'A Walk through the Studios of Rome', Art Journal, 1854, p. 287, and N. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, Boston 1860.

13 G. Halse, The Modeller: A Guide to the Principles and Practice of Sculpture, for the Use of Students and Amateurs, George Rowney, n.d. (before 1878), p. 60.

14 Sculptors were sometimes criticized for not making enough use of assistants. Horatio Greenough's insistence on taking much of the sculpting into his own hands prompted a patron to remark on 'this pitiable labour . . . which should have been done by more experienced workmen'. Cited in N. Wright, Horatio Greenough: The First American Sculptor, University of Pennsyl- vania Press, 1963, p. 69.

15 C. Carr (ed.), Harriet Hosmer: Letters and Memoirs, London, John Lane, 1913, p. 375. Hosmer, in an essay that candidly unveiled neoclassical practices, went so far as to state publicly that some sculptors did not touch their work past the initial model-stage: 'It is true, that in some cases, the finishing touches are introduced by the artist himself; but I suspect that few who have accomplished and competent workmen give much of

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their time to the mallet or the chisel' (p. 272). Hosmer's statement must also be seen in terms of the complex issue of women making a career in the male-dominated world of sculpture. See D. Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850-1900, Routledge, 2000, chapter 4.

16 E. Plon, Thorvaldsen: His Life and Works, trans. Cashel Hoey, London, Richard Bentley and Son, 1874, p. 210. See also Baker, Figured in Marble, chapter 3.

17 J. S. Memes, Memoirs of Antonio Canova, with a Critical Analysis of his Works and an Historical Overview of Modern Sculpture, Edinburgh & London, 1825, p. 557.

18 My thinking here owes much to Alex Potts. See his insightful discussion of Canova's surfaces in The Sculptural Imagination, pp. 42-3.

19 See for example the biography of John Gibson, which references numerous patrons of aristocratic and royal origin (including the Duke of Devonshire, Sir George Beaumont, Lord George Cavendish, Emperor and Empress Frederick of Ger- many and Queen Victoria). T. Matthews, The Biography ofJohn Gibson, R.A., Sculptor, Rome, London, William Heinemann, 1911.

20 For more on trade links between Italy and England, see C. Sicca & A. Yarrington (eds.), The Lustrous Trade: Material Culture and the History of Sculpture in England and Italy c. 1700- 1860, Leicester University Press, 2000.

21 Florentia, 'A Walk through the Studios of Rome', p. 287. 22 Lady Eastlake (ed.), Life of John Gibson, R.A. Sculptor, Long-

mans, Green and Co., 1870, pp. 8-10. 23 Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, Great Exhibition of the

Works of Industry of all Nations, 1851. By Authority of the Royal Commission, London, Spicer Brothers, 1851, p. 819.

24 Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations 1851, Reports by the Juries on Subjects in the Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was Divided. By Authority of the Royal Commission, vol. 3, Spicer Brothers, 1852, p. 1531 (further references given as Reports by the Juries).

25 Ibid., p. 692. 26 The Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Crystal Palace Exhibition

(1851), Dover Publications, 1970, p. 181. 27 Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue, p. 181. 28 Reports by the Juries, p. 706. 29 A. Raistrick, Coalbrookdale 1709-1959, London, 1959, p. 16. 30 A special collection of catalogues, books and journals relating

to the Great Exhibition is available at the University of Reading.

31 Although innovations in mass production, such as the invention of Parian porcelain, were commented on, often posi- tively, by the press, these discussions did not as a rule intersect critical discourse around neoclassical sculpture. For a discussion of the reception of Parian in the nineteenth century, see P. Atterbury (ed.), The Parian Phenomenon: A Survey of Victorian Parian Porcelain Statuary and Busts, R. Dennis, 1989.

32 The Jury was made up of 15 individuals, including architect C. R. Cockerell (friend of Gibson and Royal Academician); architect, ecclesiologist and writer A. W. N. Pugin (designer of the Medieval Court at the Great Exhibition); Richard Redgrave (painter and influential advisor to the Government on policies on art education; later also elected to the Royal

Academy); and Royal Mint chief medallist W. Wyon (also Royal Academician). See Reports by the Juries, p. 1529.

33 Alison Yarrington offers a reading of the Reports by theJuries as a division between 'high and low', in 'Under the Spell of Madame Tussaud', in Bliihm et al, The Colour of Sculpture, pp. 85-7.

34 Reports by the Juries, p. 692. 35 Ibid., p. 701. 36 Ibid., p. 1531. 37 Ibid., p. 1531. 38 Ibid., p. 1532. 39 It also represents a rejection of realism, a quality that increas-

ingly infringed upon ideal sculpture. For an exploration of realism and the New Sculpture, see D. Getsy, "'Hard Real- ism": The Thanatic Corporeality of Edward Onslow Ford's Shelley Memorial', Visual Culture in Britain, vol. 3, no. 1, 2002, pp. 53-76.

