{"title":"Violence into virtue: ‘liberal empire’ and Victorian statuary in St Paul’s Cathedral","authors":"Santanu Das","doi":"10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.07","url":null,"abstract":"The article investigates the collusion between colonialism and liberalism in Victorian Britain through the imperial statuary in St Paul’s Cathedral. In particular, it examines the commemorative statues of colonial heroes from British India, with particular reference to the statues of James Napier, Henry Montgomery Lawrence and Samuel Browne: it places these figures in their historical context, explores their often conflicted relation to the East India Company and imperial rule in South Asia, and teases out the multiple intensities of meaning – personal, professional, ambivalent, messy – pulsing under these statues. A close examination of the statuary reveals the impulses and anxieties around the imperial male body that went into their making and how the marble both concealed and congealed these stories to produce sanitized versions of violence and empire.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141234912","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":"Monuments to ‘settlement’: Australia in St Paul’s Cathedral, 1888–1913","authors":"Kate Nichols","doi":"10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.13","url":null,"abstract":"This article conceptualizes the relatively small and visually modest presence of Australia in St Paul’s as monuments to British ‘settlement’, rather than invasion. It examines three plaques to politicians and colonial Governors General, and the presence of Australia in the larger-scale memorial to the South African War (1899–1901). I argue that these monuments naturalized the idea of Australia as a place of peaceful White settlement, contributed to the formation of global White settler identities, and relocated violence and warfare primarily to the African continent. I employ Goenpul woman and feminist scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s notion of ‘white possessive logics’ to explore how these monuments work to legitimize Indigenous dispossession in the heart of the British metropole.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141232644","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":"Deluge and fertility: early monuments to administrators of British India in St Paul’s Cathedral, 1804–1835","authors":"M. G. Sullivan","doi":"10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Two early nineteenth-century monuments in St Paul’s register the growing significance of the empire in India: John Bacon Sr and Jr’s monument to Bengal judge William Jones, and J. C. F. Rossi’s monument to the Governor General, Lord Cornwallis; the artists took the opportunity to explore the possibilities of Hindu art and Indian culture within the Christian space of St Paul’s. This article looks at the origins of the iconography of the two monuments, suggesting how the juxtaposition of classical, Christian and Hindu motifs in the monument to Jones suggested Bacon’s promulgation of a type of visual religious teaching, homologous with Jones’s comparative religious studies, while Rossi elaborated a theme of fertility using a mixture of themes from contemporary land reform and the Hindu\u0000 Ramayana\u0000 .\u0000","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141229969","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":"Resurrecting the imperial body: monuments and Anglo-American military violence in St Paul’s Cathedral","authors":"Rebecca Senior","doi":"10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.02","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how a diverse assemblage of monuments erected in St Paul’s Cathedral to commemorate men who fought in the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 operated as a collective expression of imperial ideology. It is primarily a visual essay, using photographs of these monuments as a starting point, and focusing on the body of the deceased and its representation in sculptural and photographic form. The text offers a short exploration of how military bodies conceptualized violence for audiences in St Paul’s Cathedral and how the sculpted body offers a way to understand monuments as vehicles of imperial propaganda.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141229824","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":"(Un)forgotten: in the shadow of the Great Game, or East Asia in trans-imperial contexts","authors":"Jiyi Ryu","doi":"10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.09","url":null,"abstract":"This article looks at the juxtaposition of empires, exploring how linkages between and across varied imperial phenomena might work. Through the career of Harry Smith Parkes (1828–85), British minister to China, Japan and Korea, as well as almost forgotten stories of the British occupation of Geomundo or the Port Hamilton Affair (1885–87) in Korea, it aims to understand the interconnectedness of geopolitical regions and the work of global processes in trans-imperial contexts. Parkes is a controversial figure who played a key role in the relations between East Asia and the West from the 1850s until the 1880s. After he died in Beijing in 1885, his bust was unveiled in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. Meanwhile, in Shanghai, a bronze statue of Parkes was placed on its pedestal in 1890. While the monument to the British imperial past in China was removed by the Japanese during the Second World War, the white marble bust remains in metropolitan London, representing the imperial hero. British soldiers who died during the occupation and their gravesites in Korea, by contrast, have been largely forgotten in British imperial history. In the nineteenth century, Geomundo (Port Hamilton) was the international stage where five high-powered nations competed for political hegemony in East Asia. Now a British soldier cemetery in Geomundo History Park makes us consider the possibility of writing further trans- and inter-imperial histories beyond the silence.