Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854-1936 0199596468, 9780199596461

Table of contents :
Cover
Preface and Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I
Leisure and Learning
1. A New Audience for Greece and Rome
2. Showing off Archaeological Knowledge
3. Reproducing Greece and Rome
Part II Sculpture and the Benefits of Good Taste
4. Greek Sculpture and Nineteenth-century Commerce
5. Greek Sculpture, Beauty, and Morality
Part III An Unattainable Model?
6. Greece, Rome, and the Modern British Nation
Conclusion
Appendices
1. Ground Plan of the Crystal Palace
2. Plan of the Greek Court
3. Plan of the Roman Court
4. Plan of the Pompeian Court
5. List of Greek and Roman Sculpture Exhibited at Sydenham
References
Index

Citation preview

C L A S SIC A L P R E SE N C E S General Editors

l orna hardw i ck

james i. p orte r

C L A S SIC A L P R E SE N C E S Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of ­appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the ­centuries a­ llows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and ­identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854–1936

KAT E N IC HO L S

1

1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Kate Nichols 2015 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014946891 ISBN 978–0–19–959646–1 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For Ken and Helen Nichols

Preface and Acknowledgments In July 2013, the British press reported a Chinese billionaire’s plans to rebuild the Crystal Palace, on its (second) site at Crystal Palace Park in the London Borough of Bromley. These articles reinforced the longstanding confusion about the relationship between the Crystal Palace built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and its reincarnation in South London. They expounded numerous clichés about Victorian industrial prowess, and the Palace as the foundations of modern architecture. Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace examines the ways in which objects usually seen as not remotely industrial or modern—Greek and Roman sculpture—were displayed and debated in nineteenth-century Britain. It re-situates the South London suburbs as a prime location in the nineteenth and early twentieth century for viewing classical statuary. It builds upon the dynamic understandings of what classics and its reception might be, which I first encountered during my undergraduate degree in classical studies at Bristol; not a dead tradition with an afterlife, but something vital and dialogic. The number of friends and family members that emailed me with links to articles about the mooted reconstruction also suggested something else; quite how many people I have talked with (and possibly at) about the Crystal Palace since I started my PhD in 2005. It is a real pleasure to start to thank them; there are a lot of names here, but this book has been a long time in the making. It is a much revised version of my PhD thesis, which I completed in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College London in 2009. Without my PhD supervisor, Catharine Edwards, there would not have been a thesis to revise, and I cannot thank her enough for her insightful comments and unstinting encouragement both during the PhD and after. My examiners, Michael Hatt and Maria Wyke, raised many useful and provocative questions during the viva; I hope I have begun to answer them in this book. Whether or not I have addressed all the queries raised by the rigorous comments of OUP’s anonymous manuscript readers is another question, but I have learnt much from the attempt. Full Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funding enabled me to undertake the PhD, supplemented by an AHRC fellowship at the Kluge Center in the Library of Congress, Washington

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Preface and Acknowledgments

DC. Postdoctoral Fellowships from the Henry Moore Foundation, held at the Institute for Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition, University of Bristol, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, held at the University of York, provided invaluable time and space to think, write, and undertake new research. The Henry Moore Foundation also provided generous financial support for the images reproduced here. The expertise and enthusiasm of the staff at the National Art Library, Bromley Local Studies Library, the Minet Library in Lambeth, Guildhall Library, and at Norwood Local Studies Library made archival research both enjoyable and productive. Jonathan Lill’s virtual recreations of the Palace on Sydenham Town Forum are revelatory, and his generosity with his collection of stereoviews is laudable; many of the illustrations here would not have been possible without his permission. Marjorie Trusted and Diane Bilbey helped me with the V&A statue registries, and thanks are also due to James Sutton at the V&A archive at Blythe House, who was a mine of information about its plaster cast files. The kindness and intellectual openness of colleagues while I was a teaching fellow at York and Bristol were sustaining, and offered me new directions, questions, and modes of approaching both ancient Greek and Roman, and modern British art; in particular James Boaden, Grace Brockington, Jason Edwards, Shelley Hales, Claire Jones, Genevieve Liveley, Jeanne Nuechterlein, and Sarah Turner. Liz Prettejohn has been the best imaginable postdoctoral mentor, particularly during the challenging and unstable times that characterize early career academia. From the very start of this project, Debbie Challis has been a generous and encouraging friend, and I am particularly indebted to her for pointing out Robert Knox’s writings on Greek sculpture. Karen Carter, Viccy Coltman, David Feldman, Claire Jones, Brian Murray, and Sadiah Qureshi read chapters and provided helpful suggestions and critical feedback. Viccy and Sadiah also very kindly allowed me to look at unpublished manuscripts, as did Simon Goldhill, Liz Prettejohn, Charlotte Schreiter, and Amy Woodson-Boulton. I learnt a huge amount from speakers at two related conferences I co-organized, ‘What is to become of the Crystal Palace?’ (York, 2011), and ‘Art versus Industry?’ (Leeds City Museum, 2012), both generously supported by the Paul Mellon Centre, and, at Leeds, the Henry Moore Foundation. These helped me to rethink Chapter 4 in



Preface and Acknowledgments

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particular, and thanks are especially due to the co-organizers, Sarah Turner, Rebecca Wade, and Gabriel Williams. Since October 2012 I have been a postdoctoral researcher on a European Research Council Funded project on ‘The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-century Culture’ at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) in Cambridge. The lively research culture at CRASSH, as well as the ideas emerging from weekly group meetings, has given me the final push to finish this book, while at the same time making me realize that I could have written it, expanded it, and rethought it in entirely different directions. At OUP, Hilary O’Shea, Taryn Campbell, and Annie Rose have answered innumerable questions and helped me throughout the process of transforming a thesis into a book. Thanks are also due to the following, for a range of helpful acts, contributing directly to specific queries in the book and/or the welfare of its author: Kris Anderson, Abigail Baker, Lynda Bryant, Robert Crowe, Victoria Donellan, Katherine Harloe, Greta Hawes, Verity Hunt, Melanie Keene, Philippa Levine, Shushma Malik, Pantelis Michelakis, Alf Nichols, Jo Paul, Rhiannon Turner, Thomas Turner, Edmund Richardson, Mike O’Brien, Daniel Wilson, and Chitralekha Zutshi. Alex Wardrop has helped me to think about thinking about the past in all sorts of unexpected and kind ways. When Alex introduced me to Rhiannon Williams, I told her I was ‘a month’ away from finishing this book. Rhi is still here two years later, as is the still-not-quite-finished manuscript. She has lived with it (and me) in its most difficult, allconsuming phase, been patient and funny, a trusty partner through life and concrete dinosaur-seeking expeditions. Finally, I hope that the dedication goes some way to expressing my deep gratitude to my endlessly supportive, loving, and generous parents, who have always encouraged my interests, and provided space for me to flourish.

Contents List of Illustrations  List of Abbreviations  Introduction 

xii xiv 1

PART I: LEISURE AND LEARNING 1. A New Audience for Greece and Rome 

19

2. Showing off Archaeological Knowledge 

53

3. Reproducing Greece and Rome 

87

PART II: SCULPTURE AND THE BENEFITS OF GOOD TASTE 4. Greek Sculpture and Nineteenth-century Commerce 

127

5. Greek Sculpture, Beauty, and Morality 

164

PART III: AN UNATTAINABLE MODEL? 6. Greece, Rome, and the Modern British Nation 

203

Conclusion 

243

Appendices 1.  Ground Plan of the Crystal Palace  2.   Plan of the Greek Court  3.   Plan of the Roman Court  4.   Plan of the Pompeian Court  5.   List of Greek and Roman Sculpture Exhibited at Sydenham  References  Index 

251 252 253 254 255 269 303

List of Illustrations Figure 0.1 Ruins of the Pompeian Court  Figure 0.2 Crystal Palace and Upper Terraces, Sydenham 

2 2

Figure 0.3 Greek Court from the nave 

10

Figure 0.4 Apollo Belvedere in the Roman Court 

12

Figure 0.5 Greek and Roman Sculpture Court 

13

Figure 0.6 The Pompeian Court 

14

Figure 1.1 Visitors in the Roman Court 

20

Figure 1.2 Engraving of the Greek Court 

32

Figure 1.3 Visitors in the interior of the Pompeian Court 

33

Figure 1.4 Visitors in the Roman Court, from the nave 

34

Figure 1.5 Visitors in the Greek Court 

35

Figure 1.6 The Crystal Palace Railway, Punch cartoon 

36

Figure 1.7 Henrietta Thornhill and friends at the Crystal Palace Handel Festival 

44

Figure 1.8 Henrietta Thornhill and friends in the Palace nave 

44

Figure 2.1 Borghese or Fighting Gladiator in the Greek Court 

54

Figure 2.2 Borghese or Fighting Gladiator performed by an actor in ‘fleshings’ 

55

Figure 2.3 Temple of Apollo, Regents Park Colosseum 

59

Figure 2.4 Niobid group and painted Parthenon frieze 

75

Figure 3.1 Pompeian Court with Roman visitor 

93

Figure 4.1 The Ceramic Court 

146

Figure 4.2 Crystal Palace Art Union Prizes, 1860 

150

Figure 5.1 The Greek Court and the Egyptian Court 

168

Figure 5.2 The Greek Court, from a children’s illustrated book, 1890 

183

Figure 6.1 The Cenotaph Court in the Greek Court, 1923 

211

Figure 6.2 Stereoview through Greek to Egyptian Courts 

213

Figure 6.3 Women and the Natural History Department, Punch cartoon, 1855 

225



List of Illustrations

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Figure 6.4 Illustration depicting visitors in the Natural History Department, 1896 

228

Figure 6.5 Models of San people, Natural History Department 

229

Figure 6.6 The Bath Temple and participants in the 1911 Pageant of London 

237

List of Abbreviations AJ ICPG ILN JDM V&A1

Art Journal Illustrated Crystal Palace Gazette Illustrated London News Journal of Design and Manufactures V&A Archive, BR/B14/068 (1853–70), Newspaper Cuttings, Crystal Palace. V&A2 V&A Archive, D84/168/1 (1879–81), Nominal File: Gallery of Casts. V&A3 V&A Archive, MA/1/C3432 (1900–38), Nominal File: Crystal Palace Trustees. V&A4 V&A Archive, MA/1.B3087 (1868–1994), Nominal File: D. Brucciani and Co. Ltd.

Introduction The photograph depicts a familiar scene, the exposed skeleton of a Pompeian house (Figure 0.1). Broken columns no longer offer support, and stucco falls away from once brightly painted walls. It is a sight that has stirred the imagination of countless artists, poets, philosophers, and historians, and moved millions of tourists to pay homage to a lost ancient town. The photograph, however, was not taken on the Campania coast, but at Sydenham, a south London suburb. It shows the remains of the Pompeian Court of the Crystal Palace, an 1850s reconstruction razed to the ground by the fire that swept the building on 30 November 1936. As this temporally perplexing photograph testifies, the distinction between past and present, between the authentic Pompeii and what 1850s commentators described as its ‘complete and perfect’ reconstruction, continued to be blurred even after the Pompeian Court was destroyed.1 The deceptive image of its scorched ancient-but-modern remains introduces the main concern of Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace; the preposterous relationships forged with the material remains of classical antiquity by people in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, under the glass roof of this self-proclaimed ‘modern’ venue (Figure 0.2).2 Two broad questions frame discussion. What did display to a mass audience at the Crystal Palace do to the status and understanding of classical sculpture and architecture? And what impact did classical culture have on the Crystal Palace? Chapters in Part I investigate how attempts to communicate the classical past to the public, and public understandings of this past border on, interact with, and in many   ‘Letter to the Editor’, Morning Post (20 July 1854), V&A1, I, 135.   Berman (1983): 235–48.

1 2

2

Introduction

Figure 0.1 Ruined Pompeian house, Crystal Palace, Sydenham, 1936. ­Bromley Local Studies and Archives (CP2E/1).

Figure 0.2  Crystal Palace and Upper Terraces, with south water tower visible to the left. Date unknown, c.1920s. Bromley Local Studies and Archives (CP2).

Introduction



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ways enable scholarly knowledge. Parts II and III analyse the use of classical visual culture in contemporary nineteenth-century commercial, social, personal, and political life, questioning and destabilizing what it might mean to use the past as a model. The book is a challenge to the received idea that classical culture is exclusively the province of an elite (or, indeed, any specific group), and that the deployment of classical visual motifs is inherently conservative. It is also offered as an alternative history of museums. The British Museum appears today as the dominant museological product of the nineteenth century. But the Crystal Palace demonstrates that the museum’s now canonical exhibits were only one of many possibilities in Victorian London. I describe visitors’ relationships as preposterous partly to mark out the complexities of the relationship between past and present at the Palace, and as a nod towards Mieke Bal’s coinage of ‘preposterous history’, which ‘puts what came chronologically first (“pre-”) as an after-effect behind (“post”) its later recycling’.3 This mode of analysing the presence of the past in subsequent cultural life is woven through Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace. I do not present Victorian engagements with Greek and Roman culture as an instance of the ‘afterlife’ or ‘legacy’ of classical sculpture. These terms can imply a unidirectional contact with a distant culture closed off from later interpretations.4 Rather, I take reception theorist Hans-Robert Jauss’s proposal that art can mediate between past and present as my point of departure.5 Reception theory emphasizes the importance of the reader in the constitution of the text. This does not mean, however, that the realization of a text is a passive reflection of the society contemporary to the reader. Far from it; Jauss’s ‘aesthetics of reception’ aims to provide an alternative to both socially determined and strictly formalist readings of texts. I approach the representation of Greece and Rome in the nineteenth century as a two-way conversation—neither the concentrated greatness of antiquity ‘influencing’ a passive nineteenth century, nor a self-evidently retrievable, concrete antiquity transformed into a mere reflection of nineteenth-century mores. As in all conversations, it is   Bal (1999): 7. On the temporality of displayed art, see Forster-Hahn (1995): 174.   Martindale (1993) is now itself the ‘classic’ formulation of the need to reject the classical ‘tradition’ and embrace a more hermeneutic model. For critical analysis and response twenty years on, see Hardwick (2013). 5   Jauss (1970): 7. See also Holub (1984): 53–7. 3 4

4

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not a straightforward case of considerate mutual listening, discussion, or understanding; there are times when one participant dominates or when each talks over the other. I combine this interest in classical sculpture as a mediator between (primarily) the Victorians and antiquity with a close contextual analysis of sources, situating them in their intellectual milieu in an attempt to understand what—for example—­ the Palace court architects Owen Jones and Matthew Digby Wyatt might have sought to communicate in their statements about beauty and morality.6 Wherever possible, I have drawn upon nineteenth-century diary entries, outraged pamphlets, letters, and personal ephemera, not because I believe that these are unmediated contacts with the ‘real’ Victorians, but to allow voices that might otherwise not be heard to participate in this transhistorical conversation, however bound by generic conventions they may be. In the pages that follow, readers will meet (among others) a middle-class twenty-something diarist, Henrietta Thornhill, for whom the Palace was a favoured social and cultural hub in the 1860s; an evangelical pamphleteer, William Peters, who expressed disgust at the Palace’s nude sculpture; a working-class autodidact, John Birch Thomas, who sold toys in the Palace nave in the 1870s, and expressed delight at the Palace’s nude sculpture. They are joined beneath the Palace’s glass roof by more familiar figures from the Victorian cultural establishment—and from across the Channel and Atlantic; critics and social commentators John Ruskin, Hippolyte Taine, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Eastlake; authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville; artists Edward Poynter, Richard Westmacott Jr, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema; body building entrepreneur Eugen Sandow; and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. The archive of course is not at all representative of Victorian society, but I have sought to give at least some sense of the diversity of the visitors to Sydenham. In its engagement with Victorian uses of the past, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace is part of a wider reflexive interest in ‘revivals’ and ‘receptions’ which is very much apparent in contemporary academic writing across disciplines: the rise of ‘classical reception studies’ in classics; the interest in ‘neo Victorianism’ within Victorian studies; and the recent art-historical turn towards ‘anachronistic’ readings 6   This approach to intellectual history is not irreconcilable with an interest in reception theory. See Skinner (1989): 279–81; Thompson (1993).



