Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture: Native Genius Reaffirmed (review)

Paula Murphy's study presents the first comprehensive survey of nineteenth-century Irish sculpture, highlighting the remarkable omissions that remain in the field of nineteenth-century and Victorian sculpture. The book is published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, an institution of immeasurable importance in advancing scholarship on British art. Nineteenth-century and Victorian sculpture comprise a tiny sub-field, which, although growing, has yet to develop a body of research approaching that of other aspects of Victorian art and visual culture. Murphy's volume offers a sequel to Benedict Read's Victorian Sculpture (1982), adopting a similar format, style, and methodology. Likewise, with its generous illustrations and exhaustive research, it adds substantially to the field, drawing attention to a body of heretofore obscure work.

Spanning the nineteenth century, Murphy records some three hundred sculptures, largely monuments and memorials, produced either in Ireland or by Irish sculptors abroad (especially in London). The material is organized into ten mostly chronological chapters, with significant expositions on individual works and themes. The introduction surveys the field and the book's important themes. The backdrop to the study—Ireland's politico-religious situation—is, as Murphy points out, overtly "played out in the public monuments," a point effectively conveyed in the first chapter, which surveys the monumental sculptures erected in Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (2). Most of the monuments chronicled here no longer exist: works such as Grinling Gibbons's William III (1701); John van Nost's George II (1758); and a string of "pillar" or "column" monuments, erected across the country in honor of the Duke of Wellington, Lord Nelson, and other military "heroes," are now known only through historic photographs or engravings (13). The chapter conveys the stark imposition made by these enormous symbols of imperial power, monstrous insertions into modest urban townscapes. An 1852 image from the Illustrated London News evokes their visual brutality: the Wellington Monument at Trim, a huge Corinthian column in white marble, towers incongruously above the humble thatched cottages of an evidently impoverished community.

Buried in this chapter is a reflection on what might have become a crucial question for the book: "why Dublin for a Nelson commemoration?" (15). We could as well ask why Dublin for a Prince Albert memorial, or a Queen Victoria, or the countless English lords and viscounts commemorated on Ireland's streets. Murphy briefly answers thus: "at the beginning of the century, Dublin was the second largest city in what had become the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland in 1801. . . . I t must have seemed perfectly logical to many, therefore, that the second city of the empire would commemorate the man who defeated Napoleon" (15). That this logic was also unacceptable to many emerges in the ensuing chapters, although Murphy saves the full story for last, when she chronicles the systematic bombings of imperial monuments, often culminating in their final removal in the early twentieth century. Given how critical the relationship between Ireland and England is to the subject of this book, a more solid historical framework with which to interweave art and politics would have made this a more assertive study, perhaps demonstrating the centrality of sculpture to our understanding of Ireland's nineteenth-century history.

The book centers on individual sculptors and their commissions, interspersed with fairly broad discussions about aspects of sculptural practice. Elemental issues, such as the depiction of contemporary dress versus classical drapery, style and the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and competition processes for winning commissions, are presumably aimed at non-specialist readers. One wishes that the discussion had been more explicitly inflected by the Irish context. Chapter 2, which looks at art schools and training, might have usefully played standardized practices against those specific to Ireland.

A series of studies of once-well-known sculptors is divided into three generations, the chapters alternating between those artists who remained in Ireland and those with careers in...