Brass sculpture and the ideology of bronze in Britain 1660–1851

Abstract

Brass tacks It is chiefly thanks to the immigration of craftsmen from France and the Netherlands that large-scale cast sculpture in copper alloys was produced in England in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The word ‘bronze’ does not enter the English language as a noun until the first half of the eighteenth century, when it was introduced from the French, and ultimately the Italian. 1 The story of English and later British bronze could, then, easily be construed as relatively neat and familiar. First, patrons inspired by continental work desired an elevated form of art derived from the French, Renaissance and antique models. Secondly, continental craftsmen supplied the casting techniques developed in French and Netherlandish workshops, and finally and steadily the number of works produced in this material in Britain grew. The Gunnis Database, which has been used to store information for the forthcoming Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, bears out this general historical sketch. It shows a general small-scale increase in a small number of works over the period from the Restoration to the Revolutionary Wars in 1792, after which there was an explosion of bronze commemoration in the period leading up to the Great Exhibition and beyond. 2 This, however, is far from being the whole story, and this article connects the empirical fact-gathering of the Dictionary to wider methodological issues which are not to be found in the Dictionary itself. Although the associations of ‘bronze’ sculpture were familiar to a few cognoscenti, the works in copper alloys which were produced in Britain in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by continental craftsmen were understood by most British commentators, including many patrons and artists, to