The New Sculpture and the Old: British Sculpture between Painting and Architecture, Greece, Rome, Florence, and France, c.1870-1910

Abstract

The New Sculpture was, in a sense, no such thing. All the major figures of the movement turned in varying ways to tradition and the past to justify and inform their practice in the present. In this self-conscious ‘revival’ or ‘renaissance’ of forgotten principles, the elements of rediscovery and continuity with the traditions of the past were taken seriously, though the leading figures, including Alfred Gilbert, William Hamo Thornycroft, Edward Onslow Ford, and Thomas Stirling Lee, were both different among themselves and eclectic in their actual work. As individuals, all looked to French Sculpture, which had seen a momentous neo-Florentine revival from the 1860s onwards, yet the Quattrocentist mode, with its gradual apotheosis of Donatello, in particular, was paired with an enduring admiration for fifth-century Greek and Hellenistic sculpture, increasingly seen as having pictorial qualities in line with modern naturalism alongside the qualities of breadth, purity, and serenity associated with an earlier neoclassicism. As modellers, all aimed in varying degrees for a picturesque, colouristic handling of form that was explored in the monumental sphere as well as in small scale-works for the interior. Ruskin’s ideas, too, were more important for the New Sculpture than has been recognised. The movement produced very varied results in the field of architecture.