“The Pleasantest Object in Christchurch”: Thomas Woolner’s Statue of John Robert Godley Mark Stocker (bio) Thomas woolner’s bronze statue of colonial administrator John Robert Godley (1814–61) has enjoyed a momentous history in the 150 years since its unveiling in Cathedral Square, Christchurch, on 8 August 1867 (fig. 1). The statue has risen, been moved, been moved back, fallen, and risen once more. Yet it is remarkable in its own right as the sculptural epitome of the Pre-Raphaelite dictum of “truth to nature.” Indeed, London critics admired [End Page 5] it so much that they were reluctant to see it removed to distant New Zealand, almost certainly never to be seen by them again. Yet following its arrival and unveiling, it instantly attained local status that would today be termed “iconic,” and it is a quotation by Charles Bowen, residential magistrate in Christchurch and Godley’s former secretary, that inspired this article’s title. At the unveiling, Bowen claimed, “Every one whose opinion is worth anything pronounces the Godley statue a great success. It is the pleasantest object in Christchurch” (Bowen, Letter). Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. A. C. Barker, Photograph of the Statue of John Robert Godley with Dr. Alfred Charles Barker Seated Below, 1869. Photo courtesy of National Library of New Zealand. Godley was a major figure in New Zealand and colonial history. Drawn to the to the theories and propaganda of colonial promoter Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Godley helped to found Canterbury province. But whereas Wakefield was a tragically flawed character, Godley was legendary for his “spotless integrity” and “devotion to honest, manly work” (Bowen, “Inauguration”).1 Indeed, Godley aspired to bestow on Canterbury strong Anglican values, an excellent education system, and a nuanced social hierarchy minus the grinding poverty of the “old country.” Godley named [End Page 6] Canterbury’s principal settlement, Christchurch, after his Oxford college; he framed the province’s constitution; and he passionately advocated self-government, asserting, “I would rather be governed by a Nero on the spot than by a board of Angels in London, because we could, if the worst came to the worst, cut off Nero’s head, but we could not get at the Board in London at all” (qtd. in Carrington 132). After returning to Britain, he became assistant undersecretary at the War Office and seemed destined for high political office, as a Peelite turned Gladstonian Liberal, at the time of his premature death, from tuberculosis, in November 1861. This sad news was marked by black-bordered editions of the Lyttelton Times and The Press. The owner and editor of the latter newspaper, Godley’s close friend James Edward FitzGerald, was instrumental in the production of both print and bronze memorials, publishing A Selection from the Writings and Speeches of John Robert Godley (1863) and persuading the Canterbury Provincial Council to erect a statue funded from public revenues. A memorial committee was duly formed in London, its members including Sir John Simeon, MP for the Isle of Wight. Godley had been one of Simeon’s “oldest and dearest friends” (A. Woolner 230), while Simeon and Thomas Woolner were friendly in turn. Simeon was, furthermore, almost certainly aware of Woolner’s much-admired portrait bust of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (unveiled in 1857 at Trinity College, Cambridge), the Isle of Wight’s most famous resident after Queen Victoria. Woolner’s principal visual aid was a photograph, probably identical to that reproduced as the engraved frontispiece to A Selection from the Writings. He preferred Godley’s distinctive wide-set eyes, high forehead, and thin build to the face of another Trinity College commission, the memorial statue of historian Thomas Macaulay. As recorded in one of Woolner’s missives, his excellent progress was confirmed by Godley’s friends when they came to see the statue: “If they had only seen his legs they would have known them for Godley’s” (Letter to Pauline Trevelyan). A nicer tribute to Pre-Raphaelite verisimilitude would be inconceivable. When the plaster model was complete, in September 1864, Woolner’s erstwhile fellow Pre-Raphaelite “brother,” Frederic George Stephens, published a lengthy eulogy of the work. Stephens imagined the moment chosen...

