A History of Sculpture

by Ernest Henry Short

The consequences, as far as English sculpture is concerned, can best be realized from a visit to the Gibson Gallery at Burlington House, London.

Gibson, who was born in 1790, was, perhaps, the most popular of Canova’s English pupils—assuming that he did not forfeit all claim to be regarded as an Englishman during his twenty-seven years’ stay in Rome. Upon his death, in 1866, he bequeathed the contents of his studio to the British public, and they are now housed in the Diploma Gallery at the Royal Academy. Gibson is perhaps best known through his “Venus.” It created a stir at the time of its first exhibition, owing to the sculptor’s attempt to popularize “tinted” sculpture, in imitation of the classical fashion. The statue was designed to stand in a pale purple-blue niche. The hair and eyes of the goddess were decidedly coloured, the body being stained a rose tint. Gibson, however, failed to persuade the public and the sculptors of his age that any departure from an absolute dependence upon pure form was desirable. The “Tinted Venus” was the first and the last of its race.

JOHN GIBSON

HYLAS AND THE NYMPHS

Tate Gallery, London

An equally illuminating example of Gibson’s style can be seen at the Tate Gallery. This is the group, “[Hylas and the Nymphs],” modelled in 1826. The technical industry of the sculptor and his feeling for sculptural form are obvious at once. But no one, comparing the “[Hylas]” with the modern works of the British school which surround it, can fail to see the sickly conventionalism with which it is imbued. Notice, for instance, the modelling of the limbs of the two nymphs, and compare them with those of the boy. Surely any imaginative sculptor of the modern school would insist, above all, upon the obvious contrast between the male and the female form, seeing that the story of Hylas itself depends upon this very point. Gibson, however, practically models the male and the female limbs, the male and the female flesh, alike. Hylas has not the legs of a youth, nor have the nymphs, who have been smitten by his beauty, the legs of women. Gibson has chosen to adopt a conventional compromise, unrelated to anything in nature, and selected for no other reason than a fancied resemblance to the Greek style. The three figures are graceful enough. But they are unsatisfying in the last degree to all who have felt the far more potent emotions arising from a rigid adherence to nature. Hence “[Hylas and the Nymphs]” and the works in the Gibson Gallery remain as perpetual memorials of all that the artists of our own day had to rid themselves before the rebirth of English sculpture was possible.

Matters improved very little during the thirty years following the production of Gibson’s “[Hylas].” What can we learn from the exhibitions of 1851 and 1862, which may be fairly taken to represent the apotheosis of mid-Victorian artistic taste?

In his official guide to the Fine Art Section of 1862 the editor, F. T. Palgrave—of “Golden Treasury” fame—refers to sculpture as “the forlorn hope of modern art,” and proceeds to answer the question “whence this deathly decline?” The exhibition contained examples of all that was best in English sculpture to that time. “The Falling Titan,” by Banks, now in the Diploma Gallery; the “Thetis and Achilles” relief, now in the Tate Gallery; Nollekens’ “[Cupid and Psyche]” Joseph’s ”Wilberforce” (Westminster Abbey), and works by Flaxman, Westmacott, Chantrey, Wyatt, Watson and Park represented the earlier masters. Sculptures by Armstead, Baily, Foley, Gibson, MacDowell, Marshall, Woolner and the younger Westmacott witnessed to the achievements of the living. Yet Palgrave could only grieve over the decline in natural taste and the entire absence of that healthy severity and earnestness of spirit in which sculpture flourishes. “Serious as the subject claims to be,” says Palgrave, “I confess it is difficult to think of Nollekens’ ‘Venus,’ Canova’s ‘Venus,’ Thorvaldsen’s ‘[Venus],’ Gibson’s ‘Venus,’ everybody’s ‘Venus’ with due decorum. One fancies one healthy, modern laugh would clear the air of these idle images—one agrees with the honest old woman in the play who preferred a roast duck to all the birds in the heathen mythology.”

In the “Albert Memorial” erected in Kensington Gardens, London, “by the Queen and people of a grateful country,” we have a concrete example of what was in Palgrave’s mind when he wrote.