40 This was particularly evident in terms of sculptural design, where classicizing forms and subjects were often repetitive and barely distinguishable from each other. When it came to 'applied' art-functional objects such as cutlery, lamps or tea- services-the object's basic design (for example, a fork) would be supplemented by novel ornamentation, not only added to the surface, but also seen in the actual shape of the object: the fork might be formed into a twisted, exaggerated vegetal shape. For examples, see Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue.

41 That is not to say that crafts and design reform sprang from the Great Exhibition; rather, 1851 came (and continues) to be seen as a kind of signpost or reference point from which compar- isons were drawn. Louise Purbrick eloquently illuminates some of the problems of representing 1851 as a historical moment. See her introduction in L. Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, Manchester University Press, 2001.

42 There are many examples one might cite for further reading. Perhaps it is more useful to direct the reader to Anthony Coulson's Bibliography of Design in Britain 1851-1870, London, Design Council, 1979, which includes a section devoted to the Great Exhibition (my thanks to Grace Lees-Maffei for suggesting this resource). Amongst the many texts I have found particularly helpful are J. Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain 1550-1960, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1995, and C. Wainwright, 'The Legacy of the Nineteenth Century', in P. Greenhalgh (ed.), Modernism in Design, London, Reaktion, 1990.

43 W. Crane, The Claims of Decorative Art, London, Lawrence and Bullen, 1892, p. 8, p. 13.

44 See Stella Tillyard for a compelling study of the fusion between the critical language that defined the arts and crafts, and that which emerged in the early twentieth century to describe sculpture. Tillyard's study has been an important part of my thinking in this essay: S. K. Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism 1900-1920: Early Modernism and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Edwardian England, London & New York, Routledge, 1988, chapter 4.

45 M. Edwards, A Guide to Modelling in Clay and Wax, London, Lechetier Barbe, 1879, p. 9. Edwards was Honorary Secretary to the Society of Sculptors.

46 For much of the nineteenth century, the Royal Academy was criticized for not representing sculpture adequately, a failing

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that was examined in an official 'Enquiry into the State of the Royal Academy' in 1863, at which Edwards gave evidence. See Read, Victorian Sculpture, p. 68.

47 Reports by the Juries, p. 1458. 48 A. L. Baldry, 'The Work of F. W. Pomeroy', Studio, Novem-

ber 1898, p. 78. 49 For example, the critic Claude Phillips who regularly

reviewed the annual Royal Academy exhibitions in the Magazine of Art (see for instance 1895, p. 68). Later generations of critics and historians have also found it difficult to accept the decorative aspects of the New Sculpture. See for example A. Bury, Shadow of Eros: A Biographical and Critical Study of the Life and Works of Sir Alfred Gilbert, London, Dropmore Press, 1952, and K. Tiirr, Farbe und Naturalismus in der Skulptur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Mainz, Verlag Philip Von Zabem, 1994. An interesting attempt to identify a genre of decorative sculpture (although focused more on a French perspective) is A. Kader, 'The Concentrated Essence of a Wriggle: Art Nouveau Sculpture', in P. Greenhalgh (ed.), Art Nouveau 1890-1914 (exhibition catalogue), London, V&A Publications, 2000, pp. 251-61.

50 [Edmund Gosse], 'Sculpture at the Royal Academy', Saturday Review, 28 June 1890, p. 794.

51 Baldry, 'The Work of F. W. Pomeroy', p. 80. Other examples include E. Gosse, 'Living English Sculptors, II', Century Maga- zine, vol. 31, 1886, p. 49, and C. Monkhouse, 'Alfred Gilbert, A.R.A., I', Magazine of Art, 1889, p. 4.

52 A. L. Baldry, 'Our Rising Artists: Alfred Drury, Sculptor', Magazine of Art, 1900, p. 213.

53 J. Ruskin, Aratra Pentelici: Six Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture, Given in 1870, London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1872, pp. 173-4. The criticisms of the treatment of marble work as mechanical labour made by Ruskin and other writers in the second half of the nineteenth century foreshadow the cult of direct carving in the early twentieth century, which reinvested the material with a hand-craft ethic. See for example Eric Gill's essay on 'stone carving' (1921) in his Art-Nonsense and Other Essays, London, Cassell & Co., 1934, and K. Parkes, The Art of Carved Sculpture, 2 vols, London, Chapman & Hall, 1931. For more recent analyses, see P. Curtis, 'Direct Carving and the notion of a "Modern British Sculpture": International or Insular?', in H. M. Hughes & G. van Tuyl (eds.), Blast to Freeze: British Art in the Twentieth Century (exhibition catalogue), Kunstmuseum Wolfsberg, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002, and P. Curtis, Sculpture 1900-1945: After Rodin, Oxford University Press, 1999. See also Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism, chapter 4.