Introduction

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which reconsider the relationship between a ‘source’ and the work it supposedly ‘influenced’.7 Interests in a dialogic, reassembled, and non-linear past are not simply a relativist, voracious, ahistorical postmodernism raiding the past for trophies, or its mirror image.8 The Sydenham Crystal Palace’s evident engagement with, but refusal to play by, chronological, linear time, makes such an approach particularly suited to this venue, which, as I explore in detail in Chapter 6, confused chronological thinking as much as reinforced it. The Palace displays stimulated visitors to meditate on the nature of historical time; one popular guidebook noted that ‘We have long since left the Doric temple and Corinthian doorway, but we still look back wistfully, uncertain whether we have been advancing or merely going round and round’.9 Was history cyclical? Or were the people who could re­ create and physically contain the world’s past in one vast building headed somewhere new and without historical precedent? As they walked through its industrially cast iron and human-blown glass shell (itself a juxtaposition of old and new technologies) to Greece via the Birmingham Court, or encountered casts of the Aegina Marbles by the agricultural implements display, Palace visitors formed preposterous ideas of Greece and Rome, synthesizing, reconfiguring, and forging ancient and modern.10 Cultural historians are increasingly interested in non-specialist understandings of the English past in the nineteenth century. Yet they have tended to maintain that ‘elite’ classical civilizations had scant significance in this growing popular national sense of the past.11 The Crystal Palace at Sydenham tells a rather different story. At its peak in the first few years of opening, it hosted over 1.3 million visitors yearly, suggesting that at least twice as many people could have seen the painted plaster casts of the Parthenon marbles in Sydenham as the originals in the British Museum.12 The debates that arose around the exhibition of casts to a truly mass audience illuminate m ­ id-nineteenth-century 7   Classical Receptions Journal was launched in 2009. See also Martindale and Thomas (2006); Hardwick and Stray (2008). Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies dates from 2008. See further Kaplan (2007); Heilmann and Llewellyn (2010). In art history, see Nagel and Wood (2010); Powell (2012). 8   On postmodernism and the Victorians, see Kucich and Sadoff (2000). 9   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 55. 10   On glass and human labour in the nineteenth century, see Armstrong (2008). 11   Mandler (1997): 26; Melman (2006): 22; Mitchell (2000): 5. On classics and nonelites, S. McElduff (2006). 12   The Times (13 December 1859), V&A1, I, 61; Cowtan (1872): 304.

Introduction

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attitudes towards classical sculpture outside of the university, public school, museum, or country house. The study of classics in mass culture in the twentieth century is rapidly developing within classical reception studies.13 Research into working-class engagements with classics in the nineteenth century has focused primarily on the theatre and literary culture.14 The Crystal Palace offers one opportunity to extend this interest in classics and class into the nineteenth century, and to look offstage and into the histories of art and museums. Further, and most importantly, it provides a prime example of an intersection between the supposed ‘popular’ and ‘elite’, essential in rethinking the reductive opposition between these two apparent poles.15 Viccy Coltman and Elizabeth Prettejohn have recently explored the archaeological, art-historical, and art-theoretical roles of classical sculpture in nineteenth-century Britain.16 In the chapters that follow, I show how classical sculpture on display was also central to a range of broader discourses at mid-nineteenth century. It featured in discussions of industrial design and the concept of good consumer taste, of moral beauty and self-discipline, and as a symbol of European racial superiority. The Crystal Palace displays are a window into these various, often grubby, and hitherto largely unexplored lives of classical statuary. Sculpture and architecture at the Palace constituted more than an episode in art history; the displays were also envisaged as a means of furthering curiosity and knowledge about ancient history.17 The scope here is thus considerably broader than a discussion of how ancient sculpture was displayed in the mid-nineteenth century; it examines the presentation of ideas about Greek and Roman history and society through its material remains, and asks what role they played in shaping the aspirational visions for modern Britain that were presented at the Palace. The focus is not on individual object biographies, but on how display at mid-nineteenth century constituted an understanding of the ‘classical’. In turn, the significant role played by antiquity beneath the Palace’s definitively ‘modern’ glass roof complicates further the longstanding interest within Victorian studies in identifying and disputing the notion of ‘nineteenth-century modernism’.18   Wyke (1997); Joshel et al. (2001); Paul (2013).   Hall (2008); Hall and Macintosh (2005): 350–90; Mayer (1994). 15 16   Mukerji and Schudson (1991).   Coltman (2009); Prettejohn (2012). 17   Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (1855): 4. 18   Wolff (1964); Price (1996); Anderson (2005); Armstrong (2008). 13 14



Introduction

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The Palace’s long life span, 1854–1936, offers further opportunities to cross supposedly discrete eras to reveal what might (or might not) be specifically Victorian, Edwardian, or Georgian about its displays and responses to them.19 The casts of classical sculpture take on new significances throughout the Palace’s life, testifying to the mutability, not fixity, of the ‘classical’. Chapters are thematic, rather than chronological. The main focus is on debates surrounding the Palace at its opening in the 1850s, but there is extensive discussion of changing ideas towards casts, Roman imperialism, and design reform which reach well into the twentieth century. A reader looking for a detailed consideration of classical sculpture in early twentieth-century Britain will be disappointed. Instead, the book provides a focused discussion of attitudes towards classical sculpture in Britain c.1850–70, and a broader set of comparisons for the later period.

THE CRYSTAL PAL AC E , SYDE NHAM 1854– 1936 The Great Exhibition closed in October 1851, and, after prolonged debate, the building that had housed it was purchased by the Crystal Palace Company, removed, enlarged, and rebuilt in Sydenham, opening on 10 June 1854. The Company had fallen into financial difficulties by the 1870s, and the Palace was finally purchased by the state in 1911. It was closed to the public from February 1915 to January 1920, when it was used as a training ground and later as a demobilization centre for the Royal Navy, with men accommodated in hammocks in the Fine Arts Courts. From 1920 to 1923, the fledgling Imperial War Museum was housed at Sydenham. Under the new management of Sir Henry Buckland, the Palace was subject to a renovation programme in the 1920s, and was regaining popularity when the calamitous fire engulfed it in 1936.20 In contrast with the enormous and ever expanding bibliography on its predecessor, the Great Exhibition, the Sydenham Palace has only very recently begun to be addressed by cultural historians, and remains marginal.21 It often features as a vulgar sequel in volumes 19   On Edwardianism and the importance of nuanced period specificity, see O’Neill and Hatt (2010). 20   Piggott (2004) provides a general survey and illustrations. See also Leith (2005). 21   See, however, Atmore (2004); Challis (2008d); Gurney (2001, 2007); Hassam (1999); Kay (2008).

Introduction

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dedicated primarily to the Great Exhibition, ‘transformed from a school to a playground’ ‘the late nineteenth-century’s Disneyland’.22 Its credentials as a serious engagement with art, archaeology, geology, and anthropology are gradually being acknowledged.23 This book is part of this re-evaluation, but as will become apparent in Chapter 3, I do not necessarily hold that playgrounds and Disneylands should be dismissed as places where engagements with the past might take place. Samuel Laing, first director of the Crystal Palace Company, launched the venture in a speech at its opening with the following statement: The directors are bold enough to look forward to the Crystal Palace of 1854 becoming an illustrated encyclopaedia of this great and varied universe, where every art and every science may find a place, and where every visitor may find something to interest, and be taught through the medium of the eye to receive impressions kindling a desire for knowledge, and awakening instincts of the beautiful.24

These totalizing aims reflect the wide reach of the three main purposes of the Crystal Palace; amusement and recreation, instruction, and commercial utility. The three were closely bound up in each aspect of the undertaking. Its Fine Arts Courts, for example, were considered a form of entertainment as much as a stimulus for artistic and historical education, and (as I explore in Chapter 4) were explicitly connected to aspirations for modern manufacture. The Sydenham Palace’s contents and organization were completely different from those of the Great Exhibition. The vast building was divided into two (Appendix 1). Half was dedicated to industry and manufacture, and the remainder to Fine Arts Courts. The northern nave housed the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Alhambra, Nineveh, Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance, and Italian Courts. These displayed plaster casts and scaled-down reproductions of architecture acquired on an exhaustive tour of European museums by the architects in charge of the Fine Arts Courts, Matthew Digby Wyatt and Owen Jones.25 Four further galleries representing Greek and Roman, Medieval and Renaissance, and modern French, Italian, English, and German sculpture bordered the central transept. A northern wing contained raw material and agricultural implements. The Nineveh Court and colossal thirteenth-century bce Abu Simbel   Auerbach (1999): 200; Billinge (1993): 130.   Secord (2004); Hales (2006); Qureshi (2011): 193–208; Moser (2012). 24 25   Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (1855): 3.   Phillips (1854): 16–7. 22 23



Introduction

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figures were destroyed by fire in 1866. In the early 1900s, as I discuss in Chapter 3, many of the casts were moved, and some stored beneath ground. Yet the organizing principles, architecture, and names of the Fine Arts Courts remained fixed in place throughout the Palace’s life. Matters were rather different in the south nave, whose more commercial contents regularly changed. In 1854, it boasted courts of French produce, mixed and printed fabric, musical instruments, manufacture from Sheffield and Birmingham, furniture, carpets, paper hangings, hardware, and stationery, and estranged from the other architectural and artistic re-creations, the (permanent) Pompeian Court. The Natural History Department aimed at ethnological education, and featured models of men, women, and children (excluding Europeans), stuffed animals, and a vast collection of tropical plants. Outside, Italianate gardens displayed more statuary, while a geological area demonstrated the principles of stratification and life-sized models of ‘antediluvian monsters’. A wide range of guidebooks to the Palace were published, and form useful sources for reconstructing displays—or at least the court architects’ aspirations for displays. The official handbooks included a General Guide to the entire building and gardens, by Samuel Phillips, a journalist and Assyrian enthusiast. George Scharf, who was appointed secretary and director of the National Gallery in 1857, compiled more detailed handbooks to the Greek, Roman, and Pompeian Courts. Scharf had fine archaeological credentials; he was an active member of the Society of Antiquaries and had accompanied the archaeologist Charles Fellowes on his expeditions on behalf of the British Museum to Lycia, Turkey in the 1840s. These guides do not conduct the reader around the courts—this is left to the general guides—but are more like textbook introductions to classical sculpture and ancient history. They feature long quotations from primary source material, detailed bibliographies (including books in French, Italian, and German), and barely interact at all with the sculpture on display. Their intended audience appears to have been viewers with some sort of classical education, but little familiarity with ancient visual arts—and the guides testify to the range of visitors anticipated and catered for by the Palace directorate. They were priced between three and eighteen pence. Unofficial guides were cheaper—priced from a penny—and gave a less specialist view. The Ten Chief Courts is a particularly rich and pensive source; a New

Introduction

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Monthly Magazine review described it as a necessary introduction to the other, more complicated guides.26

A Tour of the Classical Courts The Greek and Roman Courts were designed by Owen Jones, the Pompeian Court by Matthew Digby Wyatt—their careers are explored in greater detail in Chapter 4. I include a brief overview of the courts here as the basis for more detailed discussion of their contents in the chapters that follow. A catalogue of sculpture and ground plans of each Court can be found in the Appendices. The architecture of the Greek Court (Figure 0.3; Appendix 2) was based upon the Doric proportions of the Temple of Zeus at Nemea. The main area of the Court, referred to as the Agora (Greek for marketplace), was populated by a symmetrically arranged selection of

Figure 0.3  The ‘Agora’ of the Greek Court from the nave. Venus de Milo ­centre, model Parthenon to the rear. Date unknown. Bromley Local Studies and Archives (CP2B).   New Monthly Magazine (July 1854): 378.

26

Introduction



11

Greco-Roman Venuses, with Venus de Milo, catalogue number 1, in prime position. Beyond this was a stoa containing relief sculpture. The south side-gallery (Figure 5.1) contained portrait busts of Greek poets and dramatists, in chronological order, while the north side-gallery (Figure 6.1) had similarly arranged philosophers, statesmen, and generals. At the back of the Court was a model of the western front of the Parthenon at a scale of 2/9. To the south of this were the Niobid group (Figure 2.4), and to the north were statues from the east pediment of the Parthenon. Sections from the north, east, and west of the Parthenon frieze ran along the rear of the gallery, and spilt over into the Roman section. Restored by the sculptor Raffaelle Monti, it featured parts of the frieze that were in Paris and Rome. Contentiously, as I explore throughout the book, the section of the north frieze was brightly painted. The choice of Nemea, a sanctuary in the north-eastern Peloponnese, was a rather unusual one, as the Temple of Zeus (c.330 bce) was not especially well known in the nineteenth century.27 It seems to have been selected for its aesthetic appeal rather than its standing in architectural history.28 The temple does not have a frieze, but the version in the Crystal Palace was decorated with olive wreaths copied from the choragic monument of Thrasyllus in Athens, another rather obscure choice. Jones and Wyatt added the names of principal Greek cities and colonies to this frieze, noting that ‘although it may not have been employed by the Greeks, has at least the advantage of placing before the public the names of those who illustrated so important an epoch in the civilisation of the world’.29 Even this cursory description of the Greek Court makes clear the interplay between ideas about creating a new variety of authenticity, an archaeological pedantry, and the Palace’s new audience, which I explore further in Part I. The Roman Court (Figure 0.4; Appendix 3), to the north of the Greek Court, was approached from the nave through three arches, copied from the bottom row of columns on the Coliseum, and exhibited to show what guidebooks unanimously consider to be the particularly Roman use of this architectural feature.30 ‘The centre of the area of the Roman Court is occupied not with statues as in Greece, but with models of the great structures which formed the lasting glory of the “Eternal City”’, notes the Penny Guide, referring to models of the   Birge et al. (1992): xxix.   Scharf (1854c): 3–4.

27 30

28

  Jones (1854b): i.

  Jones (1854b): ii.

29

Introduction

12

Figure 0.4  Roman Court, Apollo Belvedere vestibule, 1850s stereoview. Note the change in architectural style from the Greek Court, with a Roman arch and faux marble walls. Author’s collection.

Forum, Coliseum, and Pantheon, and clearly differentiating Rome as a place of business and urban life, not beauty.31 In Chapter 2, I analyse in detail the relationship between Greece and Rome at the Palace. Behind the central area of the Roman Court were three vestibules decorated with multicoloured marble-effect backdrops in the style of Roman baths. Pride of place in each went to Venus and Cupid, Diana the Huntress (both from the Louvre), and the Apollo Belvedere. The north side-gallery was populated with portrait busts of the most celebrated kings, emperors, and empresses. In addition to the architectural Greek and Roman Courts, there was a further court of Roman and Greek sculpture (Figure 0.5; Appendix 1, no. 12). This can be considered more of a typical gallery display than that of the Greek and Roman Courts, lacking the immersive architectural reconstructions that made the period-specific courts so unusual, and for this reason, I focus in less detail on this particular display area in what follows. It contained ‘the chef d’oeuvres of the Greek and Roman Schools’, with the colossal Farnese Bull as the centrepiece, along with other well-known sculpture from Italy.32 Antique sculpture lined the north nave, outside of the courts, perhaps giving a decorative effect similar to its display in English country houses. The central nave boasted Farnese Hercules and Flora Farnese, and the   Penny Guide (1863): 8.

31

  Phillips (1854): 150.

32



Introduction

13

Figure 0.5  1860s stereoview. Caption on reverse reads ‘150. THE TORO FARNESE, from Naples, and the CHORAGIC MONUMENT OF LYSICRATES, in the Greek and Roman Court’. From the collection of Jonathan Lill, published with his kind permission.

choragic monument of Lysikrates from Athens, flanked by Castor and Pollux, the Monte Cavallo sculpture group from Rome supposedly by Phidias and Praxiteles. These sculptures and monuments did not need to be placed within a specific historical court; they were famous enough in their own right to have taken on meanings beyond simply being Greek or Roman artefacts (see Appendix 1, letters D, E, F, G, and H). The Pompeian Court offered visitors the immersive experience of stepping into a reconstructed Pompeian house—except it was a copy that had no original, a composite of numerous different houses from excavations on site, a paradox that I explore in Chapter 3. It was ­extensive—as is apparent from the plan (Appendix 4), featuring a

14

Introduction

Figure 0.6  The ‘complete and perfect’ Pompeian house. View through the atrium from the Palace nave. Note the fully tiled roof. Date unknown, Bromley Local Studies and Archives (CP2B).

‘reception’ (atrium) with a shallow pool (impluvium), ‘dining room’ (tablinum) (all visible in Figure 0.6), ‘bedrooms’ (cubicula), a garden (peristyle), and ‘drawing room’ (triclinium). These contained mosaic floors and archaeologically exact wall paintings. It exhibited only a few sculptures and was concerned more with a re-creation of daily life,



Introduction

15

a typical reaction to the discoveries at Pompeii, and one reinforced by its position in the south wing among the industrial courts.33 A visitor could leave Pompeii and in seconds stumble upon a scene of a (taxidermied) jaguar attacking a deer, hunted by life-cast plaster Mexicans in the Natural History Department, from Rome to Elizabethan England, through Greece to Egypt. Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace aims to show how understandings of classical culture were formed in relation to the diverse exhibits at Sydenham. In considering the history of classical archaeology from the perspective of its presentation to a popular audience, it seeks to uncover the various roles that classical sculpture played in nineteenth-century understandings both of classical civilizations, and in negotiating a changing contemporary world. The decisions made about displaying sculpture to this new audience reveal a great deal about perceptions of both the ancient world and the modern. Such exhibitions, and visitors’ responses to them, have, over time, contributed to the museum culture that enables us to encounter antiquities today.

