Since the beginning of the twentieth century there has been a small but significant number of studies dedicated to Grinling Gibbons. In the mid-century Gibbons’s establishment in the broader public consciousness can be traced in the emergence of children’s books and school plays that mythologized his life and career. Yet all publications, both scholarly and juvenile, are united in their presentation of Gibbons as the only sculptor of significance to have emerged in late seventeenth-century England. I argue that this is an inaccurate portrayal of the period, and one that was not shared by his contemporaries. By contextualizing Gibbons among his predecessors, collaborators and competitors, the specific nature of Gibbons’s sculptural contribution can be more accurately placed. Such an analysis further provides a perspective from which we can understand more fully the ways in which sculpture mattered to a seventeenth-century audience.
{"title":"Grinling Gibbons in context: the vitality of English seventeenth-century sculptural production","authors":"C. Davis","doi":"10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.4","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Since the beginning of the twentieth century there has been a small but significant number of studies dedicated to Grinling Gibbons. In the mid-century Gibbons’s establishment in the broader public consciousness can be traced in the emergence of children’s books and school plays that mythologized his life and career. Yet all publications, both scholarly and juvenile, are united in their presentation of Gibbons as the only sculptor of significance to have emerged in late seventeenth-century England. I argue that this is an inaccurate portrayal of the period, and one that was not shared by his contemporaries. By contextualizing Gibbons among his predecessors, collaborators and competitors, the specific nature of Gibbons’s sculptural contribution can be more accurately placed. Such an analysis further provides a perspective from which we can understand more fully the ways in which sculpture mattered to a seventeenth-century audience.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44132740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Grinling Gibbons’s still-life sculpture emerged out of the artistic and proto-scientific culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands and was understood in these intellectual terms by the sophisticated, courtly consumers of his work in Restoration England. Our fondness for a myth of Gibbons as a dazzlingly skilful but intellectually vapid artist should not blind us to the intellectual focus of his sculptures. The carved frame for Elias Ashmole’s portrait in the Ashmolean collection is a sophisticated engagement with European cultures of collecting. The Cosimo panel for Charles II engages with the witty and formidably advanced scientific discourses of the Caroline court, while the limewood reredos in St James’ church, Piccadilly reaches back to the devotional roots of floral still life, reinterpreting it in the context of English Protestantism.
{"title":"Grinling Gibbons: a Dutch master in England","authors":"L. Cutler","doi":"10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.3","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Grinling Gibbons’s still-life sculpture emerged out of the artistic and proto-scientific culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands and was understood in these intellectual terms by the sophisticated, courtly consumers of his work in Restoration England. Our fondness for a myth of Gibbons as a dazzlingly skilful but intellectually vapid artist should not blind us to the intellectual focus of his sculptures. The carved frame for Elias Ashmole’s portrait in the Ashmolean collection is a sophisticated engagement with European cultures of collecting. The Cosimo panel for Charles II engages with the witty and formidably advanced scientific discourses of the Caroline court, while the limewood reredos in St James’ church, Piccadilly reaches back to the devotional roots of floral still life, reinterpreting it in the context of English Protestantism.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41938673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Preface: Got wood? Queering Grinling Gibbons, at Fairfax House and beyond","authors":"Jason Edwards","doi":"10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42639827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, I examine in unprecedented detail little-known Victorian craftsman William Coombe Sanders’ remarkable sheepskin Frame Resembling Carved Wood with Lobster and Crab Motif, now at the V&A, but first exhibited at the International Exhibition in London in 1862. The article asks three questions: What might we learn, from Sanders’ craft, about the likely mid-Victorian reception of Gibbons’s closely related marine works? How might we better understand Sanders’ and Gibbons’s work in the context not just of Victorian craft and design, but natural history and early twenty-first-century critical animal studies and vegan theory? And what might Sanders’ Gibbons-like relief teach us about the status of animals and humans in the longer history of still life as a genre?