Frederick Brock, edited by John Sankey, Thomas Brock: Forgotten Sculptor of the Victoria Memorial Bloomington IN, Author House, 2012, 187 pp., $56.45, £23. ISBN 1-800-839-8640In 1986 the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired an undated and at the time anonymous typescript of the life of Sir Thomas Brock (1847-1922), whose text provides the foundation for this publication. In the course of his doctoral studies on Brock, the eventual editor, John Sankey, not only made good use of this resource but also established from a giveaway reference that the author was the sculptor's son Frederick (1880-1940). Although little is known about Frederick Brock, the lively and intelligent text makes it no surprise to learn that he was a published author with a clutch of novels to his credit. Why he abandoned the typescript in such a relatively polished state remains a mystery. The tone throughout is loyal, loving and, as Marjorie Trusted states in her foreword, 'adulatory', but never is it gushing or mawkish. Frederick Brock writes from the benefit of a lifetime's experience about his father's style, techniques, commissions, clientele and critics, adding insightful anecdotes in the process. The epicentre is Brock's studio in Osnaburgh Street, near Great Portland Street underground station (originally Portland Road), where he worked 'almost from the day of his arrival in London [1866] to within a fortnight of his death', aged 75 in 1922. There Brock produced an immense oeuvre of sculpture - totalling over 200 commissions according to Sankey's research findings - but this is to count immense multi-figure projects such as the completion of the Daniel O'Connell monument in O'Connell Street, Dublin (1866-82) and the Queen Victoria Memorial in The Mall, London (1901-24) as just one work each.Frederick Brock's probable motive for writing the biography was not so much filial piety as a desire to record and rehabilitate his father's reputation, which was already in decline by the later 1920s. It had still further to fall. When the belated opportunity came to redeem it, Susan Beattie delivered the killer blow in The New Sculpture (1983) when she dubbed Brock 'the great plagiarist' of that movement, quoting with apparent approval the Architectural Review's description of the Victoria Memorial as 'a mausoleum for the reputation of the sculptor'.1 This biography demands that the reader reconsider these views, and it is a tribute to Frederick Brock's advocacy, as well of course as his father's sculpture, that it is ultimately so persuasive. Brock's achievement is arguably a more impressive, climactic one than that of his contemporary Hamo Thornycroft, an infinitely more consistent one than that of Alfred Gilbert, a less 'crafty' one than that of George Frampton and, due to his longevity, a more sustained one than those of Edward Onslow Ford and Harry Bates. Specialist scholars post-dating Beattie such as David Getsy and Jason Edwards have not yet done Brock justice; the former perhaps because of the difficulty in shoehorning his work into a remotely convincing 'New Sculpture as Modernism' thesis, the latter because there is a telling dearth of the 'homocentric', let alone exquisite aestheticism, in either Brock's persona or performance.Indeed, there are no skeletons in the cupboard of this 'strong Conservative' family man. Brock's life, according to Frederick's first sentence, was 'a simple ... and considering the position to which he rose in the profession, a somewhat retired one'. The sculpture itself, whether early or late career, conveys Brock's aims and objectives immediately, unequivocally, intelli- gently and with utter confidence and competence. It allows the spectator less than fruitful scope either for Bloomsbury formalism or latter-day postcolonial handwringing. There is an aesthetic and iconographic end of argument rightness about it all, as the initially sceptical William Goscombe John acknowledged of the allegorical groups that Brock added to the corners of the Victoria Memorial. …

This article focuses on a major area of the sculpture of Kathleen Scott (1878-1947), her ideal or imaginative works, particularly her life-sized bronze male nudes dating from between 1920 and 1938. Two major strands run through her work, her better-known portrait sculptures and her ideal works, which were of great personal importance to her. The origins of the latter were in her small, ‘Rodinesque’ statuettes, although subsequent success with memorials to her first husband, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, encouraged her to work on a larger scale. Early examples include ideal works which doubled up as war memorials, Here Am I, Send Me and 1914-1918: These Had Most to Give. The latter was widely regarded as her ‘masterpiece’, and admired by George Bernard Shaw, Sir Joseph (later Lord) Duveen, who considered acquiring it for the Tate Gallery, and the critic of Le Temps. Kathleen Scott's career in this genre continued with The Kingdom is Within, acquired by the MP Paul Latham; the question of its ‘gay iconicity’ is mentioned in this context, as is critic Stephen Gwynn's description of Laus Deo as ‘entirely unsensuous’. Finally, the liminal qualities of Ad Astra are addressed and this final, ideal sculpture's state of neglect is considered analogous to the long art historical neglect of Kathleen Scott today. This article is based on extensive primary research in the Kennet Papers, Cambridge University Library, which include Kathleen Scott's diaries, press cuttings and correspondence

ABSTRACTThe bronze sculpture variously known as These had most to give, Aspiration and Youth, stands in the forecourt of the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) in Cambridge, and functions as a memorial to the British Antarctic Expedition polar party of 1911–1912. It is one of the most important works by Kathleen Scott, wife of Robert Falcon Scott, and a prominent and prolific sculptor. Originally intended as a war memorial and dating from 1922–1923, it received critical acclaim and was exhibited widely. Ten years later Kathleen Scott offered the sculpture to the SPRI to accompany its new building. The institute's committee of management wished to reject the gift, however, as its members considered it too successful in conveying ‘death and martyrdom and in general the tragic side of Polar work’, as Frank Debenham stated, rather than scientific research and discovery. After prolonged discussions with the institute's architect, Herbert Baker, who admired Kathleen Scott and this work, it was finally accepted and installed as inconspicuously as possible. This article reconstructs the historical background to the sculpture and the controversy that surrounded it, using primary source material. The relevance of the objections to the sculpture, as well as its positive qualities, are also briefly examined from a modern perspective.

