97 'Britons Lamenting the Departure of the Romans', by E. Corbould

paintings should be illustrative of history rather than allegory, and done in fresco, that is in the mediaeval and Renaissance technique resuscitated by the Nazarenes, the early German Romantics, some thirty years before. Their shadow loomed large behind the whole scheme. Their leaders were still alive and powerful, Cornelius at Berlin and Overbeck in Rome, the one by then representing the most formal, official, academic side of high-minded art, the other its Catholic religious humility. In 1842 a competition was announced to obtain cartoons for the frescoes. Cornelius came over himself to advise. The cartoons were exhibited in 1843; there were a hundred and forty of them. Prizes went to Watts, Armitage, Cope, Horsley, John F. Bell, Townshend, Pickersgill and others. Benjamin Haydon who had worried about elevated history painting in England for longer than anyone else had sent two cartoons but obtained no recognition. Ford Madox Brown was no luckier, nor was Alfred Stevens. In the same year, 1843, Albert commissioned a number of artists (for instance Leslie, Maclise and Landseer and Etty) to paint frescoes in a garden pavilion in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. The pattern was obviously the casino of the Villa Massimi in Rome painted by the German Nazarenes in 1818. The Massimi frescoes were from Tasso, Albert's from Milton's Comus. Meanwhile a second exhibition of cartoons for the Houses of Parliament was held in 1844, and a third in 1847. Amongst those selected now was William Dyce who had spent quite a long time

98 Thorvaldsen's 'Ganymede' in Copenhagen porcelain

in Italy and met Overbeck there and who had later for the Government gone to
study art schools in Germany. Maclise and Redgrave also obtained premiums.
Amongst the cartoons shown were such subjects as Caractacus and Boadicea, St
Augustine and the First Trial by Jury, Harold's Defeat and the Charity of
Edward the Confessor. It was a noble effort and it led nowhere.

The spirit of reform was in the air no doubt, and where, in the same years,
it took the form of religious reform, of a renewed earnestness of mind, it could
become a real power. But in fine art it could not be but a failure. Aesthetic
sensibility cannot be restored by decree. Nothing could be more characteristic of
the uneasy position of the fine arts in the mid-Victorian milieu than the fact that
they were excluded from the 1851 exhibition and yet included to an oddly
limited extent. Class Thirty was called 'Sculpture, Models and Plastic Art,
Mosaics, Enamels, etc.' The Introduction in the catalogue begins thus: "The
Exhibition having relations far more extensive with the industrial occupations
and products of mankind than with the Fine Arts, the limits of the present Class
have been defined with considerable strictness. Those departments of art which
are, in a degree, connected with mechanical process, which relate to working in
metals, wood, or marble, and those mechanical processes which are applicable
to the arts, but which, notwithstanding this, still preserve their mechanical
character, as painting in colour, come properly within this Class. Paintings, as
works of art, are excluded; but, as exhibiting any improvements in colours, they
become admissible. When admitted, they are to be regarded not so much as
examples of the skill of the artist, as of that of the preparer of the colours. The
admission, however, of objects included under the definition of "plastic art”, has
greatly tended to relieve the general aspect of the Exhibition; and their happy
and judicious arrangement in the great structure forms one of its most interesting
features.'

It is a curious document. As for painting, two illustrations appeared in the Illustrated London News, Edward Corbould's The Britons lamenting the Departure 97, 100 of the Romans, and Pickersgill's The Origin of the Quarrel between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, the one characteristic of the high cartoon style in its less disciplined mid-nineteenth-century variety, the other of that pleasantly sentimental historical genre to which the young Pre-Raphaelites opposed their severer, more sensitively stylized interpretations. Corbould's painting was exhibited as an example of Miller's silica colours, Pickersgill's water-colour in a lithographic reproduction of Rowney's.

Of sculpture there was of course far more.

There's statues bright

Of marble white,

Of silver and of copper,

And some of zinc,

And some I think

That isn't overproper.

Thus sang Thackeray's indefatigable Mr Molony in his account of a visit to the
Crystal Palace. He was as right about the zinc as he was about a remarkable
tendency to half-concealed impropriety, as we shall see presently.

Sculpture indeed as a rule kept within the restrictions proposed by the
exhibition, in so far as in the nineteenth century very little large stone work was
actually executed by the artist himself. He usually only made a model, and
assistants then transferred it by mechanical means to the large block of stone.
However executed, the display of statuary from the largest to the smallest was
numerous enough to allow for a fairly accurate survey of the existing trends of
taste about 1850. The Greek Revival whose disappearance from the world of
design Wornum regretted could still be seen in a work by the great Thorwaldsen
himself who had been born as long ago as 1770, had taught and inspired in-
numerable younger sculptors and died in 1844. However, his noble Ganymede
had been translated by the Copenhagen Porcelain Manufactory into biscuit 98

porcelain and by another Danish manufacturer into ivory and his scale reduced to statuette size. The reduction of large sculpture to measures suitable for the mantelshelf was altogether at its most popular in the mid-nineteenth century, and English manufacturers had developed a special unglazed ceramic material 118 known as Parian or Carrara-the invention was contended by Herbert Minton and Alderman Copeland-to compete with the whiteness of marble. The most distinguished of all English sculptors of the period, John Gibson, who was born in 1790 and lived in Rome where visitors of all nations called on him, had sent to the Exhibition his Greek Hunter of marble-obviously Grecian in taste, though the details about the dog tell of the approach of realism. Matthew Digby Wyatt in fact specially praised the well-observed contrast between the youth and the hound pulling vigorously in different directions, and called the piece 'unquestionably one of the most beautiful works of art contributed to the Exhibition'.

99

101-104 (left to right) 'King Alfred Taught by his Mother', by the Thornycrofts; 'Rosomonda', by John Thomas; 'Saher de Quincy', by J.S. Westmacott; and a Hero from the 'Nibelungenlied' by Fernkorn

Also still classical in composition though romantic and national-historical

in its choice of subject is King Alfred taught by his Mother. This group is by Thomas 101
and Mary Thornycroft, the latter a pupil of Thorwaldsen and Gibson. Thomas's
and Mary's son was the better known Hamo Thornycroft.

102

Individual statues from national mediaeval history were plentiful. John Thomas, who has been mentioned before, had a Rosomonda amongst other things, J. S. Westmacott a Saher de Quincy, Earl of Winchester (a piece which 104 was to find a permanent place inside the Houses of Parliament), and Fernkorn of Vienna some heroes from the Nibelungenlied, which were inspired by the bronze 105 figures of the Emperor Maximilian's tomb at Innsbruck, but executed small in cast iron. Fernkorn did indeed six large stone statues of German emperors for the Imperial Vault at Speier Cathedral on the Rhine. In this style were the largest works of sculpture exhibited, two equestrian statues, the Barone Marochetti's Richard Coeur de Lion, shown outside the western entrance, and now standing in front of the Houses of Parliament, and Eugène Simonis's Godfrey of Bouillon, now at Brussels. The Thornycrofts incidentally also showed an equestrian statue, but

106 103

105 (left) 'Godfrey of Bouillon', by Simonis of
Brussels

106 (right) 'Richard Coeur de Lion' by Baron Marochetti, in front of the Houses of Parliament