Sculpture, Craft and Design Reform, 1837-1901

Overview

Sculpture is at the heart of Victorian visual and material culture in a number of ways, crossing and challenging the boundaries between craft and manufacture, as well as the figurative and the decorative, and appearing on any number of more or less functional objects. In this module, we consider the previously neglected centrality of sculpture to the design reform agenda, considering the ways in which sculptural production was industrialised and democratically diffused throughout Victorian culture, and the ways in which sculptures responded to the challenge of new industrial technologies and materials, as well as sought to challenge the industrialization of sculpture through a revival of a host of historical craft processes. Seeking to challenge the dominance of free-standing full size figurative marbles and bronzes in the extant scholarship, in favour of a focus on sculptural objects of various kinds in the decorative and applied arts, the module also seeks to challenge the notion that the industrialization of sculpture in nineteenth-century Britain led to a deterioration in quality or creativity. The module will explore a range of media, potentially ranging from iron through zinc to leather and silver, as well as wood, glass, parian and other ceramic forms, and precious and semi-precious metals and stones. Given the paucity of scholarship on this area, the module will be self-consciously object-focused, and will proceed through a series of unprecedently close readings of individual objects and groups of related objects. The module should enable the development of a range of materially-focussed and materially-diverse skills, across a broad range of genres, that might help applicants in developing a portfolio of skills with both art and design institutions in mind, and the curation of historic domestic and other interiors.

Aims

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

• A broad sense of the place of sculpture in the Victorian design reform agenda
• A broad sense of the intersections of Victorian sculpture, technology and craft
• An ability to read industrially produced and hand crafted sculptural objects in all of their detail and complexity

Outline

Possible seminar outline:

• Sculpture, Design Reform and the Great Exhibitions: Critical Contexts
• The Art Union and the World of Victorian Parian
• Sculpture and Design Reform: John Bell at Felix Summerley’s and Elsewhere
• From Naples to Sheffield: Alfred Stevens’s Applied Arts Career
• Race Cups and Testimonials: Victorian Silver Sculpture
• The Limewood Sculptures of Victorian Louth: Thomas Wilkinson Wallace
• Leather Lobsters: William Sanders and Mid-Century Rational Recreations
• Silver Shields and Oak Reliefs: Henry Hugh Armstead
• Sculptor and Goldsmith: Alfred Gilbert

Preliminary reading

• Adamson, Glenn. Ed. The Craft Reader (2010).
• ---. The Invention of Craft (2003).
• ---. Thinking Through Craft (2007).
• Art Journal. The Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Industries of All Nations (1851).
• Berstein, Susan David and Elsie B. Michie eds, Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture (2009).
• Briggs, Asa. Victorian Things (1988).
• Clerbois, Sebastien. Heart of Darkness: Ivory Carving and Belgian Colonialism (2008).
• Dehijia, Vidya Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj (2008).
• Droth, Martina, ed. Taking Shape: Finding Sculpture in the Decorative Arts (2009)
• ---. Revival and Invention : Sculpture through its Material Histories (2013).
• ---. et al, eds, Sculpture Victorious (2015), 242-306, 370-412.
• Frank, Stuart M. Scrimshaw in the Bedford Whaling Museum (2012).
• Gere, Charlotte and Judy Rudoe. Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World (2010).
• Hawkins, J.B. Nineteenth-Century Australian Silver (1990).
• Hinks, Peter, ed. Victorian Jewellery (1991).
• Hyland, Peter. The Della Robbia Pottery (2014).
• Jones, Claire. Sculpture and Design Reform in France (2014).
• Jones, Owen. The Grammar of Ornament (1956).
• Nichols, Kate et al, eds. Art Versus Industry: New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2016).
• Read, Benedict. Victorian Sculpture (1983).
• Trodd, Colin, ed. Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (1999).