Page 55 - Studio International - July August 1972

commemorated in stone or bronze. Their
Free standing monuments were matters of public concern as for the awful Richard Coeur de Lion outside
Parliament, and Wyatt for the story of the
and civic well as public subscription, and in one case at removal of his Wellington from the Hyde Park
least, the Martyrs Memorial at Oxford, of
Corner arch to Aldershot. Unfortunately there
public controversy. Nelson and Wellington, were no neglected geniuses underneath the
Peter Ferriday then Peel, Bright and Cobden, and the young mediocrities; the lesser men employed on
Queen and her Consort were the first generation architectural sculpture were no more
whose effigies were placed in front of town halls, interesting.
or in market places, wide streets or parks. And The commemorative vocation of the English
Theed, Foley, M. C. Wyatt, Noble, Calder sculptor expanded suddenly in 1861 with the
Marshall, Bailey, Behnes and Marochetti made death of Prince Albert, the Good and Great.
their fortunes. But they were, this generation of From 1862 thousands of tons of masonry were
1840 to 1870, talentless almost without deposited on our soil in his honour; the spread
exception, dull ghosts of Chantrey, limp of Alberts finally became a Victorian joke. The
traditionalists. Foley is remembered only for finest, and largest, deposit was that in
the seated Albert in the Memorial, Marochetti Kensington Garden, however much it owed in

Monument to Captain Richard Burgess by Thomas Banks. Photo: National Monuments Record
The best of English sculpture is indoors, under
church and cathedral roofs, and the very best
was for a long time the produce of Dutch,
Flemish and French immigrants. With the
national self-consciousness resulting from the
Napoleonic Wars the British sculptor was
provided with a grander opportunity. In
Flaxman the country had a designer of
European reputation and among his
contemporaries were more than competent men.
In Nelson and Wellington we had great heroes.
But the interaction of neo-classic sculptors on
early nineteenth-century military and naval
heroes produced something closer to the
ludicrous than the noble—near-naked generals
and admirals with modern rifle and cannon are
the entertainments of St Paul's Cathedral,
second only to the whispering gallery. The
external commemorations usually took the
ironically Napoleonic form of the column. They
rose in Nelson's honour from Dublin to
Yarmouth, but it was not until 1838 that
Railton's column was selected, and not until
1867 that Landseer's lions were put in place. If
this was a lengthy process it was rapid compared
with Alfred Stevens's Wellington monument for
St Paul's, which lasted from 1857 to 1912 and
generated as much heat as Waterloo itself.
With the deaths of Sir Robert Peel and
Wellington, and the repeal of the Corn Laws
producing the idols of the manufacturing cities
in Bright and Cobden, the rage for public
sculpture began. The British had become
conscious of their unmatched industrial and
shipping power, of their unrivalled wealth and
happiness, of their technical and hygienic
superiority, and of their spreading influence
across the world. Apart from an innate national
superiority it was recognized that the country's
position derived from the labours of its Great
Men.
The cult of the Great Man, civic and national,
was a Victorian phenomenon. Every occupation,
every denomination, every stage of the peerage
had its Great Man. Spurgeon was a Great Man,
Pusey was a Great Man, Stephenson was a
Great Man, the Duke of Devonshire was a
Great Man, W. G. Grace was a Great Man.
They should all be publicly and posthumously
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