Chapter XV The Modern British School the Nineteenth Century
This is an English book. It is written for men and women who look upon the world from the distinctive standpoint arising from the use of a common language. At the head of a chapter devoted to sculpture in modern England, let it be said, definitely and defiantly, that there is an English school.
The proposition is by no means as sure of general acceptance as it should be. There are many critics who appear to doubt the existence of English sculpture. They seem to regard Paris as the only source of modern work and the English school as a mere branch of the French. The real truth is that, apart from technique, the English sculptor has little to learn from his Continental neighbour. We are not writing of clay-thumbers or marble-chippers, who work for the promise of a measure of material prosperity. We have in mind earnest craftsmen who turn to sculpture naturally—joying in an art which enables them to give form to the thoughts and feelings astir around them. Great Britain has no cause to fear a comparison between the number of such men working in England and France. Owing to the lack of a gallery like the Luxembourg and the absence of the magnificent facilities offered by the Salons, the quality and the quantity of the work produced by the English school is hard to gauge. Nevertheless, it exists. When the English National Gallery is rebuilt according to Barry’s design and the two glazed loggie, flanking the main entrance and each running for 300 feet by 15 along the face of the building, are filled with British sculpture, doubt will be impossible.
Nor is this all. English sculpture is, in a very true sense, a national art. Not as we should apply the term to the art of seventeenth-century Holland or Ancient Athens, but in the sense that modern French sculpture is national. In both England and France, a body of sculptors has arisen, able and anxious to express to the full individualities which have been moulded by the influences among which it works.
As we have seen, this became possible in France about the middle of the last century. In England the growth of a similar movement may be traced back some thirty years. A convenient date is 1877, when Sir Frederic Leighton exhibited his epoch-making bronze “Athlete struggling with a Python.”
After the death of Flaxman, the English sculptors drifted into the same blind alley in which most of the Frenchmen found themselves. For fifty years they made little or no effort to rid themselves of the false canons of Canova and the philo-Hellenes. Westmacott, MacDowell, and Wyatt, to mention three English sculptors, all based their style upon that of the Venetian master. Arguing from the supreme achievements of the Greeks, they chose to imitate the classic manner as closely as possible. Their technique was Greek; their subjects were Greek; everything was Greek except their habits of thought and feeling. To Canova and Thorvaldsen, the ideas of Winckelmann and Lessing had come with the freshness of a newly discovered truth. They had the stimulating force of novelty. During the following fifty years, however, the pseudo-Greek canon was merely accepted as a convenient form which at least had the merit of sparing the artist the trouble of fresh invention.
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