  Hales (2006).

33

Part I Leisure and Learning Hitherto, in England, the Fine Arts have been wooed only under their severest aspects. They have been made objects of study, of trade, of research, of fashion, and even of necessity; but we have yet to learn to regard them as inexhaustible sources of innocent, and, at the same time, stimulating pleasure.

The architect of the Fine Arts Courts, Matthew Digby Wyatt, thus pronounced that the contemplation of sculpture should be enjoyable. He also associated the pleasurable aspects of art viewing with a mass audience, continuing, ‘To supply such a defect, it has become imperatively necessary to popularise them’.1 By the 1850s, casts of Greek sculpture were not just viewed by aristocrats in country houses or by artists in academies; at the Crystal Palace they were admired by giggling shop girls eating ices, and displayed alongside agricultural implements and frying pans. The Crystal Palace Company aimed to attract a wide audience by combining entertainment with education. The chapters in this section take the intersection between learning, leisure, and a mass audience as a point of departure. I start with the audience; who were they? And how did classical sculpture and architecture, usually seen as an elite preserve, intersect with contemporary ideas about art education and rational recreation? Chapter 2 focuses on the more overtly educational aspects of the Palace’s Greek and Roman Courts, and their engagement with contemporary archaeological scholarship. I argue that entertainment venues such as the Crystal Palace need to be taken seriously as places where fledgling archaeological ideas were communicated to the public. Such engagements are an important (if often ignored) chapter in the history of classical archaeology. But I also situate the Palace in   Wyatt (1854): 7.

1

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the wider context of a London entertainment industry that had close connections to the developing archaeological establishment. The Crystal Palace court architects foregrounded the archaeological credentials of their creations. Yet the courts stimulated far broader discussions among commentators, who debated how authentic an ancient world created by nineteenth-century Britons could be, and wondered what impact this creation would have on the public appreciation of the past. Chapter 3 examines nineteenth-century ideas about authenticity in relation to the re-created classical past at Sydenham, and suggests how these ambient environments overlapped with the Palace’s archaeological concerns. The ghosts of a lost popular phenomenon such as the Palace continue to haunt twenty-first-century discussions of museological practice. I aim to historicize some of these debates.

1 A New Audience for Greece and Rome Thirty-four million entry tickets to the Crystal Palace were sold in its first twenty years, an average of over 32,000 per week.2 A report in The Times from 1870 described participants ranging from well-dressed ‘cheap trippers’ from the North and Midlands, to London servant girls; not exactly a homogenous group in terms of geography or social standing.3 Throughout the nineteenth century, press comment testifies to the appeal of the Palace across the classes, particularly on public holidays. By the late 1850s, The Times (despite being so often keen to find fault with the Palace) noted that the Palace was the Good Friday destination for ‘Londoners of almost all classes’; figures of over 40,000 visitors were recorded on Good Friday in 1862.4 An engraving of the Palace’s Roman Court from the ICPG (1854) shows how walkways overlooking each of the courts enabled visitors to survey the building, the objects on show, and other visitors looking at the objects on show (Figure 1.1). For an even greater panorama surveying the entire Palace grounds, with London on one side and the Kent countryside on the other, visitors could ascend the water towers at either end of the Palace building, an innovation specific to Sydenham (see Figure 0.2). Visitors at Sydenham were part of the spectacle of the Palace from its inception. But since the Palace was designed specifically to attract non-elite visitors, the audience were not just part of the spectacle as they had been at the Great Exhibition.5 Their behaviour and social composition were fundamental to evaluating its   Shenton (1874): 2.   ‘Easter Entertainments, the Crystal Palace’, The Times (19 April 1870). 4   ‘Good Friday at the Crystal Palace’, The Times (3 April 1858), V&A1, II, 32. 5  On audience as spectacle in 1851, Message and Johnston (2008): 28; Miller (1995a): 57–9; Taylor (2002). 2 3

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Figure 1.1  Engraving of ‘Roman Court’, The Illustrated Crystal Palace Gazette (1854): 152 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

success.6 The novelty of men, women, and children from across the class spectrum assembling at Sydenham generated plentiful discussion among commentators. In extended journal articles, both the radical journalist Harriet Martineau (1854) and the conservative art critic Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (1855) devoted more time to recounting the conduct of other visitors than to recording their own impressions of the displays, suggesting that their engagement with and understanding of the venture was constituted largely through its audience. The Crystal Palace was one of the first destinations to offer viewing balconies as part of the attraction of a visit. These platforms, and the self-reflexive scrutiny that they encouraged, were identified by Tony Bennett as the crucial innovation that made possible the development of the ‘exhibitionary complex’; ‘a set of cultural technologies concerned to organise a voluntarily self-regulating citizenry’.7 Articulated 6   For a comparative phenomenon at the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, see Leahy (2007): 547–8. 7   Bennett (1995): 62, 69.

A New Audience for Greece and Rome



21

in a New Formations article of 1988 and developed in The Birth of the Museum (1995), the notion of the exhibitionary complex has been enormously influential within museum studies.8 Bennett analyses the development of museums in the nineteenth century as a history both converging with and reversing the development of the carceral archipelago traced by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (published in French 1975, English translation 1977). Foucault elaborates a shift from power articulated through the public ‘spectacle of the scaffold’ to the surveillance of the prison, where inmates internalize the knowledge that they are at all times visible and begin to regulate their own behaviour. The exhibitionary complex combines spectacle with surveillance. Where Foucault identifies the opening of the penal colony at Mettray, France (1840) as the moment at which the carceral system was completed, Bennett presents the Crystal Palace as its exhibitionary equivalent, ‘simultaneously ordering objects for public inspection and ordering the public that inspected’.9 In Bennett’s vision of exhibition attendance, the intentions of those in power (whoever they might be) are seamlessly communicated to the audience, denying any agency to visitors. Ostensibly focusing on the impact of exhibitions on those who attended them, nowhere does he analyse actual visitor responses. Museologists and art historians are increasingly cautious about the implications of Bennett’s ‘museology of paranoia’.10 Using detailed case studies from the very building in which the exhibitionary complex was supposedly born, I hope to demonstrate how the Palace’s mass audience, its intertwinement of education and entertainment, ‘popular culture’, and fine art might broaden understandings of the ways in which exhibitions function. Chapter 1 seeks to uncover as far as possible how the audience at Sydenham behaved and related their experiences in the Greek, Roman, and Pompeian Courts. Throughout the chapters that follow I examine what might be called the exhibitionary complexities of display; the range of intentions behind what was exhibited and the (often competing) variety of interpretations of the objects on show. My approach draws on theories of audience response developed across the humanities and social sciences, which suggest the importance of 9   Kriegel (2006).   Foucault (1977): 293; Bennett (1995): 61.   Barringer (2006): 138; Trodd (2003). On the problems of applying Discipline and Punish to nineteenth-century Britain, see Goodlad (2003). 8

10

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response in generating the meaning of a (broadly defined) text.11 I seek here to uncover the ways in which ideas about Greek and Roman culture were shaped by the Palace’s new audience—both actively in their interpretations, and through attempts on the part of the Palace directorate to cater to their perceived needs. Although visitor responses are usually seen as irredeemably lost, recent research in the history of science remains positive about the possibility of their recovery, citing biographies, memoirs, travel journals, pamphlets, and periodicals as records of visitors’ ‘emotions, surprises, disappointments’.12 By attending to visitor experience I aim to re-situate the exhibition visit as an important aspect in understanding the range of meanings of classical sculpture in nineteenth-century culture.

A N E X PANDE D AUDI E NC E ?

The Elusive Working-class Visitor For all the aspirations that the Sydenham venture would be a ‘Palace of the People’, within a month of its opening commentators began to note that few of its clientele appeared to be from the working classes.13 Various correspondents and critics offered explanations for the absence of working men and women; the expense of travelling (9d. return in third class) and gaining admission (one shilling on the cheapest days) were common reasons suggested. London carpenters, bricklayers, and plasterers earned between five and six shillings for a ten-hour working day in the 1850s, and their lesser skilled assistants fewer than four shillings; entry for a family was around a day’s pay.14 The Palace was geographically inaccessible for many Londoners, located an uncomfortably crowded train journey away from Victoria or London Bridge.15 In contrast, philanthropic art galleries founded later in the 11   For a survey see Machor and Goldstein (2000). In museum studies, see Heath and vom Lehn (2004); Hoffenberg (2001); Sandell (2006): 71–104. 12   Carroll (2004): 32. 13   ‘The Crystal Palace’, Daily News (10 July 1854), V&A1, I, 134; ‘Journal of the Crystal Palace’, ICPG (24 June 1854): 148; Morning Post (26 February 1855), V&A1, I, 158; ‘Letter to the Editor’, Daily News (26 December 1855), V&A1, I, 187; ‘The Crystal Palace and the Million’, Atlas (25 July 1857), V&A1, II, 13. 14   Bowley (1900): 83. 15   See the Morning Chronicle (28 June 1854), V&A1, I, 130; satirized in Sketchley (1870): 109.

A New Audience for Greece and Rome



23

century, such as Samuel Barnett’s Whitechapel Gallery, strove to provide venues in the heart of working-class areas, stayed open until late in the evening, and never charged an admission fee.16 Further, despite heated discussions stretching into the 1870s, the Palace never officially opened on a Sunday.17 This made visits impossible for many working people during an ordinary week.18 Loopholes in Sunday opening law did, however, enable workers from all over the country to band together as co-operative shareholders and to commandeer the Palace for themselves on several Sundays.19 Every August from 1888 onwards the Palace was occupied for week-long National Co-operative Festivals; Peter Gurney has argued that the Palace was ‘an appropriated space’ for working-class politics during these festivities.20 The more diverse audiences recorded on bank holidays indicate that inaccessible opening hours were a considerable contributing factor to the Palace’s lack of working-class visitors. The opportunities for cultural ‘improvement’ that access to the Palace offered were not just a matter for debate among educated reformers seeking to impose rational recreation on the masses.21 They were also a matter of interest to certain sections of the working class. In 1856, both the Daily News and the Morning Post printed a letter demanding cheaper access to the Palace, addressed to the Palace Company chairman and directors, and signed by 980 workmen employed in various London establishments of ‘Price’s Patent Candle Company’.22 The Daily News reported in 1857 that politically active working men were indeed concerned with the opening hours of the Palace, even pursuing their visiting rights at the expense of what might seem more pressing social conditions: Whenever we hear of a meeting of workmen assembled to discuss grievances, or of electors to cross-examine a candidate, we find that the five   Wilson (2000); Waterfield (1994).   A large number of pamphlets were published on the matter, from contributors across the social spectrum. A selection from the early years include: A Clergyman (n.d.); A Layman (1853); A Shoemaker (1854); Cruikshank (1853); Jowett (1852); Le Blond (1853); Vaughan (1852). 18   On changes in workers’ leisure time see Beaven (2005): 16–17. 19   ‘Sunday Demonstration at the Crystal Palace’, Daily News (27 May 1861); ‘A Sunday at the Crystal Palace’, The Times (28 May 1861); ‘A Sunday at the Crystal Palace’, Builder (1 June 1861), V&A1, II, 76. 20 21   Gurney (2001): 118.   On rational recreation, see Bailey (1987): 47–60. 22   Morning Post (17 June 1856); Daily News (17 June 1856), V&A1, I, 201. On the overlap between protest over work and leisure, see Stedman Jones (1983): 87. 16 17

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points of the charter have given place to the Crystal Palace as a prominent topic. What our working people want is to have the Palace open at such times and at such rates that it may be accessible to the depressed artisan and the poor needlewoman.

It went on to explain the distinct roles that the Sydenham Palace might play for different sections of society. While it provided an enjoyable day out for the middle classes, ‘to the hardworked mechanic, or the pale sempstress, it is at once an institution, a place of high festival, a school, a wonder, and a perpetual source of rational enjoyment’.23 This suggests how seriously, initially, the Palace was taken as both an educational institution and a leisure resort. The Palace was also a source of interest for specialist audiences. In 1861, the Building News described the Fine Arts Courts as of ‘incalculable value’ both to the ‘large and increasing class of art workmen’ and to students of architecture and sculpture.24 From the 1860s, lectures on ancient art in the Fine Arts Courts were apparently both easily understood and listened to ‘with great attention’.25 The foundational interest in educating artisans (discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4 was promoted through ‘affordable’ education at the Crystal Palace Schools, which opened in 1860. The school of engineering catered for men, while women could attend the school of literature, science, and art.26 By the 1890s, there was an intake of 500 young women per year. Commentators attributed the success of the schools to the use of the Palace’s collections for teaching.27 The cultural life of the working classes has been an important part of historical discussion since the 1970s.28 The Sydenham Palace may yet offer further insight into the leisure activities of the working-class men and women that its directors hoped to attract.29 If nothing else, it demonstrates the recreational activities that its business-oriented directorate thought were desirable pastimes for the working classes. Middle-class men, women, and children formed the majority of the Palace visitors during regular weeks; this is attested to in contemporary sources and suggested by both temporal and financial constraints.   Daily News (20 April 1857), V&A1, II, 4.   ‘Crystal Palace’, Building News (23 August 1861), V&A1, II, 83. 25   Daily News (8 March 1862), V&A1, II, 90. 26   Daily News (26 April 1860), V&A1, II, 65. 27   Montefiore (1892). 28   For a historiographical survey see Bailey (1998): 2–4. 29   Gurney (2007). 23 24

A New Audience for Greece and Rome



25

As well as contributing to analyses of working-class culture, further study of the Sydenham Palace might also provide a useful ground for examining the cultural history of the middle classes, a group which were for a long time regarded as rejecting culture altogether, or simply imitating the upper classes in their cultural pursuits.30

Making a Social Body? ‘Here, more than ever before’ noted Lady Eastlake, we feel how good it is to be brought into contact with multitudes of our fellow creatures, otherwise too seldom met by us except in some form that appeals to pity or censure – multitudes of the humble and the unknown wandering like ourselves through a maze of innocent pleasures, and loving to have them so.31

The Sydenham Palace could be seen as part of the process of ‘making a social body’; amassing groups that had rarely previously come into contact as fellow participants in (at least ostensibly) the same undertaking. The novelty of the Crystal Palace building perhaps positioned it outside of other cultural manifestations that might have proved intimidating to an uneducated audience. Its contemporary, industrial architecture stands in stark contrast with the imposing classical façade of the British Museum or the National Gallery.32 The Palace could arguably find a niche alongside the other distinctly nineteenth-century technologies—statistics, affordable transport, museums, and mass publishing—that Mary Poovey argues to have helped constitute a self-conscious population. Yet I am less keen to claim, as Poovey does, that in amassing all classes the Palace produced a homogenized culture.33 The responses I analyse here suggest that visitors produced and understood its displays in a variety of ways. The emphasis on class and education in shaping cultural preferences makes the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu particularly important in an investigation of audience behaviour at the Crystal Palace, which aimed specifically to change (‘improve’) the taste of an audience drawn from all classes. Bourdieu analysed museum visiting (among   For revisions, see Wolff and Seed (1988); Gunn (2000).   Eastlake (1855): 306–7. 32   On museum architecture and power, see Duncan (1995). 33   Poovey (1995). 30 31

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other practices) in Distinction (questionnaires undertaken in 1963 and ­supplemented in 1966–7), and undertook a museum-specific project with Alain Darbel (surveys 1964–66).34 He emphatically rejects abstract theorizing and his concepts are formed out of empirical research; as such, attempts to apply his ideas to mid-nineteenth-century museum visiting should be undertaken with considerable caution.35 Bourdieu situates engagements with artworks as part of the wider struggle for distinction, that is, recognition as belonging to a particular social class. The museums people choose to visit, the artworks they focus on, and how they interact with these pieces, all play a role in establishing membership of a particular group. Existing power relations are communicated and reinforced through culture. Distinction at the Palace was an evolving and complex process. How could distinction be gained from visiting the self-styled ‘People’s Palace’, where brightly coloured plaster casts jostled for attention with stuffed elephants and shopping? Yet the apparent lack of cultural prestige did not deter elite visitors from the Palace. In 2005, sociologist Nick Prior argued that Bourdieu’s interpretation needs modification if it is to be applied to twenty-first century museums. These institutions are so immersed into the entertainment industry that they no longer so obviously engender social stratification.36 The Sydenham Crystal Palace was arguably an early example of such a crossover between education and entertainment. Despite the boasts that the Palace provided a mixing ground for rich and poor, social stratification was still built into the very structure of the building, with its different classes of dining room and profusion of entertainments that could only be accessed for an extra fee. The Atlas complained that ‘The working man, the shop man, the clerk, the housemaid, the milliner (male or female) – in fact, all those who support the Sunday suburban places of entertainment – no sooner find themselves within the Crystal Palace than they are reminded of their social and pecuniary inferiority.’37 Unlike the entertainments at Cremorne or Rosherville Gardens, Atlas deemed the very nature of the Palace’s ‘improving’ displays to be alienating to working-class visitors.38 This account would seem to support a Bourdieusian analysis of   Bourdieu (1984); Bourdieu and Darbel (1991); Grenfell and Hardy (2007). 36   Gunn (2005).   Prior (2005). 37   ‘The Crystal Palace and the Million’, Atlas (25 July 1857), V&A1, II, 13. 38   On Cremorne and Rosherville, see Altick (1978): 317–31. 34 35



A New Audience for Greece and Rome

27

the Palace—where cultural institutions reproduce social inequalities, and lesser educated visitors are made to feel ill at ease by the high cultural capital of exhibits. But the Palace did not ‘belong’ to any one social group. Its commercial nature rendered it extremely flexible, offering itself to anyone who could pay the shilling entry fee—from East End school children to foreign dignitaries, hosting works outings as well as kennel club, hairdressing, and dairy produce shows.39 The Palace was attended by visitors from many walks of life, potentially allowing hitherto unprecedented access to (casts of) Greek and Roman sculpture. But once inside the Palace, did this new audience look at the classical courts? Did non-elite visitors feel uncomfortable in the Fine Arts Courts, as Atlas suggests?

