Catalogue: Sculpture Victorious

Sculpture has been curiously overlooked in conceptions of the Victorian period, even though so much of it is around us. Sculpture Victorious is the first exhibition to attempt a synthetic examination of Victorian sculpture.

On a simple level, just by giving this focus to sculpture, the exhibition helps to recover its central place. Far from being marginal, sculpture was ubiquitous and the Victorians invested hugely in it. The driving question behind this has to be why.

What was it about sculpture that made it such a critical form of representation at this time? For me and my co-curators, the objects were key to thinking through these questions. I think the book conveys in a very visual way where we ended up with the exhibition.

The front cover depicts a seven-foot majolica elephant by Minton and on the back there is a photograph of Alfred Drury’s workshop with a huge Queen Victoria statue – two images that succinctly evoke our key themes.

Most immediately they represent unmistakable symbols of empire, and they do so as sculptures at their most victorious – celebratory, affirmative and uncritical emblems of British power.

They convey this not only at the level of iconography but also physically and materially – this was an age of industry, invention and technology, and the objects are part of the enormous momentum of material production. They highlight the relationship of craft to industry and sculpture’s expansive remit as a physical art.

Wide definition

Of course the elephant gives a clear indication that this book rejects traditional definitions of sculpture as a fine art. We found that it makes little historical sense to draw boundaries between sculpture and the decorative or industrial arts, since the profession itself fluidly spanned all these forms.

So our selection of objects comprises marble, bronze and plaster as well as electrotype, silver, wood and ivory; it includes independent statues as well as trophies, caskets, coins and jewellery.

We took objects, rather than artists, as our starting point, and we included not only sculptures but also representations of sculpture in new media such as photography, stereoscopy and chromolithography.

Many exhibition catalogues begin with essays followed by a catalogue of objects. We had initially conceived the book along those lines, but felt this diluted the focus on objects. The strength of the project lies in the groupings and juxtapositions of works – both as specific objects, but also as serving a shared purpose in a larger historical context.

New scholarship

The book includes an introduction by the curators and then focuses on the 150 objects selected for the exhibition, written by the larger curatorial team at Tate and the Yale Center for British Art, and by a number of invited authors. Interspersed with that are short “postscripts”, which take the objects into a more discursive direction.

Many of the catalogue entries read more like short essays, and offer new research and analysis of works that, in many cases, have never been published or photographed. The scholarly field of Victorian sculpture is small, and the book offered a way of opening it out. This meant including authors not previously associated with the field and bringing in younger scholars.

It was a transatlantic endeavour – a collaboration between Tate Britain and Yale. This inevitably made us consider our different audiences and contexts, and helped us bring questions about international cultural dialogue into our thinking.

Martina Droth is a co-curator (with Michael Hatt, Jason Edwards and Greg Sullivan) of Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837-1901, at Tate Britain from 25 February to 25 May