Sculpture and Aesthetic Intent in the Late Victorian Interior. 2010

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Sculpture and Aesthetic Intent in the Late-Victorian Interior

Martina Droth

Art and the Victorian Interior

The 1880s and 1890s represent a period when new developments in British sculpture became closely associated with interior decoration and the private home. As sculptors began to focus a substantial part of their output on statuettes and other smaller objects, their work became expressly identified as decorative in character and domestic in orientation. It was accordingly labelled with such terms as ‘household sculpture’, ‘domestic sculpture’, ‘delightful possessions’ and ‘appropriate ornaments for the modern drawing-room’.1 The ascendancy of this ‘New Sculpture’, as it was labelled, saw major contemporary figures, including Alfred Gilbert, Edward Onslow Ford, Hamo Thornycroft and Frederick William Pomeroy, concentrate on small productions. Often incorporating richly wrought ornamental details and materials more typically associated with the decorative arts, such as ivory, precious metals, coloured stones and enamelling, this form of ‘domestic’ object emerged as a significant sculptural genre in its own right.

While the decorative and domestic associations of Victorian sculpture are now germane to the study of the period, the implications of this development remain only vaguely defined, in particular in relation to understanding the nuances of sculpture’s changing status in the private interior.2 Much scholarly attention has focused on the ‘reform’ of interior decoration across the nineteenth century, in the context of Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts movement.3 While this research has helped displace the once-pervasive stereotype of the over-cluttered, heavily furnished Victorian drawing room, few studies have concerned themselves with correlating the development of ‘artistic’ conceptions of the interior with the role that works

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rethinking the interior, c. 1867–1896212

of art played in these changing spaces; particularly in the case of sculpture.4 Paradoxically, despite being understood to have evolved specifically in relation to private interiors, Victorian sculpture remains curiously disassociated from considerations of the ‘Aesthetic’ interior, and instead has been much more broadly linked to the market for domestic commodities.5 This is reflected in nineteenth-century histories of collecting, which tend to focus largely on paintings, while sculptures, and in particular statuettes, are routinely excluded from the study of the private art market.6 Indeed, it seems that small-scale sculpture has so far been largely perceived not so much as artwork that was ‘collected’ or valued in the way we might expect a painting to be, but rather as a reproductive commodity that was ‘consumed’ within a much wider and non-specific marketplace. This is despite the fact that we know sculptors’ methods to have been distinctly unlike those of commercial producers. Often elaborately crafted, unique or copied to order, sculptors’ production focused on specialised objects that were markedly autonomous from the miscellany of domestic merchandise circulating en masse in the marketplace.

In the absence of a more precise understanding of the position sculptors occupied in the art market, the assumption remains that the domestic orientation of their work was directly motivated by a desire to link sculpture to a general consumer interest in decorative accessories for the home. Notably, while Susan Beattie’s influential survey The New Sculpture (1983) concluded that the ‘seductive idea of household art’ ultimately did not ‘extend the range of patronage’, she nevertheless presented the efflorescence of statuettes as a phenomenon ‘closely related to the issue of art in industry’, intended ‘to stimulate public interest in sculpture through the intervention of commerce’.7 Implicit in her conclusion is the assumption that the popular preoccupation with interior decoration not only coincided with, but actively influenced and shaped, sculptural practice.

In this chapter, I propose an alternative reading, and suggest that the emergence in Britain of a domestically focused sculptural aesthetic represented an idiosyncratic and independent development, with which sculptors, far from seeking to penetrate popular consumer markets, sought to appeal to an elite clientele cultivated through their own social circles; a strategy not unlike that often identified with Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic painters.8 My aim is to show that the domestic inflection of sculptural aesthetics emerged not only from external pecuniary pressures, but out of the artists’ preoccupation with their own domestic identities. To understand these developments, I begin my enquiry not with the question of the object’s destination in the market, but with its point of origin, in the artist’s studio; a place that, in the late-Victorian era, was itself increasingly cast in the image of the domestic interior.


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The Artist’s Interior

As recent scholars have shown, biography and the ‘life-writings’ of artists became major subjects of public interest in the mid to late nineteenth century.9 While this broad and diffuse genre was particularly directed towards painters, it also offered sculptors an avenue for attracting attention to themselves and their work. As sculptors followed the example of painters, by custom-building homes which incorporated large, often multiple, studios, their own domestic realms played an increasingly central role in reconfiguring the practice, representation and public perception of sculptural aesthetics. Through the focus of books, portraiture and the illustrated press, the homes of artists were transformed into increasingly visible contexts for their art, a development underscored by the complementary visuality of the work, which often mirrored the rich textures and colour of its surroundings.10 In the press, artists were shown ‘at home’, surrounded by their work, while examples of their artworks were often represented in the context of other artists’ homes. For example, in the 1890s the Strand Magazine featured a series of ‘Illustrated Interviews’ showcasing artists in their houses, including Leighton, Thornycroft, Alma-Tadema, Luke Fildes and Val Prinsep. These and other figures also appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, Harpers, the Magazine of Art, the Art Journal, Building News, and in books such as F.G. Stephens’s Artists at Home (1884), most of which were extensively illustrated and accompanied by detailed descriptions (Fig. 10.1).11 As a visitor to Leighton’s house noted in 1893, its interiors were ‘familiar to thousands that have never crossed its threshold’.12