TH E CHA L L E NG E S OF A MASS AU DIE NC E If comments on the social composition of the Palace’s audience are inconsistent, those gauging how visitors behaved when inside the building are even less coherent. The Palace Company’s grandiose claims to operate as a business directed by and for the people made the press particularly keen to hold its directorate to account for the goings-on at its premises.40 As such, reports tend to veer from hyperbolic praise to vehement criticism. An inherent difficulty of commenting on visitor behaviour lies in the fact that no two visits to any attraction are the same. The Crystal Palace hosted a vast range of ever-changing exhibits, not to mention an unprecedented volume and variety of visitors. It is hardly surprising that accounts of what was on show, who was looking at it, and how they were interacting with the displays and each other lack consistency. Certain traits, however, do emerge. There is a striking similarity between observations on visitor behaviour at the Crystal Palace and the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, which attracted an equally socially diverse audience. There seems to have been a genre of writing specifically concerned with exhibitions aimed at expanded audiences, which may have had considerable impact on the way that critics observed and described 39   Esquiros (1867): 201; Thomas (1983): 128–3; ‘Excursion from Warrington to the Crystal Palace’, ILN (25 July 1857); Berrow’s Worcester Journal (19 May 1883). 40   Atmore (2004).

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their environs.41 At both Sydenham and Manchester, sources disagree about the social composition of the audience, but concur that visitors were well behaved. The low incidences of drunkenness, criminal activity, and object breakages feature in most accounts, well into the 1890s.42 This contrasts with the best known literary representation of the Palace, George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889), where the Palace is the site of working-class drunkenness, adultery, and violence. It also departs from Kate Hill’s analysis of comment on working-class visitors to the Mappin Art Gallery in nineteenth-century Sheffield, which pits working-class visitors as either ‘rough’ or ‘respectable’.43 No such categorizations are made at Sydenham; middle-class commentators evidently had a less stratified vision of the working classes encountering artworks at the Palace. As late as 1870, The Telegraph gushed that at Sydenham, ‘A more admirably well-conducted body of persons, on so vast a scale, never met together for a day’s relaxation from work with hand or brain’.44 Commentators could not agree, however, on what these well-­ behaved visitors looked at. In 1854, The Times noted the ‘zest’ with which visitors explored the Pompeian, Alhambra, and Renaissance Courts, which were ‘crowded throughout the day’.45 In 1860, it noted the increasing popularity of the Fine Arts Courts, and that ‘there must be a very small attendance indeed at Norwood when the visitor does not find them always with their own particular knots of admirers’.46 As late as 1870, it expressed delight at the way that many of the 47,000 visitors on Good Friday addressed themselves to the Fine Arts Courts. These visitors appeared to be mainly workers from the warehouses and shops of London, and keenly ‘gathered in turns around models of disinterred cities, Roman buildings, Greek temples, and casts of statues’.47 Yet such positive comments—although apparently conclusive in their praise—were also relatively rare. Many more newspapers consider the Fine Arts Courts to have been a failure. The Building News damningly remarked in 1861 that ‘The “educational courts” do not   Leahy (2007): 548. On visitor conduct elsewhere in London see Trodd (1994).   ‘Letter to the Editor’, Morning Post (22 December 1860), V&A1, II, 71; ‘A Bank Holiday at the Crystal Palace’, Ludgate Monthly (1 August 1891): 221–6. 43   Hill (2001). 44   ‘Good Friday at the Crystal Palace’, The Telegraph (16 April 1870), V&A1, II, 140. 45   The Times (29 June 1854), V&A1, I, 131. 46   The Times (10 April 1860), V&A1, II, 64. 47   The Times (16 April 1870), V&A1, II, 140. 41 42

A New Audience for Greece and Rome



29

certainly occupy very much of the visitors’ attention, and the hundreds of thousands who go to the Palace leave it with unimproved notions of Gothic, Greek, or Renaissance art’.48 Most negative comment focuses on the increasingly sensational aspects of the Palace’s entertainments, which are presented as entirely incompatible with the fine arts.

Bodies on Display Commentators and journalists appear to have been more interested in fellow visitors than the objects on display at Sydenham. Those who agreed that visitors did look at the Fine Arts Courts were sceptical, however, about the artistic education and intellectual benefits that working men (and it is predominantly working men, not women, that they discuss) would take away from the Palace.49 The interest stretched beyond basic comments on lack of drunkenness to focus on the very bodies of the new audience. Critics scrutinized the ways that visitors moved, stood, and spoke. It was through these physical observations that commentators measured the success of the Sydenham Palace. The Fine Arts Courts, and the Greek Court in particular, are isolated as the spaces where workers’ physical movements are most jarring. The physical, ungainly aspects of workers’ comportment are emphasized, as though their very bodies were inappropriate in the presence of Greek forms. Describing a ‘smock frock’ clad ‘labourer’ in the Greek Court, Martineau laments, ‘He saunters on, swinging his feet in his thick shoes, looking up vacantly at the “images”’.50 The Daily News offers a strikingly similar account of the ‘lowest order’ of visitors, ‘dragging their heavy feet after them in the Sculpture Courts, looking vacantly at the stone images, or loitering along without looking’.51 Encumbering the visitors’ movement around sculpture, their unsightly footwear becomes symbolic of their failure to move—and thus look— in the desired way. These visitors ‘loiter’, ‘saunter’, ‘stroll’, and look ‘vacantly’; their comportment—at least, the behaviour observable by the critics—is evidently not that of someone being ‘improved’ aesthetically. After noting the way that the working man ‘strolls through the Pompeian Court and all its mystery’, the Atlas concludes that ‘If   Building News (23 August 1861), V&A1, II, 83.   On reformers’ comparative lack of interest in working-class women’s leisure time see Beaven (2005): 18. 50   Martineau (1854): 537. 51   Daily News (9 September 1854), V&A1, I, 145. 48 49

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ignorance is bliss, the happiest day of his life must be that spent in the Crystal Palace’.52 The middle-class critics describing working men at the Palace do so in an already well-established vocabulary. Bodily control was a marker of middle-class status; dancing lessons were advocated for good comportment, and furniture and clothing were specifically designed to encourage a particular posture. Conduct manuals associated sloppy movements with both moral laxity and an idleness associated with the ‘lower orders’.53 In addition to the labouring man’s movements being inappropriate, critics identify working-class preferences for specific sorts of exhibit. The Greek and Roman Courts are singled out as symbolic of an elite culture considered difficult for the new audience to grasp. Martineau’s working man saw ‘as yet, no beauty’ in Greek sculpture, ‘but when he arrives at the elephant in its rage and pain, or where the wounded tiger and the hunters are confronting each other, his dull face lights up, and he stands for half-an-hour before a single group’.54 The working man’s preference for the imitative is a common thread running through comment on mass access exhibitions. In art exhibitions, working men were apparently drawn to realism and genre scenes. At the Crystal Palace, the Natural History Department, with its plants, ‘savages and wild beasts’ was apparently the most appropriate display for ‘the lowest order’ of visitors.55 When Greek sculpture was presented in a more ‘natural’ manner it too was vehemently criticized, as the responses to the Palace’s controversial painted Parthenon frieze (further discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) demonstrate. This belief in working-class preference for the ‘naturalistic’ continues to hold sway; Bourdieu, for example, discusses ‘The hostility of the working class and of the middle class fractions least rich on cultural capital towards every kind of formal experimentation’.56 The Times noted a further connection between visitors without ‘taste’ and the exhibits in the Natural History Department: The vast majority of those who go to Sydenham, as indeed was the case at Hyde Park, return home with most vague and unsatisfactory   ‘The Crystal Palace and the Million’, Atlas (25 July 1857), V&A1, II, 13. 54   Young (2003): 112–7.   Martineau (1854): 537. 55   Daily News (9 September 1854); The Times (29 June 1854). For parallels at Manchester, see Leahy (2007). At the Great Exhibition, the largest crowd apparently gathered around the stuffed animals and the ‘illustrated story of Renard-the-Fox’; Wilkinson (1858): 248. 56   Bourdieu (1984): 32. 52 53

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impressions of what they have seen. To some the painted effigies in the Byzantine Court appear the most wonderful things in the entire collection; to others the Botocudo Indians, with their disfigured lower jaws and ears. What is this but a reproduction of the same tastes which make savages show a predilection for glass beads, or any other such object which captivates their untutored sight?57

A preference for the imitative meant that those without art education (‘[t]he vast majority of those who go to Sydenham’) were comparable to exhibits at the Palace; the models of ‘savages’ suffering from ‘untutored sight’ that were exhibited in the Natural History Department. Commentators certainly describe the physical appearance of British visitors from across the class spectrum in anthropological detail similar to the care lavished over the models exhibited in the Natural History Department. The Times, for example, contrasts the ‘broad-shouldered, ruddy-faced, slow-moving excursionists from the country—­the men in glossy broad-cloth and brilliant cravats of astonishing patterns, the women in smart, but serviceable looking, clothes’ with ‘the sallow narrow-­chested Londoners, with small shrew faces and dressed either in skimpy, tight-fitting garments or in flimsy finery’.58 The Palace offered the opportunity to observe, describe, and categorize its human occupants. The physical characteristics of different social and racial ‘types’ were a matter of considerable interest to a broad spectrum of social commentators, ethnologists, artists, and historians; I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 6.

Engraving Visitors Visitors are depicted keenly examining each other in engravings of the Palace courts printed in the general and Crystal Palace-published illustrated periodicals (Figures 1.1–1.5). These concentrate on the relationships among visitors, and between people and sculpture. They are by no means an accurate source for reconstructing actual conduct around sculpture; they are subject to the needs and objectives of the publications that they illustrate, as well as the specific generic limitations and possibilities of engravings. The impact of genre on illustrations is demonstrated clearly in the case of the lithographs in Wyatt’s 1854 souvenir volume Views of the Crystal Palace and Park. Each of   The Times (5 September 1854), V&A1, I, 144.   ‘Easter Entertainments, the Crystal Palace’, The Times (19 April 1870).

57 58

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these is described as being ‘from photographs by P. H. ­Delamotte’. However, Delamotte’s photographs of the finished courts are entirely empty of visitors. Almost every photographic image of the Palace courts, including souvenir stereograph cards, shows them similarly depopulated. This may well be due to the relatively long exposure times necessary in 1850s photography, which would have made it difficult to capture in focus an audience that was constantly on the move. But it is noteworthy that engravers chose to add in characters engaged in a range of activities; compare Figures 0.3 and 1.2. The engravings offer some insights into ideals of behaviour as presented to the middle-class readership of the ILN, the ICPG, the Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor, and Wyatt’s Views of the Crystal Palace and Park in the 1850s. Attentiveness is a key marker of visitors in these engravings—both engaging with the artworks on show and each other. Wyatt’s ideal viewers consult guidebooks and lean closer to scrutinize sculpture (the bearded man to the left in Figure 1.2, for example). In an engraving of the Nineveh Court, even a child is immersed in a guidebook (the running child in Figure 1.3, however, is the sole obviously inattentive

Figure 1.2  Engraving of the Greek Court, from a photograph by P. H. Delamotte. From M. D. Wyatt, Views of the Crystal Palace and Park (London, 1854), not paginated. Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

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Figure 1.3  Engraving of the ‘Interior of the Pompeian Court’, Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (London, 1854): 100. Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

figure in all the engravings I have consulted).59 These attentive spectators are of course an ideal, but they are an interesting earlier history to that traced by Jonathan Crary (1999), who connects the focused viewer amid distractions to the specific social and economic conditions of the later nineteenth century. Starting in 1879, he relates the attentive viewer to ‘a factory worker concentrating on the performance of some repetitive task’, particularly pertinent for the Palace’s new audience.60 The attentiveness on show here, however, is far from being an exclusively detached aesthetic gaze. Scrutinizing other viewers is clearly important in the Palace engravings; these images are the product of the engraver’s observations of visitors, visitors who are in turn surveying each other. Whether this is the self-disciplining panoptical gaze of the ‘exhibitionary complex’ is debatable.   Wyatt (1854). Also illustrated in Piggott (2004): 70.   Crary (1999): 2.

59 60

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Viewers are predominantly in groups—both mixed and single sex, although there are also individual viewers, including some lone female visitors. In general, where men are present in groups, they are depicted as conveying information to their female companions; in Figure 1.3, a man points out features with his cane. Looking at sculpture is a social activity in these images—particularly for women, who, from the tilt of their faces appear to be conversing and looking more at each other than at statuary, even in these idealizing images (Figures  1.2, 1.4). The gendered expectations of art-attentiveness are envisaged and reinforced; women gossip while men impart knowledge. But none of these images could be construed as representing visitors ‘dragging’ their way past mystifying and alienating high culture. There is no evidence in these engravings from middle-class periodicals and Palace souvenir guides of the fixations on social class as revealed through dress, physiognomy, and deportment that characterize many nineteenth-century written accounts. There is a remarkable homogeneity in the clothing and upright, respectable posture of visitors depicted. Similarly, the physiognomy of visitors is of little importance in engravings; they are not portrayed in any detail, and in Figures 1.4 and 1.5, visitors’ faces are not seen at all. Their clothing is

Figure 1.4  Engraving, ‘Facade and entrances to the Roman Court’, Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (London, 1854): 42. Bromley Local Studies and Archives.



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Figure 1.5  Visitors in the main area of the Greek Court, looking through to the Egyptian Court, 1854. ‘The Greek Courts at the Crystal Palace’, Illustrated London News (2 September 1854): 212. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (N.2288 b.6, Vol. 25, No. 700, p. 212).

a focus—but serves more to differentiate between the unclothed statuary and the overly clothed people than between viewers; I return to the significance of such comparisons between people and sculpture in Chapter 6. There is also some ethnic diversity among visitors, clearly signified by the fez and turban worn by two men on the far left of Figure 1.1, tying in with written comment on the Palace’s international appeal. The comparisons between the working classes and models in the Natural History Department that appear in written commentary are not apparent in these engravings—despite the popularity of images that compared working men with ‘savages’ elsewhere in 1850s London.61 Indeed, non-Europeans are presented here as equally respectable and attentive viewers (albeit under greater scrutiny from other visitors). Differentiations of class and nationality only appear in relation to the Palace in satirical comment. The cartoon in Figure 1.6, for example, is   Barringer (1996).

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Figure 1.6  ‘The Crystal Palace Railway as it Oughtn’t to be’, Punch (6 September 1884): 112. Author’s collection.

concerned with the inversion of proper class position, and differentiated dress and behaviour are clearly apparent in the third-class visitors pushing into first class. The men sport checkered jackets, jaunty hats, and flat caps, while the woman in the foreground wears a drab and unbounded dress—there are no corsets or bustles to shape her into ‘correct’ bodily behaviour. Her clothing contrasts particularly with that of the respectable displaced first-class female passengers. The properly ‘third’ passengers’ ruddy faces, hunched and jostling bodies, and bellowing mouths further serve to mark them off from the upright and silent ‘first-class’ passengers politely filing into third. William Frith’s hugely popular canvases Ramsgate Sands (1851) and Derby Day (1858) testify to an abundant interest in the physical appearance of different social ‘types’ in the visual culture of 1850s Britain.62 Class differences were regularly illustrated elsewhere in the pages of the ILN.63 Differentiating class through clothing and comportment was clearly not important in visual depictions of the Palace audience that appeared in the journals and publications discussed   Cowling (1983).

62

  Sinnema (1995).

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here. In its ‘First visit to the Crystal Palace’, the ICPG declared that ‘Classes, distinctions, prejudices, which are merely local and artificial, are vanishing as morning dews when the sun arises. A new day is coming for man!’64 The illustrated periodical press, especially those published out of the Palace, clearly aimed to produce text and images that confirmed their hopes for the Palace audience; that its combination of entertainment and education would somehow transform all visitors into respectable middle-class viewers.

