'Squabby cupids and clumsy graces': Garden Sculpture and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

When at the end of the eighteenth century Rowlandson represented a number of fashionably dressed people viewing figures in the yard of a London statuary (Fig. 1), he was assuming on the part of his audience a familiarity with those reproductions of antique (and some more modern) sculptures in lead and plaster that had for the past fifty years or so been produced in increasingly large quantities for interiors and gardens.' The marketing of such sculpture and its purchase by a widening social group was indeed one prominent manifestation of that growth in consumption that was so marked a feature of eighteenth-century Britain.2 Rowlandson's image is given its satirical bite in part through the juxtaposition of the elongated, nude statues with the portly male and modishly dressed female spectators. But behind it also lies some hint of those concerns about luxury that might be described as constituting consumption's Other in the eighteenth century.