As has been well documented, the development of custom-built houses, in which artists both lived and worked, marked a significant shift in the professionalisation of artists’ vocation in the late nineteenth century. As the painter George D. Leslie remembered, successful artists began, in some numbers, to cluster around fashionable London districts such as ‘St John’s Wood, Kensington, Hampstead and other suburban districts, where they built themselves large and luxuriously fitted studios’ within or attached to their domestic residences.13 Such studio-houses were as much show-homes as places to work and live. Designed for entertaining artist-friends and patron-neighbours, and accessible to a limited public on annual ‘Show Sundays’, these mediated environments were almost as public as they were private.14 Staged and controlled, they conveyed an image of high culture that played an integral role in the cultivation of an artist’s professional profile. As such, artists’ houses can be understood as representing a type, but importantly, they were also seen as individually distinctive.

Often designed, or at least altered, by their owners to cater to their particular creative needs, artists’ houses were seen as a reflection of an artist’s idiosyncratic aesthetic vision and style, and as such were seen as an extension of their practice. When Alma-Tadema took over the former home



of the painter James Tissot at Grove End Road in 1883, visitors made a point of noting that it ‘was practically re-built from its foundations’ and that the ‘studio, like the rest of the house, was designed by Sir Lawrence’ himself.15 The previous occupant had given the house an artistic pedigree, but it was essential that the new owner stamp it with his own artistic personality. Descriptions of the house’s rooms demonstrate the significance of this: the library, we are told, was like a Roman ‘atrium’, while the studio was fitted with ‘walls of marble’ and a ‘beautiful ceiling’ coloured in ‘the soft, silvery tint of aluminium’. In their construction and detail, therefore, Alma-Tadema’s interiors were seen as a mirror to his paintings, echoing their Roman settings and their abundance of marble and silvery hues; a point reinforced by the reproduction of The Kiss (1891) above the text in the article.16

The idea that artists’ homes were infused with their owners’ personal artistic sensibilities not only set these houses apart from other, notionally ordinary, homes; it fundamentally transformed the association between art and domesticity. The artist’s home was understood as inherently creative. Not only was art seen to be made here, this was a place where artists met and

10.1 J.P. Mayall, photograph of Frederic Leighton in his studio, 2 Holland Park Road, London, from F.G. Stephens, Artists at Home (1884), the London Library


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talked about art, where paintings and sculptures were given and received, for sale or as tokens of friendships, and where the contemplation of art played an integral part of everyday life. While the studio represented the heart of the house, it was often seen as continuous with, not separate from, the living spaces, and in many cases no clear boundary divided the sphere of domesticity from that of creativity. For example, as a guest to Leighton’s studio noted: ‘An artist might live here as well as work, might play the aesthetic hermit and never leave the room except for exercise, so pleasant, so adapted is it to intellectual requirements and luxurious ease.’17 Similarly, a visitor to Thornycroft’s ‘sanctum’, noted that the ‘principal first impression is that here the workshop element has been minimised until it may be said to be eliminated. Mr Thornycroft says that he does not like the room in which the greater part of his life is spent to be comfortless.’18

Indeed, the written descriptions of these studios often recall living rooms more than workspaces: in Thornycroft’s, there are ‘paintings, sketches, photographs’ on the walls; a ‘piano occupies the place of honour’; ‘there is a bookcase’, a ‘quaint fireplace’ and ‘here and there an Oriental rug’.19 Similar homely comforts, including a ‘cozy fire’, ‘deep-seated easy chair’ and a ‘couch’, were to be seen in Leighton’s studio, and these domestic elements merged and fused with the works of art scattered around. In a bay-window, the ‘light in softened splendour’ fell upon ‘recent works’ such as a ‘small model of his “Python-Slayer”’ and a ‘small group in terra cotta designed and modelled by the artist for his well-known picture the “Daphnephoria”’; a ‘bookcase, chiefly devoted to the works of Goethe’ was situated ‘between the window and the easels’; the ‘rich rugs that lie here and there’ provided ‘excellent keys for colour’; and there were ‘tables crowded with books and sketches’.20 The impression is of a remarkable exchange taking place between art and domesticity; sculptures and paintings become embedded into the architecture and furnishings, presenting an evocative image of the studio as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, a sentiment echoed in the visual records, such as J.P. Mayall’s photograph of Leighton at home (see Fig. 10.1).