{"title":"Bringing it all back home? Gibbons, William Coombe Sanders and mid-Victorian marine biology","authors":"Jason Edwards","doi":"10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.7","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In this article, I examine in unprecedented detail little-known Victorian craftsman William Coombe Sanders’ remarkable sheepskin Frame Resembling Carved Wood with Lobster and Crab Motif, now at the V&A, but first exhibited at the International Exhibition in London in 1862. The article asks three questions: What might we learn, from Sanders’ craft, about the likely mid-Victorian reception of Gibbons’s closely related marine works? How might we better understand Sanders’ and Gibbons’s work in the context not just of Victorian craft and design, but natural history and early twenty-first-century critical animal studies and vegan theory? And what might Sanders’ Gibbons-like relief teach us about the status of animals and humans in the longer history of still life as a genre?","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42106308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: This lime-tree bower my prison","authors":"M. Sullivan","doi":"10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43865869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
When we encounter the work of Grinling Gibbons, we find ourselves in the presence of multiple non-human animals. However, it is unclear how one should address these presences. On the one hand, for ecofeminist scholars such as Josephine Donovan, the aestheticization of animal death is to be vehemently resisted and the embodied presence of animals recovered by looking beyond the surface: a mode of looking that Donovan terms ‘attentive love’. On the other hand, a re-reading of the philosophical ideas of Simone Weil, upon which Donovan premises her argument, suggests that attention to others requires a mode of radical detachment. These two positions speak in important ways to the dilemmas faced by a vegan spectator. Drawing on Jason Edwards’s previous work on ‘the vegan viewer’, this article seeks to reconcile a vegan resistance to Gibbons’s depictions of animal death, in their spontaneous falling under human dominion, with the aesthetic pleasure generated by Gibbons’s craftmanship. I therefore propose ‘vegan camp’ as a means of reconciling oneself to insufficiency and complicity in systems of violence without renouncing pleasure. Vegan camp is detailed as an aesthetics that acknowledges the violence of humanity and one’s inescapable place within it, dissolving the subjective idea of the beautiful vegan soul to pay attention to the pervasive presence of an anthropocentrism that, in the case of Gibbons, decoratively adorns the sites at which animals might be eaten, worn, or offered up for sacrifice.
{"title":"Vegan attendance: reading Gibbons’s animals","authors":"E. Quinn","doi":"10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.8","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000When we encounter the work of Grinling Gibbons, we find ourselves in the presence of multiple non-human animals. However, it is unclear how one should address these presences. On the one hand, for ecofeminist scholars such as Josephine Donovan, the aestheticization of animal death is to be vehemently resisted and the embodied presence of animals recovered by looking beyond the surface: a mode of looking that Donovan terms ‘attentive love’. On the other hand, a re-reading of the philosophical ideas of Simone Weil, upon which Donovan premises her argument, suggests that attention to others requires a mode of radical detachment. These two positions speak in important ways to the dilemmas faced by a vegan spectator. Drawing on Jason Edwards’s previous work on ‘the vegan viewer’, this article seeks to reconcile a vegan resistance to Gibbons’s depictions of animal death, in their spontaneous falling under human dominion, with the aesthetic pleasure generated by Gibbons’s craftmanship. I therefore propose ‘vegan camp’ as a means of reconciling oneself to insufficiency and complicity in systems of violence without renouncing pleasure. Vegan camp is detailed as an aesthetics that acknowledges the violence of humanity and one’s inescapable place within it, dissolving the subjective idea of the beautiful vegan soul to pay attention to the pervasive presence of an anthropocentrism that, in the case of Gibbons, decoratively adorns the sites at which animals might be eaten, worn, or offered up for sacrifice.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46059170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, the authors explore the nineteenth-century British reception of Gibbons through a number of closely related images, objects and texts, frequently focusing on the bodies of dead birds. The article commences with Allan Cunningham’s pivotal 1830 account of Gibbons at the start of his Lives of the Most Eminent Sculptors, which made the influential claim that the sculptor was the heir to a ‘natural’ decorative carving tradition and father to an indigenous British school, resistant to the idealism and allegory that characterized continental classicism. The authors go on to explore Gibbons’s key status in Francis Chantrey’s contemporaneous Woodcocks (c. 1829-34) for Holkham Hall, which employed Gibbons’s idiom to emphasize Chantrey’s related status as a paradigmatic British sportsman and sculptor. The article then examines how these characterizations of Gibbons took hold at the mid-century Great Exhibitions and at the Victoria and Albert Museum, before concluding with a close reading of an obscure, but deeply revealing 1857 meditation on Chantrey’s Woodcocks, and on Gibbons before him, that reveals the complex attitudes the Victorians had in relation to the spectacle of dead animals.