Education of the Eye ‘The teachings of the Crystal Palace are intended to be conveyed through the best of media—the eyes’, noted Routledge’s Guide (1854) on its very first page.65 The eye, often disembodied and apparently acting with its own agency, came to occupy a significant (though not necessarily hegemonic) position in the Victorian hierarchy of the senses.66 The Sydenham Palace was one of the first locations to set out to provide a specifically visual education. When it opened, none of the sculptures was labelled nor was any explanation given of its role, function, or context. Edward Lee, a librarian at the Crystal Palace, described its methodology as ‘a system of what I may call visual education’, by which ‘interest and emulation are awakened, and impressions and ideas conveyed to the mind, quite as forcibly as through any medium which books or theoretical study can impart’. Lee argued that visual education in the history and development of architecture was applicable to all classes of visitor to the Palace, regardless of their prior knowledge of art.67 However, it was particularly apt for those with scant educational background, as the physician Andrew Wynter noted in his 1853 review of the Palace: ‘the ignorant man . . . is most impressed by images which appeal directly to his senses’.68 Some critics feared that exclusively sensory art perception would harm the moral fibre of the nation; I explore these ideas further in Chapter 5. The Palace directors were influenced by the writings and experiments of Swiss educational theorist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, 65   ICPG (9 June 1854): 120.   McDermott (1854): iii.   Otter (2008); Flint (2000). 67   ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Times (25 February 1887), Bromley Archives, Crystal Palace Press Cuttings. 68   Wynter (1853): 617. See also ‘Crystal Palace’, The Times (24 July 1854), V&A1, I, 137; Esquiros (1867): 200–1. 64 66

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who argued that knowledge could be conveyed directly through the senses.69 This was an important consideration in addressing a mass audience, many of whom would have had negligible reading skills. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, the geologist responsible for Sydenham’s ‘extinct animals’, described the Palace as ‘one vast and combined experiment of visual education’ and discussed the influence of Pestalozzi’s methodology on the undertaking. In conventional education, Hawkins noted, people became familiar with the names of things, but not with their physical appearance and function. At the Palace, both things and names would be presented together.70 The Palace’s lack of labels, however, was widely criticized. The Daily News voiced fears that in the absence of the information they afford, simple minds will form the oddest possible notions of the meaning of what they see, and go away with their heads crammed with ludicrous errors. What would Mr Owen Jones think of his romantic fountain of lions being mistaken for a litter of puppies, or the august deities of Abou-Simbel for Punch and Judy, after the manner of the Egyptians?71

The poorly educated members of the audience were the cause for concern. The Mechanics’ Magazine noted that without labels, ‘but little real information will ever be conveyed to the great industrial masses’. This publication, aimed specifically at artisans, worried that many visitors would return home thinking that ‘the ancients, at least, must have been unduly enamoured with either folly or mystery’.72 The Chronicle feared that the very mission of mass education was being undermined by the lack of explanation. It accused the Palace directorate of deviously neglecting to label objects in order to compel visitors to purchase guidebooks, which, it noted, were selling well.73 These same guidebooks, however, were woefully inaccessible to many visitors, and proved irritating to those who did understand their overblown allusions; ‘the Official Guidebook to the Crystal Palace takes a tone of arrogant pretension which is quite amazing.’74 70   Secord (2004): 140–1; Soëtard (1994).   Hawkins (1854): 444.   Daily News (3 July 1854), V&A1, I, 133. 72   ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Mechanics’ Magazine, 60 (1854): 488–9. 73   Morning Chronicle (14 June 1854), V&A1, I, 123. 74   Sunday Review (9 August 1862), V&A1, II, 99; The Times (7 July 1854), V&A1, I, 133. 69 71

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In response to these criticisms, labels were introduced within a month of the Palace’s opening. The Times noted a subsequent increase in interest in the Fine Arts Courts.75 More recently, Jim Secord has suggested that the calls for labels and further explanations of the extinct animals constituted a derailing of the directorate’s Pestalozzian mission.76 It is unclear whether labels for sculpture were initially omitted for the purposes of a Pestalozzian experiment with purely imagebased stimuli, or due to disorganization in the hasty preparations for opening. It is evident, however, that the press were not familiar with— or interested in—the directors’ engagement with Pestalozzi’s ideas about a specifically visual education, or how this might be particularly appropriate to an audience with a range of literacy levels. The presence of labels does not, of course, instantly clarify visitor experience; indeed, it further mediates interaction with an art object.77 Contemporary commentators were not interested in such hermeneutic matters, however. The AJ noted that ‘Visitors to the Crystal Palace require to be told, and they also are particularly desirous of being told, what the courts contain, and what instruction they are in so peculiar a manner qualified to convey’. The needs of visitors to the Palace were evidently different from those of visitors to other contemporary art establishments. Further, the AJ is keen to point out that the Palace—­ although initially criticized for not labelling objects—was in fact distinctly unusual in having any such explicatory assistance beyond a catalogue.78 These criticisms and anxieties about communication of knowledge suggest that the expectations of the Crystal Palace were unique.79 It stimulated passionate discussion and many hopes were vested in its success in the early years. The labels were not sufficient for all critics, however. The Crystal Palace Magazine of Art, Science and Literature was printed in the Palace but was independent of the Palace Company. It aimed to be a periodical for all classes, and to achieve mass appeal by juxtaposing entertainment with education. It remained critical of the Palace’s educational methods, arguing that the Fine Arts Courts required considerable prior knowledge: ‘A man cannot fully enjoy this, whose mind is not stored with information’.80 To correct this, it ran a special series 76   The Times (7 August 1854), V&A1, I, 141.   Secord (2004): 159. 78   Baxandall (1991): 38.   ‘The Crystal Palace’, AJ (1 July 1858): 212. 79   Purchase (1855): 8. 80  ‘Introduction’, Crystal Palace Magazine of Art, Science and Literature, 1 (1859): 2. 75 77

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on ‘Pagan Mythology’ to try and explain the contents of the Greek and Roman Courts to visitors ignorant of ancient history; ‘What see they in the colossal figure of Hercules but a burly prizefighter? What in the Farnese Flora but a buxom dairymaid?’81 Working-class visitors did not view sculpture correctly; they saw only pathetic imitative references to their unheroic lives. The Magazine prioritizes identifying subject matter as a mode of art appreciation, and does not even countenance the idea that working-class visitors might take aesthetic pleasure in sculptural form. The new audience clearly brought with them challenges and opportunities for the display of sculpture—and for the middle-class culture-rich commentators who fixated on them; Harriet Martineau describes an elderly couple utterly perplexed by the Pompeian house, convinced that it was a modern show home, and winces at overhearing loud voices speaking of ‘Dinah the Huntress’.82 The initial lack of explanation via labels perhaps seems strange given the exacting archaeological details over which the court architects lavished such attention. It seems that there were many levels on which the Greek and Roman Courts of the Crystal Palace could be appreciated. Punch, of course, was mocking the Palace when it commented on the excerpt from Herodotus (in Greek) that was emblazoned across the main entrance to the Greek Court; ‘the learned will recognize these characters as constituting a passage from Herodotus. The unlearned will at once enter the court without going through the passage, which, if it is unfortunately above their comprehension, is luckily so much above their heads that they can pass immediately under it.’83 However, it may well have captured the variety of means by which visitors engaged with the Palace courts. The decision to ‘educate the eye’ has particular ramifications where classical education is concerned. Punch isolated a text as representing the height of classical knowledge, not the sculpture and architecture that were the main focus of the Palace’s displays. This is typical of the literary focus of classical studies at mid-nineteenth century.84 At the Palace, however, archaeological evidence was not merely a source to corroborate classical literature. It was harnessed as a primary 81   ‘Pagan Mythology’, Crystal Palace Magazine of Art, Science and Literature, 22 (1860): 183. 82   Martineau (1854): 545. 83   ‘Punch’s Handbooks to the Crystal Palace. The Greek Court’, Punch (19 August 1854): 61. 84   Stray (1998).

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illustration of a whole culture; ‘nothing better aids us in realising the people and customs of the past, than the wonderful monuments happily preserved from the destructive hand of Time’, noted the official guidebook.85 In the 1860s the exiled French writer Alphonse Esquiros concurred; although the majority of Palace visitors ‘have never read one line of a Greek poem . . . a kind of history of Hellenic art, religion, and society, may be gathered from the ensemble of the spectacle presented to us’.86 The use of sculpture and architecture rather than literature as a means of classical education distinguished the Palace from contemporary approaches to the classical past. Yet the socially mixed Palace audience may have served to reinforce the elite status of the written word, and the perception that sculpture and architecture are selfexplanatory, their meanings readily grasped. ‘The newly awakened man cannot at once be appealed to through the reason, but he may be taught through the eyes . . . Nations have sculptors before they have writers’, noted the Ten Chief Courts.87 A visual classical education was appropriate for the masses, while literary texts remained the preserve of an educated elite—as the AJ bluntly stated in an 1853 article on ‘The Educational Uses of Museums’, ‘Everyman may be taught to observe, but every man cannot be taught to read Euripides in the original’.88

The ‘Frivolous Associations’ of Entertainment and Education In a letter of 1883, the Reverend Samuel Barnett, the philanthropic founder of art museums aimed at the working classes, explained how ‘bitterly disappointed’ he had been by the Palace’s Handel Festival. This was no fault of the musicians, nor of acoustics; ‘I imagined myself swept away by the volume of the sound into the regions of mystery. Instead I was conscious of the Crystal Palace, its flimsy structure and its frivolous associations. The music seemed out of place and one was hurt by its incongruity.’89 Many commentators remarked upon the 86   Phillips (1854): 38.   Esquiros (1867): 229.   Ten Chief Courts, iv. See also ‘The Sculpture in the Crystal Palace’, ICPG (9 June 1854): 135–6. 88   ‘The Educational Uses of Museums’, AJ (1 November 1853): 283. 89   Letter from Samuel Augustus Barnett to his brother Frank G. Barnett, 23 June 1883, London Metropolitan Archives, F/BAR/1. Musgrave (1995) provides a more positive view of the Palace’s role in extending music to a wider audience in nineteenthcentury Britain. 85 87

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impossibly distracting environment of the Palace. Its founding mission to combine education with entertainment was regarded as implausible and even destructive by some critics. The concessions made to the new audience—and even the visitors themselves—were part of the problem. John Ruskin found the pursuit of art education and entertainment to be fundamentally incompatible: If I go to the Crystal Palace to make a note on the cast of a statue, it is a considerable nuisance to me to have a party of children chasing each other around it; while to the children themselves, and to their parents much more, the presence of this brittle white spectre – which they ought to admire, and are only afraid of knocking over – is a damping and solemnising feature of the Palace, fatally destructive of merriment.90

This response is perhaps not altogether surprising from Ruskin—and not just as a result of his well-documented phobia of the Sydenham Palace.91 Ruskin held that the best means to artistic understanding was through gradual introduction. His art museums for working men commenced with copies of less-renowned works to prepare them for contemplation of the most esteemed art.92 The approach at Sydenham was quite the opposite, bombarding new viewers with an enormous range of art of all periods and calibres. Such comments were not limited to the intelligentsia. The Mechanics’ Magazine noted the difficulty of seriously engaging with objects from the past at the Palace.93 The Daily News reports 83,721 visitors on Foresters’ Day in 1862. It lamented that the hustle and bustle of the mass audience was hardly conducive to the grand associations and reflections on history that ancient sculpture and monuments were supposed to evoke; pork pies and ale bottles ‘stray’ into the Alhambra, and ‘broken sandwiches’ litter the Pompeian Court.94 Punch enjoyed the opportunity to remark upon the distracting nature of the Palace’s audience, entertainingly juxtaposing the Ten Chief Courts’ claim that the Pompeian Court brought readers ‘at once with TACITUS and the two PLINYS’ with the reality of the Palace’s somewhat prosaic visitors: ‘on looking around we see a BRICKLAYER and two LABOURERS, while instead of having “the roar of the amphitheatre still in   Ruskin (1905a): 218.   See Cook and Wedderburn (1903–12): XIX, xxxiv. 92   Breton (2005). 93   ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Mechanics’ Magazine, 60 (1854): 488. 94   ‘The Crystal Palace’, Daily News (17 December 1862), V&A1, II, 103. 90 91



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our ears,” we catch the distinct clatter of the knives and forks of the refreshment-room.’95 Ruskin’s notion that the ‘brittle white spectre’ of sculpture aroused fear or feelings of inadequacy in the uneducated is not so well attested. Indeed, the social and pleasurable aspects of behaviour in the Fine Arts Courts are emphasized in contemporary comment in both the press and diaries. For more personal encounters with sculpture at the Palace, I now turn to a middle-class female diarist and a working-class male autobiographer, both of who visited the Palace regularly during the 1860s and 1870s.

THE DIARIST AND T HE AUTOBIO G R A PH E R

Henrietta Thornhill The middle-class diarist Henrietta Thornhill (born 1847) resided for a few months each year in Lambeth with her extended family. Thornhill records visiting the Palace on individual occasions at least eight times between 1866 and 1878. She attended more regularly during a stay in Norwood in 1878; repeat visits seem to have been common among residents of South London, a trait persisting well into the twentieth century.96 A trip to the Palace is interesting enough to merit remark in the diary, but was by no means an unusual undertaking. Visits tended to revolve around an additional attraction, rather than the permanent displays: the Handel Festival, a pantomime performance of ‘Bluebeard’, and fireworks. Mark, a family friend, regularly ice skated at the Palace in the winter of 1875–6, and entered his dog in a show when he returned from Oxford during the long vacation in 1876. On each visit Thornhill notes how busy the Palace was; on one encounter with friends she remarks ‘there was such a crowd, I could only just say how do you do to them’.97 Thornhill always takes a ‘turn’ up and down the nave of the Palace, and must have come into contact with the contents of the Fine Arts Courts. She does not enter into detail about the exhibits, however, and focuses instead on the social side of visiting, as do the sketches of visits that supplement her diary entries (Figures 1.7 and 1.8). 95   ‘Punch’s Handbook to the Pompeian Court’, Punch (15 July 1854): 17; Ten Chief Courts, 40. 96   Pussard (2005): 196. 97   Friday 23 June 1871, Lambeth Archives, IV/81/8.

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Figure 1.7  Sketch from Henrietta Thornhill, Diary, Wednesday 21 June 1871, Lambeth Archives, IV/81/8. Thornhill aged twenty-four, and a group of male and female friends (their names inscribed on the backs of chairs) conversing at the Handel Festival. This image is reproduced with the permission of Lambeth Archives department.

Figure 1.8  Sketch from Henrietta Thornhill, Diary, Friday 23 June 1871, Lambeth Archives, IV/81/8. Encounters with friends in the nave during a crowded Handel Festival. This image is reproduced with the permission of Lambeth Archives department.

Thornhill’s reticence about what she sees is not limited to her descriptions of the Crystal Palace. The entry recording her first (and only diary-recorded) visit to the British Museum is similarly unforthcoming about the artefacts displayed, focusing more on practicalities: ‘we

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did a great deal of walking.’98 Thornhill is quite conversant on matters of contemporary fiction, regularly attending readings of Dickens’s work. Her confidence in matters classical is somewhat shaky, however. There was no uniform classical education for women in the nineteenth century, unlike the grammatical rote learning and prose composition that typified male encounters with Greece and Rome in public and grammar schools.99 Schooling in the classics was more down to the whim of the parent or guardian in charge of girls’ educational provision; though as Isobel Hurst has shown, classical learning in the nineteenth century was less exclusively male than has been assumed.100 Thornhill notes that she has begun to read Lord Derby’s translation of the Iliad (1864), but does not enter into any further detail.101 It may be that she lacked the self-assurance to discuss the artistic contents of the courts. Alternatively, she simply may not have been interested in them. It would be impossible to generalize from this one source about middle-class female viewing practices at the Palace. But the social capacity that the Palace provided was clearly significant to Henrietta Thornhill. It was certainly not just women who used the Palace as a social space. Thornhill notes encounters with both male and female friends, and describes visits in mixed groups; these are also presented (albeit idealistically) in engravings of visitors (Figures 1.1, 1.3). Nineteenthcentury commentators, however, fixate on women socializing at exhibitions. Leahy (2007) observes similar tendencies in her study of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition. Clichés about female sociability may explain some of this interest, but the prevalence of such commentary is arguably more significant. Critics’ attention was drawn to groups of women at exhibitions precisely because their presence was a new phenomenon. Indeed, the attendance of middle-class women like Thornhill may well have served to legitimate the Palace’s status as a socially acceptable venue.102 The AJ described the unique opportunities (‘in this respect the Crystal Palace stands alone’) for appropriate intellectual development offered to women by the Sydenham Palace: ‘A day may be pleasantly and profitably spent there without the risk of subjection to a single casualty that might interrupt its enjoyment   Wednesday 5 October 1870, Lambeth Archives, IV/81/7. 100   Bowen (1989); Stray (1998).   Hurst (2006). 101   Tuesday 4 October, 1870, Lambeth Archives, IV/81/7. 102   See Davidoff and Hall (2002): 397–415; Gunn (2005): 55. 98 99

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or mar its retrospect: ladies may at all times visit this establishment unaccompanied by “protectors”.’103 It refers both to the excellent taste of the objects displayed, and the general good behaviour of Palace visitors. Exhibitions provided a legitimate, acceptable space for women to socialize, either with or without male company. A similar function has been attributed to department stores later in the century. Sydenham considerably pre-dates these later settings for female sociability and differs from the department store in offering women opportunities for explicitly intellectual development.104 Thornhill’s diaries demonstrate that the Palace provided a space where women could socialize and encounter artworks independent of male custody. Not only that; Elizabeth Eastlake notes that the Renaissance Court at the Palace provided women with access to casts of architecture from the Certosa di Pavia, a Carthusian monastery in Lombardy that had previously been viewed only by men.105 There are few detailed female responses to sculpture at the Palace; the most extended are those of Martineau and Eastlake, which are more concerned with the behaviour of working-class men.