Seen as essential both to the creative ethos of the artist’s house, and to its domestic function, art was represented as part of a symbiotic process, often encoded as explicitly male: feminine qualities associated with domesticity played a much less prominent role in this context, and sometimes were expunged altogether.21 For example, while a visitor to Thornycroft’s house would have observed a few works by the sculptor’s ‘gifted mother’, Mary Thornycroft, and a fireplace decorated by his sister ‘Miss Helen Thornycroft’, the house was nonetheless dominated by the ‘master-spirit’ and ‘controlled by his taste’.22 Its interiors, it is implied, were not so much decorated for beautiful (feminine) effect as being spontaneously artistic: ‘There is no attempt at elegance of arrangement’; in the studio, although comfortably furnished, ‘[c]ulture, true culture, not its teacup semblance, pervades the very air of the room’.23



A yet more extremely de-feminised environment was linked to Leighton’s house. A visitor, hinting perhaps at the artist’s ambiguous sexuality, noted that its interiors had a ‘certain air of formality, perhaps; or is it the knowledge that the owner is a bachelor which suggests a something lacking? There are no flowers, no suggestions of embroidery in process, nor any other indications of a woman’s presence.’24 This description (curiously at odds with what we know about the decoration of Leighton House in its time, and from its surviving interiors) deliberately suppresses feminine associations of domesticity, thereby heightening the notion that such a house was not domestic in any usual sense: ordinary domesticity was displaced by an extraordinary commitment to art.25

This erasure of female presence strikingly suggests a conscious endeavour to heighten the professional and rarefied aura of the studio-house. If home-making and interior decoration were traditionally associated with women, their absence, by contradistinction, allowed the home of the male artist to be redefined as seriously aesthetic. Significant to the representation of art in

this context is the attendant elevation of the home’s contents. Far from being trivialised as decorative touches or pretty accessories, art-objects were implicitly raised in status, as significant visual symbols of aesthetic taste and creativity. Although the studio-house effects a blurring between domestic and creative space, suggesting a continuity between areas of activity usually thought of as separate, the interconnection between these spheres does not so much downgrade art-practice into a form of domestic work, as conjure an image of art as a way of life. In a deliberate suppression of ordinary domesticity from the artistic environment, an artist’s day-to-day life was shown to be somehow different or above quotidian existence.

A compelling example of how such an image was strategically cultivated by artists is brought across in a portrait of Onslow Ford, painted by his son Wolfram around 1899 (Fig. 10.2). Here, no clear distinction is drawn between the realms of studio and living space, nor between the activities we assume to take

10.2 Wolfram Onslow Ford, Portrait of Edward Onslow Ford, R.A. (1899?), oil on canvas (untraced), from Studio Magazine (1902), Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art


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place there. Ford is shown seated in the foreground of an imprecisely defined interior, which suggests a study or drawing room. It is furnished with a chair, mirror and chandelier, and a large framed painting hangs above a hazily depicted piece of furniture, possibly suggesting a piano, on which rest a vase and a little white horse. Ford conspicuously holds up a small reproduction of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434), which evocatively reinforces the notion that the contemplation of art was a central function of this ambiguous interior’s function.26 Behind the sculptor, two examples of Ford’s own work are clearly visible. The Singer (1889), raised up high on a tall plinth, stands at the edge of a partition, and behind it the memorial to Percy Bysshe Shelley (1892) is partially visible, indicating a large workspace or gallery extending behind the wall.27 The Singer, one of a series of works by Ford linked to music, plays a key role here.28 Prominently positioned at the boundary between the ‘domestic’ space and the workspace, its iconography – a harp and singing – hints at the musical evenings that perhaps took place in the front room, and metaphorically extends Ford’s affinity with the performing arts and with the art of poetry, also embodied by the Shelley Memorial at the back.29 While thus drawing attention to the transition between the two spaces, The Singer underscores their continuity. Simultaneously representing a work created in the studio and an object displayed in the home, it suggestively embodies the moment that these two spheres spill into each other.

Art and Patronage

Ford’s portrait further provides us with an insight into the way in which interiors could function symbolically to embody an artist’s professional position. Because of its semi-public status, the studio-house provided a visual and conceptual framework through which artists could determine the aesthetic conditions for the reception of their work. In Ford’s painting, the prominent inclusion of van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait not only suggests an identification with a revered artistic tradition, it specifically invokes an artwork that itself depicts a carefully arranged interior, moreover one into which the artist famously inscribed himself through his prominent signature and reflection in the mirror at the centre of the painting. This reference might be read as a validation of the artistic significance of a domestic sphere, and as an assertion of the role it played in an artist’s professional relationships and transactions. In the nineteenth century, van Eyck’s painting was thought to represent Arnolfini’s wedding, to which the painter was witness; his self-representation in the painting therefore implies a shared space, and a certain intimacy with his sitters.30 By associating himself with this painting, Ford seems to suggest that exchanges with his own patrons were not distant financial transactions, but developed from close relationships specifically



mediated through contact taking place in the domestic realm – a realm that was largely under the artist’s jurisdiction and control.

