In April 1851, the architect then in charge of the construction of the British Museum, Sydney Smirke, wrote to the sculptor Sir Richard Westmacott to say how glad he was 'to hear that the pediment will be peopled this month'.1 This was in reference to the addition of figurative sculpture to the triangular tympanum space over the museum's Ionic portico. 'Peopling' the pediment was the last task to be completed in the construction of the southern entrance wing, itself the last phase of the three-decade-long project. The sculpture was titled The Progress of Civilization, and it was Westmacott's final major work (fig. 1).Despite its prestigious authorship, prominent siting and sheer scale, The Progress of Civilization has not been critically discussed in any depth by architectural or sculptural scholarship. Commentators who refer to it are mostly repelled by the extreme severity of its classical style, and what is taken to be the conventional nature of its allegory. The most thorough modern account of the museum, by David M. Wilson, described it as 'an elaborate and deep carving which has a meaning of considerable convolution', but does not go into detail about what that meaning is, or what perspective it suggests about the museum.2 Accounts of Westmacott's work have been written without any mention of his largest single design.3 In her monograph on the sculptor, Marie Busco wrote of it as 'expressing little more than solemn dignity', and even as 'the dead end to which neoclassicism could lead'.4 However, if it is considered in the context of comparable works of the same era, and if Westmacott's stated intentions are taken into account, The Progress of Civilization emerges as a work of considerably greater interest than this critical consensus would suggest.Westmacott was given the commission without any competition or selection process as a result of his close involvement with the museum over four decades. He was an unofficial advisor on matters of arrangement and purchase of sculpture, and with Robert Smirke had designed, in 1816, the timber rooms in Montagu House that had displayed the Elgin and Phigalian marbles from their arrival until 1831. Although best known for public statuary commemorating the Napoleonic Wars, Westmacott had also been closely associated with architects throughout his career. His debut at the Royal Academy in 1797 was with a bust of William Chambers intended for the boardroom of the Office of Works. Other work in collaboration with architects included that with John Soane for the Pitt cenotaph at the National Debt Office (1817-19), James Wyatt for, inter alia, the staircase hall at Ashridge Park (1815-23) and John Nash for reliefs on Marble Arch and Buckingham Palace (1828-32).The design of the southern entrance front to the British Museum was by Robert Smirke. We do not know his original intentions for how the pediment would have been decorated, but those of his other executed porticoes, such as that of the General Post Office, were intentionally left empty. However, two decades passed before construction even began on this part of the museum, and in 1842-44 a revision of the design showed sculpture in the tympanum. A lithograph was published in 1844 which also showed 'colossal statues ... to surmount the pediment', with copies of the Laocoon group and Uffizi Wrestlers on each side of the portico steps.5 However, no action was taken regarding the sculpture before Smirke's departure from the project two years later. The architectural responsibility for erecting the southern entrance front fell to his much younger brother Sydney, who had been working at the museum since 1823. The latter had a much more decorative sensibility: the exterior ironwork was to his design, as well as the Round Reading Room, with its projected plan of sculptural embellishment by Alfred Stevens.A design for the pedimental sculpture was ready to be approved by the trustees of the museum in August 1848.6 In October 1850, The Critic reported that the sculptures had begun to arrive at the museum from the sculptor's workshop. …