Mind-boggling things

By A.C.

"VICTORIAN sculpture" is a phrase that can make the heart sink. One thinks of dreary monuments and dour busts. Certainly, many sculptural works produced in the heyday of the British Empire were stiff and worthy. But then many were also dazzling and unusual, as a wonderful new show at Tate Britain reveals. More than 100 statues, friezes, ceramics and other objects have been exhumed from storage by curators from Tate and the Yale Centre for British Art. The combination of imperial pomposity, neoclassical grace and arts-and-crafts inventiveness makes "Sculpture Victorious" an absorbing and often surprising tour.

The art of the Victorians was roundly despised by the modernists who followed them. Much was a bit dull, such as monuments to war heroes like the Duke of Wellington and endlessly reproduced portraits of the monarch, both of which are documented in the show. It is still seen by many as slightly ridiculous, concedes Jason Edwards, a professor of art history at York University, who collaborated on the exhibit and its (appropriately) massive catalogue.

Yet in fact Queen Victoria's reign from 1837 to 1901 was, say the curators, a golden age for sculpture in Britain. It witnessed an expansion of sculpture on a scale not seen before, thanks to royal patronage, commissions for new buildings and public squares, and innovations in casting and reproductions. From coins to busts to life-sized works, sculpture formed what the catalogue calls "an integral part of everyday experience".

The show opens predictably enough with Victoria herself: both as we know her, brooding and squat, and as a tender new queen of 19, in Francis Chantrey's sensuous, bare-shouldered marble bust. Chantrey's work was one of the first to be mechanically reproduced by a pantograph machine developed by Benjamin Cheverton, which helped make sculpture accessible to all. Chantrey was also a successful artist whose bequest to the nation allowed what is now the Tate Gallery to buy important contemporary sculpture at the time. Artists in this period, says curator Greg Sullivan, were inspired both by technical innovation and by a general societal fascination with the past, prompted in part by archaeological finds in Egypt and Greece. They thus experimented with technique and chose historical subjects as motifs.

Works inspired by the medieval era and by antiquity are given separate rooms in the show. The highlight of the first is one of 18 statues from the House of Lords that has never before been removed for public viewing. Saher de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, was one of the barons who signed Magna Carta; his chain-mail-clad figure is a fine, detailed example of the new process of electrotyping. A similar technique produced a striking upright version of the tomb effigy of Queen Elizabeth I from Westminster Abbey. The ceremonial gives way to the lyrical in the next gallery, filled with neoclassical youths and charging horses. Frederic Leighton's stupendous "Athlete Wrestling a Python" is one of several works directly inspired by the Parthenon frieze removed from Athens by Lord Elgin and endlessly copied after it was put on display in London in 1817.

The largest gallery mimics the Great Exhibition of 1851 with an array of showpieces meant to amaze and project power. A gaudy giant ceramic peacock and majolica elephant go eye to eye; on a bombastic gold-and-silver shield, prancing cavalrymen very literally celebrate the crushing of Indian mutineers at Lucknow in 1857. Meant to show off Britain's role as an industrial powerhouse, these works are masterpieces of technical craft. Nearby stands "The Greek Slave", a classical white Christian maiden in chains by an American sculptor, Hiram Powers, that became a sensation of the day. The unspoken hypocrisy, given the vast American slave trade, prompted John Bell, a renowned British sculptor, to respond with "The American Slave", a dark-skinned figure in bronze and silver, and also in chains. Together, the pair suggest the first stirrings of dissent in the marble certainties of empire.

It is the last room, however, that really packs a wallop, bringing together a number of unique works that mark the final chapters of the Victorian empire. Extraordinary pieces in mixed media include the towering figure of Dame Alice Owen in marble, alabaster, bronze, paint and gilding; a fabulous unfurling bronze triptych by Mary Seton Watts of "Death Crowning Innocence"; and the show's crowning glory, an immense game of chess between Queen Elizabeth I and Philip II of Spain by William Reynolds-Stephens. "A Royal Game" uses ships from the Spanish Armada as chess pieces; its two figures are sumptuously detailed on a peculiar tomb-like plinth. It was completed in 1911, but Reynolds-Stephens's interest in empire and in representing a great Britain in a historical sculptural form is absolutely in tune with the rest of the exhibition. It's a final vision that more than justifies what Mr Sullivan calls the ability of Victorian sculpture "to produce mind-boggling things that can still surprise us now."

"Sculpture Victorious" is at Tate Britain in London until May 25th