The notion that an artist’s private home could play a decisive role in the selling of art and the cultivation of buyers has been explored by scholars in relation to Victorian painting, notably in Diana Sachko Macleod’s Art and the Victorian Middle Class (1996). In Macleod’s account, the studios of aesthetic painters could function as a kind of shop, an exclusive ‘“aesthetic boutique” designed to stimulate the acquisitive instincts of patrons’.31 Implicitly, patrons were not merely buying works of art, but seeking the integrated aesthetic concept they saw embodied in the elevated artistic lifestyles of painters. What is striking in the relationships artists developed with their buyers is the degree of authority that resided in the artist’s domestic realm. It not only indicated a phenomenal increase in artists’ ability to assert their agency, it also suggested that the efficacy of this agency originated within, and radiated from, the semi-domestic environment of the studio. Sculptors have mostly been left out of this history, but as Ford’s portrait suggests, the crucial interconnection we can see between the private lives and professional status of painters was equally relevant for sculptors’ strategies for promoting and selling work.32

Scholars have recognised that the social networks which extended through artists’ houses and neighbourhoods functioned as crucial marketing instruments for artists. Drawn into their social circles, clients and patrons were effectively ‘shared’ amongst friends.33 Sculptors naturally played a part in these networks, and collectors who bought their work were also those buying aesthetic paintings. For example, as Jason Edwards has shown, Alfred Gilbert’s Perseus Arming (1882) could be seen displayed on a table in Frederic Leyland’s library, a house that famously also housed Whistler’s controversial Peacock Room.34 While reciprocity between artists was mutually beneficial, even necessary, in pecuniary terms, it also suggests that the market for sculpture was closely contained, even guarded, and underpinned by the social contact revolving around artists’ houses. It is no coincidence that such a close-knit circle is mirrored in the development of the critical discourse around sculptors’ practice. Indeed, if we examine descriptions and images of sculptors’ homes, and compare them with art-writings that underscored sculpture’s domestic credentials, we can identify parallels which indicate that a cohesive image was built around sculptural aesthetics, which took the artist’s own domestic environment as its point of departure.

Sculpture in Art Criticism

Much of the more serious theoretical writing on sculpture published in the late nineteenth century was authored by a small group of critics, artists


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and collectors, many of them closely connected with each other through friendships and neighbourhoods.35 Edmund Gosse, an intimate friend of Thornycroft’s, and a vocal and committed champion of the New Sculpture in the 1880s and 1890s, contributed some of the most critically astute analyses of the emerging sculptural aesthetic.36 From his earliest articles, Gosse recognised sculptors’ interest in the smaller format of statuettes as a significant part of their practice, and regularly emphasised the domestic capacity of this work. His comments typically presented sculpture as a sophisticated means of enhancing a domestic space, for example, by describing the ‘air of dignity and serenity’ created by the ‘presence of … statues’, and the ‘refinement and style’ given to a large room by a ‘few beautiful specimens of sculpture’.37

Although it has been well established that Gosse’s interest in sculpture was directly inspired by his friendships with artists, surprisingly little connection has been drawn between his ideas about sculpture’s domestic aura and the individual aesthetic interiors he associated with the creators of the objects.38 But such parallels occur throughout Gosse’s writings on sculpture. The hypothetical interiors he describes share close affinities with contemporary descriptions of artists’ homes, suggesting that Gosse was strongly influenced not by an abstract notion of ‘ordinary’ middle-class houses, but by the actual interiors inhabited by artists in his circle.

For example, in his article ‘English Sculpture in 1880’, Gosse presents a brief but succinct description of a drawing room, which reveals that he has a particular type of interior in mind: ‘In corners where there now stands a gorgeous Indian vase or Japanese pot, space might be found for figures that would be intellectually more worthy of attention, and no less decorative in character.’39 The precise reference here to Japanese and Indian objects suggests that Gosse wanted to evoke the tastes and influences at that time firmly identified with Aestheticism. The eastern and oriental references in the work of leading painters such as Alma-Tadema, Whistler and Albert Moore were by that time well established.40 Gosse reinforces the Aesthetic connotations of his hypothetical interior by naming a piece of sculpture that can similarly be identified with these artists. Of ‘those vigorous little figures in bronze’ for which ‘our younger sculptors show a special aptitude’, he singles out Thomas Nelson MacLean’s Naiad (1880), then ‘being exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery’.41 The Grosvenor, from its opening in 1877 through the late 1880s, was London’s ‘Temple of Aestheticism’, as Colleen Denney described it, and MacLean was an artist closely connected with prominent aesthetic painters who exhibited there.42 Although the Naiad is untraced, MacLean’s Ione (1875) can be linked to the Romanising figures of Albert Moore, while his later Spring Festival (1881) was recognised to have been directly ‘suggested by Mr Alma Tadema’s well-known painting’ of the same title (Fig. 10.3).43