John Birch Thomas Henrietta Thornhill’s diaries provide a general view of Palace visiting practices. More personal reflections on encounters with sculpture are detailed in John Birch Thomas’s autobiographical account Shop Boy. The son of a bankrupt grocer, Thomas was born in Peckham, South London, in 1860, and penned his autobiography in the 1930s.106 He was educated at dame, day, boarding, and National schools until the age of 12 when he began his first job as an office boy at a brewery. He then worked at a pawnbroker’s, a china shop, a boot shop, and, in the mid-1870s, in a toyshop owned by a Mr Carwynne. The enterprising Carwynne also had a stall in the Crystal Palace. On holidays and festivals this was so busy that Thomas was required as an extra assistant. Thomas devotes most of a chapter to his experiences at the Palace. His account provides invaluable information about the ways in which   ‘The Crystal Palace as a Teacher of Art and Art Manufacture’, AJ (1 July 1856):

103

217.

104   Rappaport (2000). On women and consumption at the Crystal Palace see Miller (1995a): 64–70. 105   Eastlake (1855): 333. 106   See further Burnett et al. (1984): 313.

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visitors used its commercial and artistic entertainments, even though his nostalgic recollections are evidently shaped by the Palace’s recent dramatic demise in 1936. Working-class autobiographers are a self-selecting minority, and one autobiographical account obviously cannot be held as representative of an entire social group’s responses to sculpture at the Palace. However, the general impressions of visitor behaviour that Thomas provides, and his reflections on how he personally understood sculpture there, breathe life into the one-dimensional, depopulated accounts of the courts in guidebooks and photography. He also offers a less axegrinding view than that of contemporary comment in the press. It is perhaps appropriate that the Crystal Palace features so prominently in a working-class autobiography. The genre enabled working people to present themselves to society through the printed word, a means hitherto inaccessible to the poor. This contributed to the way in which they were viewed by other classes who had dominated this mode of communication.107 In a not dissimilar fashion, working-class people arguably made the Crystal Palace’s middle-class improving mission their own, through rallies, meetings, and simply the act of visiting. Despite the observations on their physical movements, their behaviour generally won approval among wealthier commentators. A visit to the Palace may have functioned for some visitors as a means of self-presentation. Nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies are often keen to emphasize the author’s literacy and self-improving pursuit of knowledge; Shop Boy is characteristic in this aspect. None of the Palace’s more boisterous entertainments feature. Yet while Thomas is well versed in a wide range of literature (from the novels of Walter Scott to Shakespeare), he is evidently not so familiar with visual art.108 The only displays that he mentions are the ever popular Wurtemberg taxidermied animals and the courts of sculpture. His comments on sculpture at the Palace are marked by a naivety and cliché that stands in stark contrast to his confident use of literary references. Middleclass commentators’ claims that visual art is easily appreciated by an uneducated audience are not borne out by this particular workingclass autobiographer.   Vincent (1981).   On working-class autodidact desire to consume literary culture normally associated with the highly educated, see Rose (2001): 12–57. 107 108

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Thomas makes a special expedition to see the sculpture during his dinner break from the toy stall. He had carefully planned his time there, noting that he brought food with him from home so that he would be able to eat while looking at the statuary. From the exhibits described it seems likely that Thomas spent his dinner break in the Greek and Roman Courts. He was clearly impressed by what he saw, describing the sculpture as ‘true copies of some of the most beautiful sculpture in the world and quite worth the shilling admission to see them alone’.109 Thomas thus acknowledges the sculpture as a work of art for aesthetic contemplation. However, his focus on these ‘true copies’ soon wavers from appreciating their artistic merit, as he describes the revelations about the female body provided by the nude female sculptures.110 He inadvertently participates in a long-standing discourse, addressed in Chapters 5 and 6, that associates the forms of sculpture with the actual bodies of ancient Greeks. Classical sculpture may well have provided visitors with ideas about the physical form of the opposite sex.111 Whether it accomplished the art historical lessons and aesthetic contemplative experience anticipated by the directors is another matter. The classical world did not exactly occupy a rarefied sphere of intellectual contemplation at Sydenham. Thomas provides further evidence for behaviour around sculpture at the Palace that departs quite radically from experiences in other contemporary institutions exhibiting Greek and Roman sculpture. The fact that Thomas was able to contemplate celebrated nude female sculpture while eating his sandwiches instantly distinguishes the exhibition of Greece and Rome at the Palace from the British Museum. Lady Eastlake similarly describes visitors eating ices and drinking hot chocolate beneath Farnese Hercules’ club.112 Thomas provides a vivid sense of how the consumption of goods and of art went on side by side at the Palace. He recalls selling joke false whiskers to visitors who wore them about the Palace; serious contemplation of sculpture was evidently optional.113 These conditions may have rendered Sydenham a more welcoming place for 110   Thomas (1983): 126.   Thomas (1983): 127.   On European art galleries as a form of sex education in the nineteenth century, see Gay (1984): 379–80. 112   Eastlake (1855): 343. Working-class visitors did apparently eat sandwiches in the National Gallery, despite prohibitions (and complaints) against this behaviour; see Siegel (2008): 125. 113   Thomas (1983): 127–8. 109 111

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visitors not accustomed to the conduct expected in a more formal art gallery setting. According to Thomas (and also remarked upon in the press), the public spaces provided by the Fine Arts Courts at the Crystal Palace facilitated activities beyond the didactic: The side courts where the statues were seemed quite dark, but they were the most crowded. Lots of young men and girls passed up and down all the time and jostled each other. Many couples were sitting in dark corners, and passers-by made remarks to tease them. ‘ “I’ll tell your Mother, Maudie,” ’ and ‘ “Anything like that you can enjoy,” ’ but nobody took offence. Everybody was enjoying themselves and all was jolly.114

Indeed, the Palace seems to have become known as a location for flirtation and rendezvous; one commentator noted in the 1890s: ‘After all, it is not in connection with pictures that one principally thinks of the Crystal Palace. One associates it rather with fireworks and assignations.’115 In this working-class visitor’s account, sculpture is acknowledged as an art form, but becomes the backdrop for romantic liaisons and education about the female body. Thomas’s personal account and Martineau’s reports of visitors’ ‘misunderstandings’ indicate that visitors made their own interpretations of Greek and Roman sculpture. Working-class visitors were not, it appears, necessarily intimidated by the elite associations of classical sculpture; they seem to have been oblivious to them.

C ONC LU SION Responses to the Palace are characterized by their fixation on other visitors. A satirical comment from Punch, describing the sculpted reliefs in the Nineveh Court, epitomizes this tendency. They will repay a much closer examination than most loungers condescend to bestow upon them. The ordinary amount of comment vouchsafed to these marvellous reproductions is, Mr Punch regrets to say, rather compendious than critical. He cannot regard such observations as ‘ “What Guys!” ’ – ‘ “Haven’t they got Jew noses?” ’ – ‘ “There’s a rum bird, BILL!” ’ – ‘ “See that chap tumbling off the wall?” ’ – ‘ “The feller in the cart   Thomas (1983): 126.   ‘At the Crystal Palace. Some Pictures and Other Things’, Sun (10 May 1894), in Bromley Archives, Crystal Palace Press Cuttings, 125. 114 115

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is like our SAM!” ’ – in which the humbler class of spectators chiefly display their acumen, as at all exhaustive of the subject, any more than the refined observations of their betters, who remark, “Dear me, how elaborate – did you ever see a bonnet as that which just passed?” – “Nineveh, is it – O yes – it throws great light on sacred history – here, HENRY, make haste, don’t let us meet those tiresome BICKERSTAFFS” – “MR LAYARD – ah, to be sure, a very rising man – there’s LORD PALMERSTON – do go and say a word for that poor stupid BRADDERWICK, his mother bores me to death to get you to ask for something of him”.116

Punch reinforces the notion that class determines viewers’ responses to ancient sculpture. Lacking an artistic vocabulary, the working classes understand art only as imitative and assess its correspondence to the world around them. Their ‘betters’, on the other hand, use it as a conversation point, a place to observe the latest fashions or perhaps even make useful contacts. Rich and poor are not united in elevating aesthetic contemplation, but by their failure to appreciate the ‘marvellous reproductions’ provided at the Palace, and by their preference for entertainments over the more didactic Fine Arts Courts.117 Visitors of different classes do not seem to have achieved social distinction through their preferences for the ultimate arbiters of good taste—the Greek and Roman Courts—over industry or entertainment. This is not to argue that Bourdieu’s analysis has no merit at the Crystal Palace; visitors were keenly aware of the proliferation of different class groups there. However, distinction does not seem to have been registered through looking at the casts in the Fine Arts Courts. It was more a matter of clothing, where you sat to dine, whom you were seen speaking to, and how you moved, that marked out visitors. This may have enabled visitors of all classes to encounter Greek and Roman sculpture in a less constraining manner and on more of an equal footing than in the British Museum. As the visitor responses and newspaper comments surveyed here suggest, visitors were far from intimidated by Greek and Roman sculpture; they ate, drank, and flirted around it. The emphasis on visitors surveying each other returns discussion to Bennett’s exhibitionary complex. The Palace was scarcely a place where self-regulated drones silently contemplated great works of past 116   ‘Punch at the Crystal Palace. No. 11 – The Nineveh Court (ctd.)’, Punch (23 August 1856): 71. 117   Eastlake (1855): 350; The Times (5 September 1854); The Telegraph (25 June 1867), V&A1, II, 160.



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art. Scrutinizing visitor responses, as I have done here, makes readily apparent the flaws in explaining the provision of culture to a mass audience solely as an instrument of social control. To do so negates the ways in which people evidently used the Crystal Palace for their own purposes, both consciously and inadvertently upending the moralizing and ameliorating intentions of some of its directorate.118 The communication of meaning through arrangements of sculpture and architecture is scarcely simple, especially one left initially to a system of ‘education of the eye’ without labels, let alone explanations. While it is evident that visitors did not follow the prescriptions of the directors, court architects, and guidebook authors, it is important not to fixate on this as evidence of some sort of emancipatory creation of their own vision of the ancient world, using ‘guerrilla tactics’ to subvert power.119 It is perhaps better to think of attending the Palace as a matter of consensus, an active process of negotiation. I draw here on Patricia Anderson’s study of popular pictorial magazines in England 1830–60, which usefully applies Antonio Gramsci’s thought to these nineteenth-century attempts at mass education through leisure.120 Visitors actively chose to attend the Crystal Palace; they may have made their own meanings out of a visit, but they also, in their paying presence, endorsed the mission of its directorate. If the audience made whatever they wanted of the ancient world at the Palace, did its displays add anything to the populace’s understanding of Greece and Rome? That the visitors were active participants and did not necessarily understand the objects on show as intended by the directors is scarcely something to be celebrated if—as Martineau related—it meant some visitors left the Palace thinking that they had been looking at a modern show home rather than a reconstruction of a Pompeian house.121 Punch, of course, is satirical and rather pessimistic about the Palace in general. Yet the optimist could perhaps extract a degree of hope from its comment and accompanying cartoon of the Nineveh Court. It acknowledges the high standards of the Palace’s contents, and 118   Examples of working-class rebellion against the imposition of rational recreation elsewhere can be found in Beaven (2005): 37–40; Hill (2005): 130–8; Koven (1994). 119   The formulation is John Fiske’s, but the idea refers to Michel de Certeau’s description of consumption as a subversive ‘tactic’ employed by the powerless. See Fiske (1989): 18; de Certeau (1984): 29–44. 120   Anderson (1991): 6. See also Hoffenberg (2001): 27. 121   Martineau (1854): 545–6.

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describes visitors actively engaged in looking at ancient art, consulting guidebooks, and responding to it as their current state of knowledge permits. The Palace was evidently an attractive location for a range of visitors. The potential existed for new audiences to examine objects in an environment conducive to discussion. The meanings that visitors created for Greek and Roman sculpture at the Palace were evidently in many cases somewhat different from any art historical knowledge that might have been intended. However, the role of classical sculpture in the nineteenth century extended beyond educating visitors about the Greeks and Romans. The following chapters address these often neglected, even surprising functions. There perhaps was hope for the future of learning about ancient art, even if at present, as Punch punned: ‘All visitors looking round this hall have casts in their eyes’.122

122   ‘Punch at the Crystal Palace. No. 11 – The Nineveh Court (ctd.)’, Punch (23 August 1856): 71.

2 Showing off Archaeological Knowledge An 1854 piece in Punch mockingly emphasized the far-from-grand precursors of the exhibition of Greek and Roman sculpture at the Palace: No. 5 is a warrior from the Louvre, who is generally known in England as the Fighting Gladiator, and who has probably been seen by many of our readers in the person of some suburban Signor, who ‘ “does the statues” ’ at a minor theatre in a suit of white fleshings, a wig of wool, and a countenance thickly embedded in chalk – a style of getting-up which is supposed to qualify the worn out Harlequin for the embodiment of all or any of the “classical heroes of antiquity.”1

To the Palace’s new audience, the Fighting Gladiator (Figure 2.1) may have signified a fleshings-clad actor (Figure 2.2) rather than a marble museum piece. The magazine describes a familiarity with ‘worn out’ ‘suburban’ presentations of Greco-Roman sculpture, performed at ‘a minor theatre’ and definitively removed from authoritative academic and metropolitan classicism. The prominent ‘PAY HERE’ banner in Figure 2.2 demonstrates the commercial drive of such exhibitions of antiquity, which formed an important element of a growing mass entertainment culture of shows and exhibitions. In this chapter I explore the relationship between these popular shows and the emergent ‘professional’ classical archaeological establishment at mid-century, exemplified by the British Museum. I argue that in 1850s London, ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’, ‘entertainment’, and ‘education’ ought to be seen in tandem, rather than as polar opposites. The Crystal Palace is a prime location for exploring such connections. 1  ‘Punch’s Handbooks to the Crystal Palace. The Greek Court (ctd.)’, Punch (26 August 1854): 80.

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Figure 2.1  1860s stereoview. Caption on reverse reads ‘147. SCULPTURE IN THE GREEK COURT. On the left is the VENUS VICTRIX OF CAPUA, from Naples; on the right is the WARRIOR OF AGASIAS, or, FIGHTING GLADIATOR, from the Louvre; and beyond, the magnificent group of LAOCOON AND HIS SONS, from the Vatican’. From the collection of Jonathan Lill, published with his kind permission.

Public interest in the ancient world, from visiting a firework display of the eruption of Vesuvius at Vauxhall Gardens, to the avid readership of archaeological excavation reports in the ILN, developed alongside the museum-based study of objects and textual criticism.2 An older antiquarianism existed alongside and contributed to both of these, typified by sensory experience and the idea of reliving the past.3 All are 2  Bacon (1976). On the formative relationship between popular understanding and archaeological knowledge, see Holtorf (2005). 3  Bann (1990): 100–18; Sweet (2004).



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Figure 2.2  Cartoon depicting an actor in ‘fleshings’ as the Borghese or Fighting Gladiator, from ‘Punch’s Handbooks to the Crystal Palace. The Greek Court (ctd.)’, Punch (26 August 1854): 80. Author’s collection.

part of the same phenomenon; a desire to know the past. In Britain no university positions for archaeologists existed until the 1880s, and ‘amateur’ antiquarianism and archaeology continued to overlap throughout the nineteenth century.4 Yet professional history and archaeology are usually presented as having supplanted antiquarianism from the 1830s onwards.5 The distinction between the two has arguably been overstated; Stephen Bann calls for ‘a historical view which will include both the amateur and the professional, Carlyle and Ranke, the historical novel and the text edited by the Public Record Office – rather than insisting that they differ like chalk and cheese.’6 The architectural reconstructions in the Crystal Palace provided such a meeting ground. The attempts to engage a mass audience created a place concerned 4  Levine (1986): 35–9. 6  Bann (1989): 103.

