Henry Moore Institute Library Display Developed by York PhD Candidate

Posted on 7 October 2013

The current display in the Henry Moore Institute Library, ‘The Drowned Man’: Edward Onslow Ford’s Monument to Percy Shelley 1893, has been assembled by York History of Art student Rebecca Senior.

Henry Moore Institute Onslow Ford Display

The display has been drawn from the Library and Archive collections of the Henry Moore Institute where Rebecca has been a Research Library Trainee.

'Since its unveiling in 1893, Edward Onslow Ford’s memorial to Percy Shelley has been met with equal amounts of derision and praise. The awkwardly corpulent body of the drowned poet, which lays flaccid on a pedestal of Roman bronze, is arguably the sculptor’s most powerful figurative work. Victorian critics however, struggled to reconcile Ford’s faithful rendering of the corpse with the popular naturalism of the New Sculpture Movement. Art critic Edmund Gosse (1849-1928), who first coined the term in his 1892 essay for The Art Journal, described the style of New Sculpture as a careful remodelling of nature, and praised sculptors such as Alfred Gilbert (1854-1934) and George Frampton (1860-1928), in their efforts to unify figurative sculpture under the principles of truth and harmony.

Henry Moore Institute library Onslow display

Ford’s position within the movement is complex and often contested. The graphic depiction of Shelley’s body washed up on the beach at Viareggio marked a dramatic departure from the principles of New Sculpture towards realism. His loyalty to the visceral body can be similarly seen in ‘Echo’ (1895), made in the same period, where the figure’s exposed ribs and supine posture blur boundaries between materiality, subject and life-model. When confronted by such highly individualised sculpted bodies early critics, such as Gosse and Claude Phillips (1846-1924), did not see these works as celebrating the imaginative potential of sculpture, rather they regarded them as mere replicas of the model’s body and, in the case of the ‘Shelley Memorial’, nothing more than the portrait of a corpse or drowned man.'‌

Edward Onslow Ford's sculptures The Singer and Applause are at the centre of a recent Tate 'In Focus' project published by Professor Jason Edwards.