Gosse returned to the subject in more detail in his 1895 ‘The Place of Sculpture in Daily Life II: Sculpture in the House’ article for the Magazine of Art. This much-cited piece of journalism has often been interpreted as paradigmatic of the commercial aspirations that underlay sculptors’ production of small bronzes. But if we study in detail his descriptions of objects and their domestic settings, we find that considerable care is taken to qualify their association with the interior, distinguishing explicitly between ‘ordinary’ homes and more sophisticated aesthetic environments. In a telling description, Gosse speculates on the kind of home a ‘reasonably well-to-do person, who would naturally buy pictures’ would occupy:

suppose that he has one of the dark harmonious drawing-rooms or libraries which are now in vogue, rooms which Mr William Morris first put into our power to arrange. The woodwork, I suppose, is sombre; the wall-papers glaucous green or dusky red, the furniture, as far as possible, in the taste of the last century – Sheraton and Chippendale and Hepplewhite.

Gosse’s terms of reference here are highly specific. His mention of ‘drawing-rooms’, rather than ‘parlours’, immediately raises the standing of this imaginary house,44 while ‘pictures’ and ‘libraries’ also evoke affluence and intellectual status. These terms may certainly suggest the home of a wealthy collector; they are also strikingly evocative of artists’ houses. Indeed, Gosse mentions colours and stylistic details that by this time were the well-known hallmarks of a kind of ‘Arts and Crafts Aestheticism’ associated with tastes of distinguished artists. Indeed, contemporary images and journal articles describing artists’ interiors regularly named these very details: wooden panelling, walls painted ‘Indian’ or ‘Pompeian’ red, historic and revival ‘Chippendale’ or ‘Sheraton’ furniture alongside contemporary Morris designs and textiles. For example, these were all noted features in the homes of Leighton, Thornycroft, George H. Boughton and others.45 Thus, rather than presenting any kind of generic home, Gosse may well have been describing the interiors of his artist-friends.

10.3 Thomas Nelson MacLean, Spring Festival (1881), bronze, 73 cms, private collection. Courtesy of Live Auctioneers LLC


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Gosse’s descriptions of the individual sculptures contained within these spaces are similarly exacting. He points not only to some of the more obvious sculptural trends, such as the preference for bronze over marble, and the importance of the statuette-format, but also draws attention to the subtle visual aesthetic that sculptors were developing. He lingers over the details of the ‘delicate surface’ of the ‘bronze of artists’; the fine finish of lost-wax casts that captured the ‘actual touch of the artist’, down to the ‘last little thumb-mark’ of the original model; the ‘patina, in which are perceived all manner of tones of olive-brown and coppery-green, and tints of gold and shades of black’ – colours we can readily associate with Aestheticism.46 Highlighting such fine details, Gosse demonstrates his recognition of important contemporary concerns with the visual nuances of sculpture – colour, modelling, craftsmanship and individualised authorship. Furthermore, he makes a point of distinguishing between different types of statuettes, noting their varying scales, the design of their pedestals, and their origin and role in a sculptor’s oeuvre.

Gosse’s comments suggest an intimate familiarity and personal knowledge of these objects, conceivably gained through visits to the studio-houses of artist-friends. Indeed, if we examine his descriptions of the objects, we can draw just such parallels. His description of ‘pieces of bronze about two feet high’, placed on ‘well-designed pedestals’, can be readily linked to images of the homes of Thornycroft, Leighton, Ford and George Frampton, where precisely such objects abound. Similarly, Gosse mentions ‘tiny statuettes’ of

10.4 George H. Boughton’s studio, Campden Hill, London, from Joseph Hatton, ‘Glimpses of Artistic London’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1883), the London Library



‘sketches of larger statues’, which we might, for example, relate to miniature casts of Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877), which were visible in the studios of Boughton, J Edgar Boehm, John Pettie, as well as in Leighton House (Fig. 10.4).47

Further specific analogies can be detected when we examine the photo-graphs of the anonymous collector’s home that accompany Gosse’s article. For example, comparing Leighton’s home with Gosse’s image of Leighton’s Sluggard shows marked similarities in the manner of display: in the midst of a book-case, with framed pictures hung above (see Figs 10.1 and 10.5).

Similar parallels can be drawn between other images reproduced by Gosse, such as that showing Thornycroft’s Mower (1882), which bears close parallel with the rooms in Thornycroft’s house. Similar eclectic furnishings – historic Sheraton interspersed with contemporary Morris pieces, Turkish and Persian rugs, William de Morgan and Doulton ceramic ware

– feature in both homes, and the manner of display of the sculpture is again similar: the Mower is placed on a mantelshelf above the hearth, an abstract-patterned Eastern rug before it (Figs 10.6 and 10.7).