5  Levine (1986); Momigliano (1950).

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with education but also entertainment, neither professional nor amateur, somewhere between museum and Madame Tussauds. The Crystal Palace’s founding aims—to provide both archaeolog­ ical exactitude and popular entertainment—suggest the wider social and cultural context in which classical archaeology developed in 1850s Britain. Here I set the scene by considering the role that classical sculpture and architecture played in the nineteenth-century London entertainment industry. I survey the fledgling archaeological establishment in 1850s Britain, emphasizing throughout the overlaps between the two, before looking in detail at the Crystal Palace’s archaeological credentials.

G REECE AND ROME BEYOND T H E M U SE UM

Immersive Envirovnments: Architecture and Topography Before the Palace opened, foreign lands were readily available to Londoners without travelling any farther than Robert Barker’s Panorama in Leicester Square, and paying no more than one shilling. Barker’s opened in London in 1789, and by the early nineteenth century the capital boasted numerous rival shows. Visitors ascended a disorienting darkened stairwell to arrive at a viewing platform surrounded by a circular painted canvas. They were physically immersed in the scene, which had no obvious beginning or end, nor a frame to separate the viewer from the object viewed. Both the panorama at Leicester Square (1789–1858) and on the Strand (1802–32, also run by the Barker family) offered visitors two separate views, one of a smaller circumference on a second floor. Panoramas depicted current affairs, sights of Europe, and, most relevant here, topographical views of ancient cities. The scenes were often taken from sketches by celebrated artist-topographers, and were praised for their accuracy. They were usually on show for up to a year; unfortunately very few survive, since most canvases were painted over and reused. However, pamphlets and guides featuring miniature reproductions of the scene on view provide some information.7 The major classical sites began appearing regularly when new subjects were sought at the close of the Napoleonic Wars. ‘Rome’ was on 7  Oetterman (1997). Andrews (1930) provides a chronological summary of panorama subjects at Leicester Square and the Strand.



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show at the Strand in 1817, while ‘view of Rome, ancient and modern’ and ‘the Coliseum at Rome’ were exhibited in the lower and upper circles at Leicester Square in 1839. In 1818, a panorama of Athens was on display at the Strand, and from 1845–7, Leicester Square boasted a new view of the city, sketched by artists dispatched to Greece expressly for the purpose.8 From 1823–4, both Strand and Leicester Square offered panoramas of Pompeii. The Strand’s 1824 Pompeii was shown again at Leicester Square from 1848–50. Non-classical archaeological sites were also on display in the years before the Crystal Palace opened, including ‘Nimroud’ (1852) and ‘Granada and the Alhambra’ (1853). The panorama may well have acquainted visitors with the architecture reconstructed in the courts of the Crystal Palace. Panoramas were aimed at a varied audience; the guide to the 1839 ‘view of Rome, ancient and modern’ suggested that it would appeal to ‘those who have not seen Rome’ alongside ‘those who have’, as well as ‘the classical scholar . . . by elucidating, in a most clear and forcible manner, many passages in his favourite authors.’9 The new immersive techniques of the panoramas might not just supplement but clarify classical texts (for a select male audience). I return in Chapter 3 to the idea that technologically innovative representations might be an improvement on the ancient ‘reality’. Spectacular visions of the ancient world were also available in the pleasure gardens of the city, where, thanks to fireworks and elaborate lakeside arrangements involving paintings and models, Vesuvius could be seen to erupt nightly. This was also a popular subject matter for magic lantern and diorama shows, with interest intensified by the volcano’s activity during the early nineteenth century.10 Vesuvius in particular became, as Isobel Armstrong puts it, ‘a new nineteenth-­century myth organized primarily by the lens and screen.’11 The violence of an eruption could be fearsomely re-created but also contained by contemporary technologies. The significance of any volcano—as geological phenomenon, metaphor for violence and political upheaval, example of the sublime in philosophical aesthetics—ostensibly moves beyond explicit representations of the classical world.12 Vesuvius is always the volcano selected in these early nineteenth-century dramas, however, and its ability to graft these wider cultural resonances to the ancient 8  On the archaeological credentials of the Athens panoramas, see McNeal (1995). 9  Description of a View of Rome (1839): 3. 10  Simmons (1969): 103–5. 11  Armstrong (2008): 313, 262–4. 12  Armstrong (2008): 312–5.

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world is of note here. Although spectacular and entertaining, these shows were also considered ‘an intellectual amusement’.13 Contemporary periodicals made sense of the pleasure garden spectacles by quoting guidebooks to the real sights in Italy.14 Less dramatic immersions in the ancient world were also available to Londoners at the Regent’s Park Colosseum, a replica (confusingly) of the Pantheon at Rome. This entertainment complex was in operation from 1829–43, reopening under new management from 1845–68. It had sporadic periods of success throughout the century but by 1870 stood in ruins and was finally demolished in 1875.15 On the 1845 re­ opening, the ILN printed an image of a ‘decaying Greek temple’ (Figure 2.3), and described how its grounds offered visitors: a chaos of classical relics of the antique world, and of luxuriant, but mouldering, beauty from our own . . . the designer has not attempted to copy rigidly any particular monument of antiquity; although the classical traveller and artist will be reminded of the Temple of Vesta and the Arch of Titus, at Rome, and the Temple of Theseus, at Athens.16

The ‘chaos of relics’ knowingly echoes the ‘chaos of ruins’ Byron describes in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1811–17), and passages from Cantos II and IV are printed at the foot of the article. The ILN explicitly draws parallels between the ideas about past and present evoked in romantic poetry and the atmosphere of the reconstructions in Regent’s Park. This reinforces an association with an elite form of travel and appreciation of ruins, as does the claim that only ‘the classical traveller and artist’ would have noted a likeness to particular ancient edifices. As I explore in more detail in Chapter 3, travel was rapidly changing in the mid-nineteenth century with the growth of mass tourism. By the 1840s, Childe Harold had become the quintessential guide to appreciating Rome.17 It seems that visitors to the Regent’s Park versions of classical ruins were encouraged to understand them through the same literary lens. There is a lack of specificity in the text (‘the designer has not attempted to copy rigidly any particular monument of antiquity’), which refers also to the Temple of Theseus at Athens, while the caption to the 13  Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction 37 (1841), cited in Altick (1978): 325. 14  See Altick (1978): 319–25. 15  Hyde (1982); Altick (1978): 141–62. 16  ‘Re-opening of the Colosseum, Regent’s Park’, ILN (3 May 1845): 276. 17  Buzard (1993): 114–30.



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Figure 2.3  Engraving of the Temple of Apollo at Regents Park, from ‘Reopening of the Colosseum, Regent’s Park’, Illustrated London News (3 May 1845): 276. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (N. 2288 b.6, Vol. 6, No. 157, p. 276).

illustration adds a further temple to the mix—that of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae. This vagueness demonstrates a concern with atmosphere and experience rather than archaeological education, again suggesting a generalizing mode of approaching ruins more associated with the eighteenth century than the 1850s.18 Yet the ILN wrenches these romantic ruins firmly into the mid-nineteenth century, stressing the achievements of the architecture park’s engineers in producing such an effective show ‘in a most limited space, and with, apparently, the least promising materials.’19 The ‘ruins’ were proud achievements of contemporary engineering. Archaeological exactness, then, was not at the top of the agenda; effect, atmosphere, and the accomplishments of contemporary designers took priority. This contrasts with the 18  See Thomas (2008). 19  ‘Re-opening of the Colosseum, Regent’s Park’, ILN (3 May 1845): 276.

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panorama exhibitors’ pride that renowned excavators and architects were involved in their productions.

The Theatre and the Historical Novel When the Crystal Palace opened, visitors from across the class spectrum could readily have come into contact with classical epics, tragedies, and tales from Ovid at classical burlesque shows, even if performances of more formal Greek tragedies were rather limited in the period from the late 1840s to the 1870s. Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh’s pioneering work on classical burlesque has established it as a truly mass forum for engagement with the ancient world.20 Performed both in West End theatres and East End pubs, these shows combined classical mythology, humour, song, dance, and contemporary cultural and political references. In an 1851 ‘Jason and Medea’, performed at the Grecian Saloon in the Eagle Tavern on City Road in Shoreditch, for example, the gods from Mount Olympus pay visits to the Great Exhibition.21 Burlesque referenced both ancient literature and visual culture, and was characterized by particularly lavish sets.22 It built upon an older concern with archaeological precision in theatrical set design; the Kemble siblings’ Greek tragedy productions of the 1790s had avidly embraced the latest details emerging from the publication in 1794 of the most recent volumes of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s Antiquities of Athens.23 Figures from classical mythology, and the stories that accompanied sculpture at the Sydenham Palace may not have been entirely unfamiliar to its audience. The form of historical representation that comes closest to the presentations at the Palace, however, was not a physical reconstruction, but a literary one. The origins of the historical novel are usually traced to Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), and by 1902 Jonathan Nield’s Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales listed over 1,000 publications from the previous century. The historical novel is as varied as the array of Victorian responses to and understandings of the past.24 Here I focus on the pre-eminent evocation of classical civilization in literary form, Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii (1834).25 20  Hall and Macintosh (2005): 350–90. 21  ‘Jason and Medea’ (1851). 22  Pearsall (1973): 60–72. 23  Hall and Macintosh (2005): 268. 24  Bowen (2002). 25  On historical novels set in Greece and Rome see Jenkyns (1980): 79, 82–5; Goldhill (2011): 153–244; Turner (1999): 173–87; Vance (1997): 197–221.



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Historical novels were obviously not as widely accessible as a firework display at Vauxhall Gardens. However, Bulwer Lytton’s vision of Pompeii rapidly diffused across the entertainments market. Operatic and theatrical productions, paintings, pyrodramas, and panoramas of the towns destroyed by Vesuvius proliferated after 1834.26 Although there were engagements with Pompeii before Lytton, the exhibits that emerged in his wake were evidently inspired by his novel as much as by the excavations. It became almost impossible to mention the ancient towns destroyed by Vesuvius without also referring to Lytton, and his vision of Pompeii had huge repercussions for the means by which the ancient town was understood and represented. The guide to Leicester Square’s panorama of Pompeii from 1824 dwells on public buildings and broader themes of imperial decline and fall.27 The 1849 panorama guide is strikingly different; it focuses almost entirely on daily life, and contrasts between ancient and modern activities. While these shifts cannot, of course, be exclusively attributed to Lytton’s novel, it is striking that the 1849 guide remarks that ‘Those who have read Sir Edward’s classical and elegant work will feel an increased interest in the view’.28 At the Crystal Palace, the Pompeian Court, although a pastiche of many different surviving buildings, was most commonly associated with the House of the Tragic Poet, where Lytton’s hero Glaucus resides. Its success as a reconstruction of a Pompeian home was almost unanimously assessed in terms of its correspondence to Lytton’s novel. Guidebooks and commentators also asserted that nineteenth-century visitors would find the Pompeian Court of greater interest if they had read Lytton’s novel.29 Historical novels both stimulated interest in the ancient world, and shaped the way that it was presented. They also made the past seem closer to nineteenth-century Britons. The Ten Chief Courts noted that, after Lytton, ‘the city of Glaucus and the Blind Girl seems now accessible by omnibus, and to be almost within sound of Bow Bells.’30 Both Palace and Last Days invited the visitor/reader to a new and intimate vision of the ancient world, to step back in time, 26  Yablon (2007). 27  Description of a Second View of the Ruins of Pompeii (1824). 28  Description of a View of the Ruins of the city of Pompeii (1849): 4. 29  ‘The Crystal Palace for the People’, Morning Star (1 October 1856), V&A1, I, 229; The Crystal Palace (1867): 24; Adams (1861): 64; Scharf (1854b): 30–7; McDermott (1854): 128. 30  Ten Chief Courts (1854): 41.

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and, in their privileged position, see things denied to the common tourist at the archaeological site, and invisible to text-focused scholars.31 Yet, at both, the powers of the imagination were combined with laboriously articulated archaeological details.32 Lytton himself had deemed Scott’s writings historically inaccurate, and aimed to restore scholarly prestige to the historical novel.33 Lytton is an outstanding example of the crossover between the historical novel and the scholarly writing of history. In 1837, his history, Athens, its Rise and Fall was published, described in 2004 by Oswyn Murray as ‘the first serious history of Greece in modern Europe’.34 There was more to this relationship than the fact that the same people wrote history and historical novels.35 The two were regarded as complementary; an 1859 article in Bentley’s Miscellany, for example, argued that it was ‘essential’ to read novels alongside academic history, for the insights they offered to ordinary social life.36

Sculpture on Show Classical sculpture was also present in perhaps unexpected locations outside of the museum in nineteenth-century London. Casts of famous works such as the Laocoon, Apollo Belvedere, and increasingly, the Elgin Marbles, abounded at places of popular entertainment. Sculpture was exhibited for decorative, ambient reasons, rather than as the main attraction, as (intended) at the Palace. When Madame Tussaud finally settled her collection of waxworks at Baker Street in 1835, visitors entered through an ornate lobby lined with casts of ancient sculpture.37 Between 1829 and 1843, one million visitors passed through the ‘Saloon of Arts’ in the centre of the Regent’s Park Colosseum, which housed contemporary as well as ancient statuary, including casts of ‘Phidias’ Diana’, Venus de Medici, and the Apollo Belvedere. From 1845, this area was restyled as the ‘Glyptotheka’, hung with silk and lined with casts of the Parthenon frieze, as well as statues and busts of eminent figures from British history.38 The presence of such works in these public spaces of entertainment may well have familiarized visitors with the forms of the classical canon. These sculptures, generally 31  See further Jenkyns (1980): 85. 32  Harrison (2011). 33  Sanders (1978): 17. 34  Murray (2004): 15. 35  Explored further in Bann (1995): 17–29. 36  Cited in Sanders (1978): 15. See also Mitchell (2000): 17. 37  Altick (1978): 333–4. 38  Altick (1978): 155.



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associated with country houses and the nobility, were perhaps more approachable and less exclusively connected with social elites than has previously been assumed. Their display in these rotundas was more in the style of a private country house than a public institution, yet was specifically designed for popular consumption. Visitors to the Palace may have previously encountered Greek and Roman sculpture in media other than plaster and marble. From the 1820s, ‘Anatomical Museums’ around Leicester Square provided visitors with access to wax versions of the human body, showing how muscles worked, the development of foetuses, and a fixation with biological abnormalities. These exhibits usually did not allow women to visit, or, if they did, offered special opening hours for women only. They had a standard entry fee of one shilling, were often accompanied by lectures, and tended to have inclusive opening hours—some opening until 10 p.m.39 In the 1856 catalogue to his ‘Anatomical and Pathological Museum’, ‘Dr Kahn’ emphasizes one particular exhibit ‘for the purpose of showing the perfect formation of the human body, as contrasted with the six following deformities’.40 The object of his lavish praise is a wax Venus de Medici, also referred to as the ‘Greek Venus’. Kahn also boasted that he had spent two years and dissected more than 300 parts of the human body in order to complete a full-size wax Apollo Belvedere that could be fully disassembled. Described as ‘this chef d’oeuvre of anatomical perfection’, the catalogue adds that ‘the figure has elicited the highest encomiums from the medical and general public’.41 Classical sculpture appeared in anatomical museums from the 1820s to the late 1850s as an example of the flawless human form. Not just the apogee of art, it was also the desired physical appearance for real humans. The real human body was the focus of another mode of display of Greek and Roman sculpture popular at the time the Crystal Palace opened. At poses plastiques or tableaux vivants shows, gymnasts and actors in ‘elastic dress’ performed as celebrated sculptures from antiquity. These started off as circus side-acts and by the late 1820s had taken centre stage as performances in their own right.42 In these shows, the ‘perfect’ classical body covered in ‘fleshings’ was 39  Altick (1978): 339–41; Alberti (2009); Bates (2008). 40  Catalogue of Dr Kahn’s (1856): 17. 41  Catalogue of Dr Kahn’s (1856): 45. 42  Saxon (1978): 149–53, 226–32.

