Herbert Ward: Sculpture in the Circum-Atlantic World

Abstract

The English imperial adventurer, writer and late new sculptor Herbert Ward (1863–1919) was an important international artist and turn-of-the-century society figure. Depicting Congolese tribespeople in nineteen bronze sculptures and two popular books inspired by his five-year exploration of the then-Belgian-controlled Congo Free State during 1884–9, Ward won two Salon gold medals for his monumental bronzes. Ward’s sculptures and extensive collection of Congolese artefacts were subsequently bought and exhibited both privately and publicly across the circum-Atlantic world, where they were employed in a range of often contradictory ways ranging from formal art exhibitions at the Paris Salon through imperial apologetics in Brussels to didactic ethnographic displays at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. And yet, Ward’s sculptures hardly appear in the extant scholarship on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sculptural history, while previous museological writings on Ward’s exhibitions have focused on the utilization of the sculptor’s Congolese collection, rather than on the exhibition of Ward’s sculptural oeuvre. In this article, I address these issues and omissions by exploring the differing sculptural encounters that were provided through Ward’s statues as they were exhibited across Europe and America. Comparing the domestic display of Ward’s newly created sculptures at his Parisian home from 1910 onwards, with both the Brussels exhibition of his works in the palace of King Leopold II and the public, didactic exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History from 1921, I examine how the visual relationships between the Congolese objects and Ward’s bronzes generated very different sculptural and ideological effects, with far-reaching consequences for the history of Ward’s sculptures, collection and reputation.