Abstract
An academic review of the exhibition ‘Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901’ at the Yale Center for British Art, assessing the impact of the exhibition for the future of studies into Victorian sculpture.
Highlights
Review of ‘Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901’ at the Yale Center for British Art, 11 September to 30 November 2014
This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts
What is Westmacott’s piece doing here as an adjunct to this pairing of sculptural portraits? The curators were perhaps keen to show off the first of their many coups by immediately presenting to us a novel sculptural encounter: Westmacott’s Earl is normally removed from close scrutiny, looking down on the chamber of the House of Lords from a niche twenty-five feet above the floor, alongside statues of seventeen other barons and prelates who in 1215 helped to secure the signing of the Magna Carta. This first experience delivers one of the exhibition’s primary concerns: to make our interaction with Victorian sculpture surprising again, and one of the techniques used to achieve this is through offering opportunities for close proximity while at the same time gesturing to the dizzying range of viewing spaces, contexts, and conditions in which Victorian sculpture experienced its unprecedented ‘efflorescence’
Summary
Review of ‘Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837–1901’ at the Yale Center for British Art, 11 September to 30 November 2014.
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