On the reception and agency of neoclassical sculpture and its material: case studies from Viennese sculpture galleries (c. 1780-1820)

The last two decades have seen a surge in publications and exhibitions on neoclassical sculpture, exploring histories of collecting, transnational artistic exchange, artistic self-fashioning strategies, workshop processes, new biographical insights and art-theoretical questions. However, there is relatively little research regarding the display and staging of neoclassical sculpture in comparison with earlier periods. The years around 1800 marked the peak of a fashion for purpose-built galleries that appeared all over Europe. The multimedia setting for sculpture in this new type of building tied in with contemporary patterns of staging and viewing artworks in different contexts, such as tableaux vivants and phantasmagorias. This article investigates the different modes of communication between viewer and object in neoclassical sculpture galleries to shed light on the reception of these objects and their respective material. Case studies are centred on the Viennese sculpture galleries of Nicolas II, Prince Esterházy, Andrej Razumovsky and Joseph Count of Fries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

A ‘milky mass’ and ‘uniform material’: white marble in eighteenth-century French discourses on sculpture and geology

Knowledge of the materiality of stone during the Enlightenment expanded following the exploration of mineralogical structure, to alter ideas about taxonomy and challenge the role of rocks in the history of the earth. Close studies of the material of marble sculpture generated expertise on grain size, surface varieties and stone deposits. This mode of reception became intertwined with contemporary controversies about the age of the earth. This article focuses on both French sculpture and geological discourses of the eighteenth century to reveal an international and interdisciplinary network centring on protagonists such as Denis Diderot, Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach and Étienne-Maurice Falconet; through these figures, debates can be connected concerning both geology and art theory. Within these contexts, the article discusses the translation processes between these artistic and geological interests.

The business practice of Louis François Roubiliac, 1752-62

Evidence for the organization of Roubiliac’s workshop in the last ten years of his life is provided by the ledgers of his bank account opened with Drummond’s, Charing Cross, in the year of the sculptor’s third marriage to the Deptford heiress Elizabeth Crosby in 1752. The resulting financial confidence, albeit short-lived, enabled Roubiliac’s visit to Italy with Thomas Hudson, also in 1752. The ledgers reflect the sculptor’s expanding business between 1755 and 1760 and document his assistants Christian Carlsen Seest from 1756 to 1759, Nicholas Read from 1756 to 1760 and Nathaniel Smith between 1755 and 1761. Other payees can be identified as masons assisting with installation and suppliers of marble. Payments to and from silversmiths and jewellers indicate Roubiliac’s close connection with those of French origin trading in the London luxury market, including Thomas Harrache, who served as the sculptor’s executor. Roubiliac’s ledgers also provide negative evidence - he was not always paid in full for his work, as his will drawn up six days before his death indicates: ‘all my book debts which is due to me to be equally divided into four parts’. This suggests that Roubiliac’s reputation for taking an excessively long time to complete commissions resulted in his forfeiting full payment, and explains why he died in debt. A letter from the sculptor to the agent of the 4th Earl of Gainsborough in 1751, requesting settlement of a bill for plaster busts supplied four years earlier, published for the first time, demonstrates Roubiliac’s poor grasp of the English language as well as his lack of business acumen.

Two sculptor-geologists and the perception of marble in nineteenth-century Britain: Sir Francis Chantrey and William Brindley

This article focuses on two British sculptors who straddled the worlds of practical geology and sculpture in the nineteenth century, and in particular how their work affected the scientific and popular understanding of marble. Francis Chantrey and William Brindley were both long-term members of the Geological Society of London and contributed practical understanding of stone to the development of the geological discourse on white and coloured decorative marbles. This article looks at Chantrey’s use of fossiliferous British ‘marbles’ and his role in the growing comprehension of Carrara marble as a metamorphosed limestone in the 1830s. The second part of the article deals with William Brindley’s discovery and popularization of coloured marbles from ancient quarries around the world, and the role of these stones in contemporary imperialist discourse.

A family affair: John Bacon’s monument to Jane Russell, 1810-13

Focusing on John Bacon the younger’s monument to Jane Russell, this article illuminates death and memorialization in early nineteenth-century British India, with a social history focus regarding issues of gender and family. The monument in its first iteration was lost at sea in a shipwreck, and a later replacement is still in situ in St Mary’s Church at Fort St George, in the former Madras Presidency. The narrative arc traces the life cycle of a memorial to a young woman whose husband and father were leading English East India Company employees, including its commission by correspondence, execution in the metropolis and transport to the Indian subcontinent. Russell’s death and its commemoration in visual and material culture were, it is argued, a family affair on various interpretative strata, including but by no means limited to the iconography of her marmoreal ‘deathscape’.