Although unnamed by Gosse, Caroline Dakers has revealed that the rooms photographed for his article belonged to a silk-merchant, Stephen Winkworth, who, like other better-known collectors, such as the Ionides, lived in Holland Park.48 Such a closely clustered artistic neighbourhood, where collectors lived next to the creators of objects in their houses, fulfilled at once the acquisitive desires of patrons and pecuniary needs of artists. But the role it played in perpetuating and extending outward the unified aesthetic identity of artists’ houses must be recognised as equally significant. With its sculpture, paintings and furnishings, the collector’s home both emulated the aesthetic of artists in his circle, and relied on them for its creation. By mirroring the artist’s studio-house, often by employing the same decorators, designers and furnishers, the collector could fashion an interior fitting for the display of their artworks.49

This interdependency is strongly insinuated in Gosse’s descriptions. By highlighting the harmonious accord between the nuanced colours of the

10.5 Frederic Leighton, The Sluggard (1884) in an interior at Holly Lodge, Holland Park, London (home of Stephen Winkworth), from Edmund Gosse, ‘The Place of Sculpture in Daily Life II: Sculpture in the House’, Magazine of Art (1895), the London Library


10.6 Hamo Thornycroft, The Mower (1882), in an interior at Holly Lodge, Holland Park, London (home of Stephen Winkworth), from Edmund Gosse,

‘The Place of Sculpture in Daily Life II: Sculpture in the House’, Magazine of Art (1895), the London Library


10.7 R.W. Thomas, photograph of Hamo Thornycroft in his studio, 2 Melbury Road, London (undated). Courtesy of Leeds Museums

& Galleries (Henry Moore Institute Archive)


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bronzes and the hues of the walls, and by precisely delineating the scale and proportion of the objects in relation to their settings, he evokes an image of a room of perfect compositional and spatial harmony. This symbiosis, between room and contents, compellingly hints that a patron, like Winkworth, was guided to purposefully design the interiors of his home to complement the art within it. If the collector’s house represents a type of reciprocal aesthetic that was self-consciously fashioned in the image of the artist’s home, both the qualities of the work itself, and its manner of diffusion, can be seen in a different light. Art collectors and patrons, by living in neighbourhoods populated by respected artists and cultivating friendships with them, exercised the process of buying and selling in a way that was mutually nurtured and mediated.50 Art, and its embrace into a particular visual context, can therefore be seen as a manifestation of personal friendship, and a signal of receptivity to an artist’s individual creative philosophy.51 The similarities between interiors occupied by collectors and their neighbouring artists suggest a process of transference and emulation that radiated from the artist’s home, implying that the dynamic we habitually expect between art and interiors was fundamentally reversed. Sculpture, as Gosse attests, was not merely regarded as a generic domestic accessory; rather, only certain kinds of refined aesthetic environments were deemed suited to the display of modern sculpture. Seen against this background, Gosse’s characterisation of sculpture as ‘domestic’ becomes much more complex than might at first appear. It suggests that the modern sculptural practice he championed was neither suitable for, let alone predicated on, the demands of ‘ordinary’ interiors. Rather, Gosse seems to propose, the New Sculpture stood for a self-consciously conceived high art, developed for specific audiences and destined for carefully considered aesthetic spaces. Only in such special environments, precisely attuned to the objects they contained, could sculpture come into its own.

Conclusion

The common association of late-Victorian sculpture with ‘domesticity’ has so far been seen as unproblematic, but I would contend that the lack of clarity around the nature of this relationship, especially the question of the kinds of interiors that sculpture was intended for, has had considerably negative consequences for the historical reception of British sculpture. The very notion that this work was made expressly for the middle-class consumer market has lent it a peculiarly anti-aesthetic and old-fashioned image, thus misaligning what were often highly refined and unique works of art with the wider output of domestic consumer goods. Given this context, it is perhaps not surprising that, until very recently, the visual sophistication and theoretical complexity



of British sculpture has gone virtually unrecognised.52 It is only when we examine sculptors’ strategies for self-promotion more closely that the active role they played in orchestrating the aesthetic and critical framework around their work quickly becomes apparent; a framework that in great part depended on both the image and the social contact that revolved around their homes. By redirecting our attention to the nuances of both the work and the tangible individual contexts in which it was made, a much clearer sense emerges of the creative intent that shaped both artists’ aesthetic vision, and the place of their work in the Victorian art world. Through their exemplary interiors, sculptors were at least partly able to determine the agenda, one which was influential upon, not solely determined by, the external environments into which sculpture was circulated.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Wouter Davidts for having encouraged me to develop this essay, an earlier version of which was published (in Flemish) in D. Pültau and W. Davidts (eds), Art and the Home, special edition, De Witte Raaf, 121, Belgium, 2006. My special thanks also to Nicholas Mead, Penelope Curtis, Jason Edwards and David Getsy for their many thoughtful comments and helpful suggestions on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. Gosse, 1880, 178; Gosse, 1895, 371; Sparrow, 1902, 107; [Gosse], 1890, 794; [Gosse], 1888, 722. For further references to articles making such links, see Droth, 2004a.