'As a piece of art to be admired, it destroyed its own ends, as citizens could not now look at the figure, lest their motive be questioned.' 1 So claimed William Campbell, pastor of the Church of Christ, in a petition presented to Auckland City Council in January 1937. 'piece of art' concerned was the bronze figure of an athlete, erected the previous June at the main entrance to Auckland Domain (figs. 1, 6). So inflamed were local passions - Campbell's petition bore 1,152 signatures - that press coverage temporarily vied with that accorded to the lifting of League of Nations sanctions against Italy following the Abyssinia invasion. And like another notable sculpture controversy that hit New Zealand exactly twenty years later - the British Council exhibition of Henry Moore - the 'Athlete affair' proved a cartoonist's and doggerelizer's delight (fig. 2).2The artist of the Athlete, Richard Oliver Gross (1882-1964), was New Zealand's leading inter-war sculptor. English-born, he emigrated to New Zealand in 1914 after an interim period in South Africa, where he assisted with the architectural carvings of Herbert Baker's Union Buildings, Pretoria (1908-13). Unlike his near contemporary fellow expatriates, William Wright (1886- 1943) and Francis Shurrock (1887-1977), both of whom had studied under Edouard Lanteri at the Royal College of Art, and went on to teach at the art schools in Auckland and Christchurch respectively, Gross was heavily reliant on his selfemployed earnings. Far more prolific than the other two, Gross was the first Auckland sculptor to set up a foundry for casting small bronzes. He was a highly literate, expressive, if ultimately rather bitter correspondent and polemicist in the columns of Art in New Zealand and the New Zealand Herald, passionate about environmental as well as artistic issues. He served as president of the Auckland Society of Arts (ASA) from 1936 to 1945, and published five slim volumes of poetry in the 1950s.3 In his monograph, New Zealand Sculpture: A History, Michael Dunn asserts: 'today, it must be realised that to [Gross] more than anyone else belongs the credit for building a professional image for New Zealand sculpture. He was a sound craftsman, a ceaseless worker and an active spokesman for sculpture over a period of fifty years.'4Gross's most ambitious work was an equestrian bronze, Will to which is placed atop his Wellington Citizens' Memorial (1929-32, fig. 3). Cast in Britain because of its size, at the 1930 Royal Academy summer exhibition it was prominently displayed outside Burlington House prior to its shipment to New Zealand. Writing in the Sunday Times, Frank Rutter declared: 'To symbolize Peace, in its essence a negative idea, is a difficult task for painter or sculptor; but The Will to Peace is a positive aspiration [...] clearly expressed in the soaring lines of Mr. Gross's statue.'5 Such acclaim would have counted for much in a New Zealand art world that measured success in terms of prestigious offshore recognition, and the clipping of Rutter's review remains proudly preserved in the Gross family archive.Yet for all his achievements, Gross seems fated to be remembered solely for his controversial Athlete (fig. 4). New Zealand Herald later observed: 'no statue before or since has been exposed to as much [...] civic or public criticism as [...] the 1936 nude'.6 Recently, Hamish Keith, in his cursory treatment of Gross in Big Picture: A History of New Zealand Art Since 1642, amusedly notes that 'regular prayer meetings' endeavoured 'to persuade the Lord to intervene and take the work away'.7 While Auckland City Council, rather than the Lord, was primarily addressed, the Auckland Star confirmed that 'miniature Hyde Park meetings have been held outside the Domain Gateway'.8 Precedents such as Eros on Alfred Gilbert's Shaftesbury Memorial (1885-93, Piccadilly Circus, London) - in its pose like a lither, slenderer and younger brother to the well-developed Athlete9 - and the British Medical Association building sculpture by Jacob Epstein (1907-08, Strand, London)10 had provoked comparable reactions of moral outrage, which were enthusiastically reported in the press. …

This article examines the legal contract for the double effigy monument to George and his wife Mary Curzon at Kedleston Church, Derbyshire (1908–13). It was made between Lord Curzon and the sculptor Bertram Mackennal. The contract is reproduced and the circumstances surrounding it are examined. The article then examines the extent to which the contract was adhered to by sculptor and patron.