54 Reports by the Juries, p. 1549. 55 Walter Armstrong (with reference to Harry Bates), 'Sculpture',

Art Journal, 1887, p. 180. 56 Gosse, 'Sculpture at the Royal Academy', p. 794. 57 The parallel extends to the evaluation of art through skilled

execution. As Tillyard observes (with reference to the Arts and Crafts Movement): 'The degree to which technique, form and idea could be made to work together became the means for

judging a work of art.' See Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism, pp. 20-2.

58 This must also be understood as a backlash against the perceived elitism of'fine artists'. Fred Miller, 'George Frampton, A.R.A., Art Worker', Art Journal, 1897, p. 321. See also Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism, p. 146.

59 Transactions of the National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry, Birmingham, 1891, p. 213.

60 Other studio photographs of New Sculptors reflect a similar message. For examples, see J. Wood, Close Encounters: The Sculptor's Studio in the Age of the Camera (exhibition catalogue), Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2002.

61 See for example F. Lynn Jenkins' outline of the advantages of electrotyping over bronze-casting, in M. H. Spielmann, 'F. Lynn Jenkins: His Decorative Sculpture and his Methods', Magazine of Art, 1901-2, pp. 298-9. My thanks to Matthew Withey for directing me to this article.

62 See my 'Small Sculpture c.1900' for more on the market for 'domestic' sculpture.

63 French, particularly Parisian, bronze founders, led an international industry in statuette-reproduction. For a comparison of statuette-manufacture in France and Britain, see my 'Bronze statuettes and the sculpture-industry in nineteenth century England and France', in P. Mainardi (ed.), Copies, Variations, and Replicas in Nineteenth Century Art, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming).

64 Transactions of the National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry, Edinburgh, 1890, p. 121. Edmund Gosse, similarly, saw no contradiction between the New Sculpture's craft ethic and its need to sell, writing in 1890: 'Mr. Onslow Ford's elegant and spirited work specially lends itself to reproduction in miniature' (E. Gosse, 'Small Bronzes', Saturday Review, 31 May 1890, p. 672).

65 This is not to undermine the pioneering achievements of the New Sculpture; on the contrary, it was by seizing on commercial trends that they helped sculpture evolve from an elitist, narrowly-defined discipline into a popular, accessible art-form.

66 Further reading includes The Second Empire: Art in France under Napoleon III (exhibition catalogue), Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1978. For the representation of these artists at the Great Exhibition, see P. Mainardi, 'French Sculpture, English Morals: Clesinger's Bacchante at the Crystal Palace 1851', Gazette des Beaux Arts, 1983, pp. 215-8.

67 See for example Greenhalgh (ed.), Art Nouveau. 68 M. Spielmann, 'Survey of the Fine Arts Section', in Souvenir of

the Fine Art section, Franco-British Exhibition, 1908, Compiled by Sir Isidore Spielmann under the auspices of the British Art Committee, Bemrose, London, 1908, p. 72.

69 As Tillyard has shown, despite evolving at and crossing the threshold of Modernism, the New Sculpture tends to be classed as 'Victorian' and excluded from early Modernist discourse. This false division is beginning to be bridged however; see for example David Getsy's anthology Sculpture and The Pursuit of a Modern Ideal.

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Issue Table of ContentsJournal of Design History, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2004Front MatterDangerous Liaisons: Relationships between Design, Craft and Art [pp. 207 - 219]The Ethics of Making: Craft and English Sculptural Aesthetics c. 1851-1900 [pp. 221 - 235]Significant Other: Art and Craft in the Career and Marriage of Mary Watts [pp. 237 - 250]Fine Art and the Fan 1860-1930 [pp. 251 - 266]Here's One I Made Earlier: Making and Living with Home Craft in Contemporary Britain [pp. 267 - 281]Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Transient Materiality in Contemporary Cultural Artefacts [pp. 283 - 293]Reviewsuntitled [pp. 295 - 297]untitled [pp. 297 - 300]untitled [pp. 300 - 302]untitled [pp. 302 - 304]untitled [pp. 305 - 307]untitled [pp. 307 - 309]untitled [pp. 309 - 310]untitled [pp. 310 - 312]untitled [pp. 312 - 313]

Books Received [pp. 314 - 315]Back Matter [pp. 316 - 316]

the ethics of making craft and english sculptural aesthetics c. 1851 1900

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