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141234899","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":"Soiled bodies: unearthing the colonial Caribbean in the memorials of Ralph Abercromby, John Moore and Thomas Picton, c. 1803–1816","authors":"Gemma Shearwood","doi":"10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.03","url":null,"abstract":"This article moves beyond iconography to seek out traces of the colonial Caribbean in the memorials to Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby by Richard Westmacott (c. 1803–09), Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore by John Bacon Jr (1815), and Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton by Sebastian Gahagan (1816). In these memorials, ‘soil’ in its figurative, imagined and literal forms offers a lens through which to consider Caribbean colonialism in relation to the peculiar contradiction of attraction and repulsion that characterized British attitudes towards this region of the empire. Using ‘soil’ as a lens in this way blends the superficial Napoleonic commemorations of these officers with broader imperial resonances of this conflict, and amplifies early nineteenth-century debates in Britain regarding the regulation and abolition of African enslavement and the trade in enslaved Africans. Recognizing the significance of soil is therefore essential to identifying traces of the colonial Caribbean in St Paul’s, thereby rectifying the iconographic absence of this imperial context across the pantheon, and further demonstrating methodological resistance to discursive erasures of Britain’s contested histories.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141234923","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":"The Great Game? Anglo-Afghan monuments in St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1816–1916","authors":"Jason Edwards","doi":"10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.08","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the perhaps surprising centrality of sculptural engagements with Afghanistan and the broader north-west frontier of the Raj during the century after the Battle of Waterloo. The article ranges across a broad array of commemorative media, from standing white marble figurative statues and portrait busts, through allegorical mourning figures and memorial brasses, to High Church religious sculpture and scenes of biblical history. It argues that sculptors never really settled on a sculptural iconography for Afghanistan, in spite of drawing on key photographic and print representations of the region, but that the very malleability of the genre of Anglo-Afghan monuments in St Paul’s might itself have collectively represented a necessary linguistic, conceptual and personal mobility on the north-west frontier of the Raj.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141233288","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":"‘Weighted with the Past’: commemorating New Zealand – Edward Onslow Ford’s memorial to Sir George Grey","authors":"Sophie Matthiesson","doi":"10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.14","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141231523","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":"The special correspondents’ monuments: Melton Prior, imperial memory and the Victorian press in the shadow of the South African War, 1899–1901","authors":"S. Willcock","doi":"10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.12","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Bertha Burleigh’s 1912 marble and onyx monument to the war artist Melton Prior (1845–1910) alongside a range of earlier memorials to ‘special correspondents’ in the crypt in St Paul’s Cathedral. It considers the monument in the context of significant shifts in the nature of war reportage in the early twentieth century, as new and increasingly brutal technologies and methods of war placed significant strain on romantic Victorian conceptions of conflict. Exploring the extent to which war artists such as Prior were implicated in the violence they were tasked with documenting, the article also asks how such visual reportage informed the racial politics of memory embodied in the crypt, anointing some men as imperial heroes worthy of sombre commemoration and others as ‘ungrieveable’.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141235343","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":"Incursions, incisions, omissions: liberal imperialism, violence and British Southeast Asia in Francis Leggatt Chantrey, Major General Robert Rollo Gillespie, and Joseph Edgar Boehm, Richard Southwell Bourke, sixth earl of Mayo","authors":"Sarah Monks","doi":"10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/sj.2024.33.2.06","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the sculpted monuments in St Paul’s Cathedral to nineteenth-century protagonists in Britain’s invasion and rule of Southeast Asian territories (including Burma (Myanmar), Indonesia and the Andaman Islands). It focuses on two works in particular: Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey’s monument to Major General Robert Rollo Gillespie, and the monument to Richard Southwell Bourke, sixth earl of Mayo and viceroy of India, attributed to Joseph Edgar Boehm. The first commemorates the man considered by his supporters to be the hero of the British East Indies after smashing a hole in the Indigenous power structures of the Indonesian archipelago so that it could be claimed for British India. The second remembers a man who was one of the British East Indies’ many victims, even as he ran the place. His story and his monument indicate the extent to which Southeast Asia became a region to which British India despatched its problems – and in which the liberal ideology used to justify nineteenth-century British imperialism met its limits. These two men’s imperial histories and sculpted memorials are read in turn as distinct and divergent instances of liberal imperialism’s simultaneous dependence upon, and denial of, its own capacity for brutal violence. The article argues that, viewed up close and in context, both monuments bear traces of that violence, its consequences, and the alibis, omissions and occlusions with which it was – and, in the neoliberal present, continues to be – cloaked in public discourse.","PeriodicalId":21666,"journal":{"name":"Sculpture Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141235016","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}