2. The association of sculpture with interiors is typically discussed very broadly; for example, Avery and Marsh, 1985; King, 1985. More recently, scholars have paid closer attention to the specific issues at stake, notably Droth et al., 2000; Edwards, 2002; Yarrington, 2005.

3. See, for example, Cohen, 2006; Gere and Hoskins, 2000; Weber-Soros, 1999; Cooper, 1987.

4. See Macleod, 1996.

5. This has much to do with sculpture’s easy conflation with other kinds of ‘things’, which, in the context of the Victorian interior, have both implicitly and explicitly absorbed it into discussions about Victorian commodity culture. See Bridgeman and Drury, 1975; Saisselin, 1984; Briggs, 1988; Olalquiaga, 1998. For an insightful discussion about the contested status of the interior as a space for art, see Reed, 1996a.

6. Notable exceptions include Yarrington, 2005, and Edwards, 2002.

7. Beattie, 1983, 181, 185. See also Read, 1982, 341.

8. For the French industry in sculpture reproduction in the nineteenth century, see especially Cadet, 1992; Chevillot, 1992; de Caso, 1975; and Droth 2004a, for further references.

9. See in particular Codell, 2003.

10. The interiors of the famous became, as a whole, a popular subject, particularly of individuals associated with the arts and literature, such as actors and novelists, but it is the home of artists that


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provides us with a privileged insight into interiors where sculpture played a significant role. For a recent analysis, see Codell, 2003, 45ff.

11. See references below and the following in Strand Magazine: How, 1892; How, 1893a; How, 1893b; Steelcroft, 1896. Of the many other examples, see especially [Goodman], 1901; Stephens, 1884; Haweis, 1882. For further references see Codell, 2003; Dakers, 1999; Walkley, 1994.

12. Anon., 1893, 5. Leighton House has been particularly well studied; for two insightful recent studies (and further references) see Campbell, 1999, and chapter 3 in Edwards, 2006.

13. George D. Leslie cited in Walkley, 1994, xxiii. According to Walkley, ‘in London alone, over 1300 domestic artists’ studios were erected during the 60 years prior to the First World War’. See also Girouard, 1972a and 1972b.

14. See Dakers, 1999.

15. Dolman, 1899, 612.

16. Dolman, 1899, 611. For a Modernist interpretation of Alma-Tadema’s romanising settings, see Prettejohn, 2002.

17. Hatton, 1883, 830–31.

18. Meynell, 1886, 68–9.

19. Meynell, 1886, 69.

20. Hatton, 1883, 831.

21. This is a complex subject, both in terms of the role women played in such environments, and of what constituted ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’. For example, while no female influence is acknowledged by a visitor to George H. Boughton’s house, the artist and his interiors are described in terms we would hardly consider ‘masculine’. There is a cabinet ‘daintily decorated by the artist himself’, a ‘frieze of the pretty reedy flower known as flag’, ‘a tiny window of a pretty design’. Similarly, the artist’s work ‘deals chiefly with the gentle and domestic side of life’, and his ‘touches were of the lightest and finest … often made with the tip of his little finger’ (Hatton, 1883, 841–2). The complexity of this subject can only be superficially touched on here. For a detailed study of women in the home decorating movement, which reveals the particular Aestheticism cultivated by several women-authors contributing to this discourse, see Schaffer, 2000, and Chase, 1996. See also Atkinson, 2006; and the special issue of the same journal, Aynsley and Berry, 2005. My thanks to Penelope Curtis for discussing this point with me and for directing me to useful source material.

22. For more on Mary Thornycroft and her children, see McCracken, 1996, 3–8.

23. Meynell, 1886, 69, 71.

24. Hatton, 1883, 834.

25. This was sometimes true even of spaces designated for use by women. As Dakers has shown, the Thornycroft residence had ‘no need for a boudoir – the Thornycroft women were in their studios. During daylight hours the domestic interior was left to the cook and the housemaid’ (1999, 180).

26. The original painting, in the National Gallery, is 82.2 × 60 cm, oil on panel (NG186, acquired 1842). For an insightful interpretation of how the presence of the van Eyck print in this portrait functions as a metaphor for Ford’s sculptural realism, see Getsy, 2004b, 124. For a sustained discussion on the importance of van Eyck’s painting to nineteenth-century artists, see Graham, 2007.

27. For more on the Shelley Memorial, see Getsy, 2004b, chapter 3; Haskell, 1978, 3–6.

28. The Singer was paired with a statuette called Applause (1893), similarly pharaoic and raised on the same type of pedestal. These were followed by bronze statues of Music and Dance (both 1890).

29. Harps, and more often lyres (associated with Apollo, god of poetry and music), were commonly taken as poetic symbols. Perhaps it is not entirely accidental that a lyre, although of a different kind to the one held by The Singer, is the subject of one of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1820).