{"title":"Cunningham, Chantrey and Gibbons: winged words on nation and nature, c. 1829-57","authors":"Jason Edwards, A. Harris, M. Sullivan","doi":"10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/SJ.2020.29.3.6","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In this article, the authors explore the nineteenth-century British reception of Gibbons through a number of closely related images, objects and texts, frequently focusing on the bodies of dead birds. The article commences with Allan Cunningham’s pivotal 1830 account of Gibbons at the start of his Lives of the Most Eminent Sculptors, which made the influential claim that the sculptor was the heir to a ‘natural’ decorative carving tradition and father to an indigenous British school, resistant to the idealism and allegory that characterized continental classicism. The authors go on to explore Gibbons’s key status in Francis Chantrey’s contemporaneous Woodcocks (c. 1829-34) for Holkham Hall, which employed Gibbons’s idiom to emphasize Chantrey’s related status as a paradigmatic British sportsman and sculptor. The article then examines how these characterizations of Gibbons took hold at the mid-century Great Exhibitions and at the Victoria and Albert Museum, before concluding with a close reading of an obscure, but deeply revealing 1857 meditation on Chantrey’s Woodcocks, and on Gibbons before him, that reveals the complex attitudes the Victorians had in relation to the spectacle of dead animals.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45916882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Recent international exhibitions and publications on artists’ studios have relied heavily on visual sources such as photographs, prints and paintings. Approaching the subject from an architectural and interior design perspective using construction plans for studio buildings – in particular, ground plans and sections – we can situate the studio space more broadly within the building and the plot on which it stands. This in turn offers a better understanding of specific studio practice and of the dialectical relationship between living and working, making and showing. We examine purpose-built sculptors’ studios in belle epoque Brussels. Based on a substantial sample of construction plans, a five-point typology is developed. Case studies are then used to determine the respects in which sculptors’ studios differ in architectural terms from painters’ studios and how they express contemporary ideas about sculptural practice. Despite their administrative and technical character – or possibly because of it – the plans of Brussels sculptors’ studios, which are drawn out down to the smallest space, provide us with an alternative, almost intimate insight into the life and work of nineteenth-century Belgian sculptors.
{"title":"Inside sculptors’ studios in belle époque Brussels: an interior architectural view","authors":"Linda Van Santvoort, Marjan Sterckx","doi":"10.3828/sj.2020.29.2.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2020.29.2.5","url":null,"abstract":"Recent international exhibitions and publications on artists’ studios have relied heavily on visual sources such as photographs, prints and paintings. Approaching the subject from an architectural and interior design perspective using construction plans for studio buildings – in particular, ground plans and sections – we can situate the studio space more broadly within the building and the plot on which it stands. This in turn offers a better understanding of specific studio practice and of the dialectical relationship between living and working, making and showing. We examine purpose-built sculptors’ studios in belle epoque Brussels. Based on a substantial sample of construction plans, a five-point typology is developed. Case studies are then used to determine the respects in which sculptors’ studios differ in architectural terms from painters’ studios and how they express contemporary ideas about sculptural practice. Despite their administrative and technical character – or possibly because of it – the plans of Brussels sculptors’ studios, which are drawn out down to the smallest space, provide us with an alternative, almost intimate insight into the life and work of nineteenth-century Belgian sculptors.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45276699","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"W. H. Thornycroft’s statue of Oliver Cromwell and the bitter waters of Babylon","authors":"Philip Ward-Jackson","doi":"10.3828/sj.2020.29.2.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2020.29.2.4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48094712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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