30. See Graham, 2007.

31. Macleod, 1996, 296. Indeed, Macleod goes as far as to say that these interiors are an indication of artists’ cynical attitudes towards collectors, suggesting that their homes were intentionally set up



as ‘aesthetic traps’ designed to ‘lure’ and ‘exploit’ patrons. A similar, if slightly less critical, point is made by Dakers, who notes that the collective of artists’ houses in Holland Park provided a ‘formidable store-house of temptations’ (1999, 255).

32. The domestic aura that begins to surround sculptural practice in the late nineteenth century does seem to suggest that sculptors were emulating approaches longer associated with painters, successfully to some extent, as this essay suggests, although sculpture never attracted a fraction of the prices that fellow-painters were able to command. The question of prices and quantities, outlay and profits, remains an elusive one as far as sculpture is concerned and is in need of much further research.

33. See especially Dakers, 1999; Macleod, 1996; and Codell, 2003.

34. Edwards, 2006, 54.

35. See Codell, 1989, 139–63.

36. For an analysis of Gosse as sculpture critic, see Stocker, 1985; Edwards, 2002; and chapter 3 in Getsy, 2004b.

37. Gosse, 1880, 178–9.

38. Further, there are close parallels between Gosse’s published ideas and those we know from Thornycroft’s notes and letters. For example, in a letter of 1883, Thornycroft wrote: ‘I have an idea that sculpture furnishes a room & pictures do not. … a good picture … takes the eye out of the room, it has its own atmosphere. … But a nice piece of statuary of the proper colour for the room … does furnish, for the room is its atmosphere.’ Compare with Gosse’s claim that ‘the surroundings of a piece of sculpture are its atmosphere’. Although the letter was not addressed to Gosse, it suggests a firmly held conviction that the sculptor may well have discussed with the poet. Letter from Thornycroft to Agatha Cox, 13 November 1883, Thornycroft Papers, Henry Moore Institute Archives. My thanks to David Getsy for reminding me of this letter; see Getsy’s introduction in Droth et al., 2000, 3.

39. Gosse, 1880, 179.

40. For example, Whistler’s Rose and Silver: The Princess from the Land of Porcelain (1863–64, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington DC), a portrait of Christine Spartali wearing a kimono, holding a Japanese fan and standing before a Japanese screen. For more on oriental and especially Japanese influences in Whistler, see Anderson and Koval, 1994. For the association between Orientalism and Aestheticism, see chapter 3 in Denney, 2000. See also chapter 3 in Edwards, 2006, for a recent succinct appraisal of the hallmarks of Aestheticism with particular reference to sculpture.

41. In his early recognition of the sculptor, some five years before MacLean’s exhibition of statuettes at Bellman & Ivey’s, Gosse shows himself to be acutely keyed into current aesthetic concerns in sculpture. His article predates some of the major innovations in sculptural practice, demonstrating his awareness of emerging concerns. For MacLean, see Blaikie, 1886, 233–8.

42. Denney, 2000. For a recent account of the significance of the Grosvenor in relation to sculpture, see Edwards, 2006. See also Denney and Casteras, 1996; and Newall, 1995.

43. Blaikie, 1886, 236. In the 1880s, MacLean was a member of the Society of British Artists, of which Whistler was President between 1886 and 1888. MacLean was among the artists who resigned in support of Whistler when he was forced to stand down as President. Other documents, including dinner invitations, show MacLean’s closeness to Whistler’s circle (Centre for Whistler Studies, Glasgow University Library).

44. For an analysis of this distinction, see Logan, 2001.

45. See Hatton, 1883; How, 1892, 1893a and 1893b.

46. Gosse, 1895, 370.

47. Early biographies are good sources for the social networks between artists – for Boughton, see Baldry, 1904; for Pettie, see Hardie, 1908. For Boehm, see Stocker, 1988. A number of letters by Boughton, Pettie and Boehm are preserved at the National Art Library.

48. Dakers, 1999.

49. See Dakers, 1999, which demonstrates that the same architects and designers were used repeatedly by the circle, including Aitchison, Crane, Morris, Norman Shaw and John Belcher.

50. As Dakers suggests, the silk trade was not an indifferent industry, but one closely relevant to the art world, providing a vital, luxurious raw material for designers, like Morris, and, on occasion,


Martina Droth 229

prompting partnerships. Winkworth’s neighbour, silk-merchant William Rawlinson, worked with Morris and Co. on the reintroduction of traditional silk-dying methods. See Dakers, 1999, 257.

51. Of course, artists developed different relationships with different patrons, as many of the sources cited above trace. Additionally, see Peppiatt and Bellony-Rewald, 1983, especially 75ff.

52. Getsy and Edwards recently challenged this attitude; see Getsy, 2004b; and Edwards, 2006. See also Droth, 2004a.


Sculpture and Aesthetic Intent in the Late Victorian Interior. 2010

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