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a counterpoint to the bodies of exhibited people from Africa, the Americas, and Asia. The very name given to one such exhibited person, Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’ explicitly draws attention to her body’s non-conformity with the classical ideal.43 In Chapter 6 I return to the problems raised by the wax model and pose plastique to argue that the connection between classical bodies and human perfection should be understood in the context of nineteenth-century racial discourse. By the mid-1840s there were two main rival institutions exhibiting these enormously popular living ‘artworks’ at a shilling per show; ‘The Ancient Hall of Rome’ at Duborg’s Theatre of the Arts in Great Windmill Street, Piccadilly (opened 1845), and Madame Warton’s ‘Walhalla’ in Saville House, Leicester Square (1846).44 But they also took place in pubs. The entertainer Charles Rice records performances of ‘The Grecian Statues’ in the Adam and Eve pub on St Pancras Road. On 19 February 1840, Rice was ‘employed on the Stage to read the Different Statues previous to their pourtraiture (sic) by Lufkeen; – nasty job!!’, which indicates that some sort of didactic convention sometimes accompanied them.45 Rice is a peculiarly appropriate statue master; he was an attendant in the British Museum by day. Like Rice, poses plastiques shows spanned both worlds—although not always comfortably. They became a staple of later-nineteenth-century music hall, and were increasingly associated with a salacious voyeurism, often performed by women who also worked as prostitutes.46 The early manifestations of poses plastiques, were, however quite different, not least as they were primarily concerned with sculptures of male heroes, performed to a mixed, family audience. In the 1830s reviews deemed these shows depicting old master paintings and classical sculptures an ‘exhibition of art’. One Monsieur Ferdinand Flor used the medium to perform the evolution of painting from Greek vases, through Pompeian wall paintings, concluding with works by Raphael and Michelangelo.47 Greek and Roman statuary had a vibrant life beyond the museum in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet, as Monsieur Flor’s display of the history of art, and the ostensibly scientific concerns of Dr Kahn suggest, entertainment and education were certainly not mutually exclusive in these undertakings. 43  See Qureshi (2004). 44  Altick (1978): 345–7. 45  Senelick (1997): 44–5. 46  See Assael (2006); Faulk (2004): 142–87. 47  Altick (1978): 345.



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Sculpture in Print More private engagements with classical statuary were also made possible through the mass dissemination of printed images. Punch suggested that visitors to the Crystal Palace might already be acquainted with the Laocoon thanks to ‘Italian image boys’ who hawked prints of engravings on the streets.48 Contemporary commentators were not shy of applauding these itinerants’ contributions to the elevation of British taste. Egyptologist and design reformer Sir John Gardner Wilkinson claimed that ‘they have done more to improve the general taste, to place copies of known sculpture within the reach of all, and to familiarize the eye of the English public with what is good, than any school (which a few only can attend); than any gallery (which the working classes seldom visit); or any institution in the country’, again reinforcing the importance of looking beyond the well-established museum environment to understand cultures of the classical in the nineteenth century.49 Stereograph cards provided more expensive images of sculpture for personal perusal. The cards featured two separate photographs, which, when viewed through a stereoscope, merged into one, apparently ­three-dimensional, image (Figures 0.5, 2.1, 2.4, 4.2, 6.2). The inventor of the stereoscope, Sir David Brewster, argued that the three-­ dimensional depth and permanence of light in a stereoscopic image was better than viewing an actual sculpture.50 The superiority of stereoscopic visions to the actual image viewed was a characteristic assertion, and one to which I return in Chapter 3. Brewster maintained that, rather than setting up museums, aesthetic education could be promoted nationwide by despatching stereograph cards of classical sculpture to British schools. The cards were easily reproducible and portable, and, Brewster is keen to emphasize, captured sculpture in atmospheric museum settings.51 The pricing of stereograph cards and viewers, however, may have been prohibitive; they retailed at three shillings—the same price as three physical visits to the Crystal Palace.52 Engravings in magazines brought images of Greek and Roman sculpture before a more genuinely mass audience. The Penny Magazine, 48  ‘Punch’s Handbooks to the Crystal Palace. The Greek Court (ctd.)’, Punch (26 August 1854): 80–1. 49  Wilkinson (1858): 176. For further praise, see Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (1855): 4; Taylor (1848). 50  Brewster (1856): 185. 51  Brewster (1856): 199. 52  Plunkett (2007).

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authored, edited, and published by Charles Knight was the first major undertaking to do so. The first edition was issued in March 1832, and by December of that year circulation amounted to 200,000. In Knight’s estimate, this provided a probable readership of 1 million with access to its contents, a new development avidly discussed by commentators of the 1830s. Publication ceased in 1845.53 The Penny Magazine was a forerunner to the Crystal Palace in more ways than simply providing a new audience with access to representations of Greek and Roman sculpture. Knight’s aims were remarkably similar to the motivations behind the Crystal Palace Company, not least because they were directed towards all classes, and as such truly ‘popular’. Knight intended the Penny Magazine to offer culture as an alternative to disruptive behaviour and radical politics. Yet, as Patricia Anderson emphasizes, he also aspired to cultivate visual instruction as an independent pleasure.54 The encyclopaedic juxtaposition of sculpture, industry, natural history, and science at the Palace also had a precedent in the Penny Magazine. In December 1832, an article on the Apollo Belvedere was followed by an examination of British copper mining, and an article on the Elgin Marbles was preceded by ‘The structure and use of the human lungs’.55 Both Palace and Penny Magazine considered British technology and industry a signifier of civilization; the moral improvement of the working classes via visual education was the best means of further developing these benchmarks.56 Anderson argues that the Penny Magazine transformed Greek and Roman statuary into role models for British citizens. Forbearance and hard work are emphasized as classical qualities. These were manifested in the physical appearance of the sculptures, some of which appear to have been altered for the purposes of the magazine; the Dying Gladiator’s agonized scowl replaced with a stiff upper lip. The associated mythological stories were similarly didactic. Laocoon is chastized for showing undue emotion, the Dying Gladiator becomes an exemplar of restraint and diligent labour, and Niobe is held up as a warning of the consequences of ‘pride of heart’.57 However, buried among the civilizing exhortations is a genuine concern with recent archaeological investigations. The same articles make 53  Anderson (1991): 52; 10. 54  Anderson (1991): 76–80; 53. 55  Penny Magazine (15 December 1832): 362; (22 December 1832): 371. 56 ‘Preface’, Penny Magazine (18 December 1832): iii; Phillips (1854): 38–9. 57  Anderson (1991): 60–1.



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scholarly references to the writings of German classicist Friedrich Thiersch and French archaeologist Quatremère de Quincey, and carefully elucidate a range of competing explanations regarding the original display context of the Niobid group.58 The moralizing and scholarly aspects of engagement with the ancient world were not distinguished from each other but woven together in each Penny Magazine article, and as I argue, at the Sydenham Palace. The crossover between archaeology and the entertainment industry extended further. Charles Cockerell, the architect and archaeologist who excavated the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina and the Temple of Apollo at Bassae was consultant for the 1818 Athens panorama, while the 1845 painting of the city was proudly based on drawings made by the architect and traveller George Knowles, whose ‘Ground Plan of the Temple of Minerva at Athens’ was published in 1847.59 Many of the first Western European ‘archaeologists’ of Greece had trained as architects or artists, and pursued archaeology in addition to their other interests; they were far from exclusively employed to excavate, catalogue, and interpret evidence. Classical sculpture had a prominent role in artistic education and many of the nineteenth-century British texts on classical sculpture were adapted from lectures to students at the Royal Academy, from John Flaxman (1829), Richard Westmacott Jr (1864), through to Frederic Leighton (1896). Archaeologists—and archaeology—at mid-century does not fit neatly into either category of ‘amateur’ or academic ‘professional’.

CL ASSICAL ARC HAE OLO G Y I N 1 8 5 0s BRI TA I N The mid-nineteenth century in Britain is often skipped over in histories of the study of Greek and Roman sculpture; there is a yawning gap between the British Museum’s purchase of the Elgin Marbles in 1816 and the establishment in the 1880s of the nation’s first chairs in Archaeology at London, Oxford, and Cambridge.60 Yet this was a time 58 See Penny Magazine articles on ‘Apollo Belvedere’ (15 December 1832): 362 and ‘Niobe’ (2 February 1833): 41. 59  Andrews (1930): 60; 77. 60  This is a feature both of more general histories of classical archaeology and those focusing on Greek sculpture in particular, e.g. Morris (1994); Stewart (1990); Whitley (2001).

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of enormous significance, with new excavations in what is now Turkey expanding the world of ‘Greek’ sculpture, the development of ideas about the relationship between Greek and Roman sculpture, further debates about polychromy, style, and the organization of museums, as well as the foundation of scholarly journals.61 Here I begin to fill in this gap, starting with a survey of the display of classical sculpture in museums in the 1850s, before focusing in more detail on archaeology at the Crystal Palace.

Greece and Rome at the Museum The first major British classical sculpture collections were formed in the eighteenth century. The prospering aristocracy imported statuary, usually of Roman origin and heavily restored, to fill their newly built country houses, many of which were designed especially to display sculpture. These were private collections and inaccessible to ordinary people.62 The one exception to all these categories was the Earl of Arundel’s collection of fragmentary pre-Roman sculpture from what is now Turkey, amassed in the seventeenth century, and displayed from 1755 in the Old Schools at Oxford. They were moved to a long gallery display in the University Galleries (now the Ashmolean Museum) in 1840.63 The Fitzwilliam Museum opened to the public in Cambridge in 1848, but classical sculpture was little more than architectural decoration until the Disney Collection arrived in 1851. A product of eighteenth-century Grand Tour collecting, this was largely composed of what would now be called Greco-Roman sculpture.64 The major industrial towns did not open public museums until later in the nineteenth ­century—I discuss these in more detail in Chapter 4. From 1837 a range of marbles and plaster casts, again primarily Roman, was also accessible to the public at Sir John Soane’s Museum at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, alongside a panoply of architectural fragments: ceramics from China and Peru, ‘natural curiosities’, cork models, and ‘miscellaneous medieval works’.65 Although the nineteenth century assuredly saw an opening up of sculpture collections to the public, even by the 1880s the greater proportion of classical sculpture in Britain 61  See Challis (2008a). 62  Scott (2003). 63  Haynes (1968). 64  Gill (1990); Beard (2012); Vout (2012). 65  From an undated inventory, cited in Black (2000): 67. On the architectural models and Soane’s ‘system’ see Elsner (1994).



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remained in private hands.66 In this context the readily accessible Crystal Palace cast collections take on even greater significance. Despite the scholarly connections of Oxford, Cambridge, and Soane, their displays were more aesthetic than academic. The major ‘professional’ body for classical archaeology at mid-century was the British Museum, founded in 1753, and opened to the public in 1759. Until the 1820s, admission was dependent on making an advance request for an admission ticket.67 By the 1850s, its galleries were open freely to the public on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.68 It had no formal Department of Antiquities until 1807, and there was little in the way of classical sculpture on show until Charles Townley’s collection of Greco-Roman statuary was given a permanent home at the museum in 1808.69 When the Crystal Palace opened in 1854, the British Museum’s Greek and Roman galleries housed original fifthcentury sculpture, the Elgin Marbles, and the frieze from the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae (acquired 1815). Evidence of the wider world of ‘Greek’ sculpture was also on display, with sections of the frieze from the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and Lycian tombs from Xanthus, the results of Charles Newton and Charles Fellowes’s excavations in Western Turkey on behalf of the museum trustees during the 1840s and 1850s.70 From the 1840s, the British Museum was committed to the principle of chronological display, reflecting and further contributing towards contemporary archaeological interest in the development of sculptural styles. In theory at least this further sets it apart from other contemporary British displays of sculpture. The Fitzwilliam was bound to display by benefactor, not period or style, while the German museum director and art historian Gustav Waagen noted that ‘the arbitrary mixture of heterogeneous objects’ gave Soane’s Museum ‘something of the unpleasant effect of a feverish dream.’71 It was not until the 1880s, however, that the sculpture galleries at the British Museum were transformed into an approximation of a ‘chain of progress’, with fifth-century Greek art at its apex.72 The British Museum’s Natural History collection was only transferred in 1883 to South Kensington to form the nucleus of the Natural History Museum. At mid-century, 66  Michaelis (1882): 3. 67  Miller (1973): 96; 123–4. 68  For a range of contemporary ideas about the public in the British Museum, see Siegel (2008): 82–123. On opening times see Miller (1973): 256–7. 69  Jenkins (1995): 13–19; Coltman (2006): 165–93. 70  See Challis (2008c). 71  See Beard (2012); Waagen (1854): II, 321. 72  Jenkins (1995): 56–74.

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its collection was still a hotchpotch; in 1850, a single cabinet housed a plaster cast of Flaxman’s Shield of Achilles, various British medieval antiquities, a model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a Chinese bell, a model of an Indian temple, and another of HMS Victory.73 The incongruities of display at the British Museum were remarked upon by contemporary commentators in archaeological journals: ‘We go from the masterworks of the Parthenon straight up to the stuffed seal and buffalo.’74 The French writer Francis Wey visited London in 1856 and was similarly unimpressed by the museum’s arrangements of antiquities: ‘No method in the classing, an indigestible mix of marble and plaster, no chronological order in the Greek and Roman monuments . . . In a large room painted a dirty yellow are the marbles from the Parthenon – the greatest masterpieces of Phidias and of all human sculpture.’75 In contrast he lavished praise upon the (ostensibly) chronological and culturally distinct arrangement of sculpture at the Crystal Palace, and noted that ‘[i]n a few hours you can scan the entire index of universal annals’.76 Wey is one example among many continental visitors to London who were able to make comparisons among British exhibits of classical antiquities and their varying modes of display in the major museums of Europe.77 Any Palace visitor that paid attention to the guidebook was made well aware that classical sculpture was scattered across Europe. Scharf ’s Guide to the Roman Court includes an eight-page subsection of ‘Notes on the Principal Collections of Ancient Sculpture in Europe’, which lists the significant possessions of each, and arguably positions the Sydenham Palace as the ultimate pan-European collection.78 Contemporaries were keen to compare and learn from exhibitionary strategies developing across Europe. In a survey of ancient art in European collections, Charles Newton, British Museum Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities 1861–85, singled out the Glyptothek in Munich (opened in 1830) as the paradigm for modern museum display.79 The building was specially designed to exhibit a chronological, stylistic developmental history of art.80 This new scheme was entirely dependent on recent archaeological discoveries, and had as 73  Miller (1973): 100. 74  Pulszky (1852): 11. 75  Wey (1935): 226–7. 76  Wey (1935): 157–8. 77  For an overview of the development of European and American museums in this period, see Dyson (2006): 133–71. 78  Scharf (1854c): 19–26. 79  Newton (1851). 80  Potts (1980a).



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its linchpin the pedimental sculpture from the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina, excavated 1811 and purchased by Ludwig of Bavaria in 1812. Newton dismisses ‘the museums of Italy’ where ‘there is hardly any attempt at classification’ beyond ‘an occasional selection made on some partial unessential principle, such as . . . Animals in the Vatican’.81 Neither Berlin nor Paris feature. Berlin’s Altes Museum, opened to the public in 1830, had a rather limited classical collection at this point (‘few objects of especial celebrity’, according to Scharf ’s Roman Court guide), and did not narrate an exclusively stylistic chronology of art.82 The Musée du Louvre was declared a public institution in 1793. Between 1797 and 1815, it housed the most celebrated sculpture from the Papal collections (requisitioned by Napoleon I), and during this period was the most important location in Europe for classical sculpture. Despite the acquisition of the Venus de Milo in 1821, the Louvre continued to display sculpture thematically, the manner associated with the older canon that it had once contained. In the 1850s an Algerian antiquities room was opened, which added a vague geographical structure to its exhibits. It was not until 1930 that a chronological arrangement was undertaken there.83 Newton’s omissions indicate the archaeological establishment’s shift away from Greco-Roman sculpture towards a newly emergent canon of fifth-century Greek works held in Munich and London, and a preference for display that demonstrated stylistic evolution.

Plaster Casts Wey’s discomfort at the ‘indigestible mix of marble and plaster’ would have been a sore point for Charles Newton. The British Museum did display plaster casts alongside marbles, but only in order to fill in the gaps in the chain of art that it sought to represent; it refused, for example, a cast of the Apollo Belvedere in 1840, but presented casts of the Aegina Marbles as essential to understanding the development of art.84 Newton concluded his 1851 article with a plea for a systematic cast gallery in Britain, ‘not disposed, as is too often the case, merely to please the eye, but so as to develop, by a series of transition specimens,

81  Newton (1851): 227. 82  Scharf (1854c): 25; Moyano (1990). 83  Martinez (2004). For the early history of the Louvre, see McLellan (1994). 84  Jenkins (1995): 65–6; 166.

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the chief features of successive styles’.85 The Crystal Palace courts formed a somewhat perplexing response to this request. Before the Crystal Palace opened, the only public gallery devoted to casts of classical sculpture belonged to the Trustees for Manufactures in Scotland’s drawing school in Edinburgh, which had been founded in 1798 to educate artisans into good design, and was opened to the public for four days a week in 1836.86 Casts were also on show among marbles in the university museums in Cambridge and Oxford.87 These galleries were dominated by sculpture from canonical Italian collections and were more scattered than classified. Elsewhere, casts were used in the teaching of students at the Royal Academy of Arts from its foundation in 1789, and from 1836 were key components of Government Schools of Design, a subject to which I return in Chapter 4.88 In the 1857 Report of the National Gallery Site Commission, experts were summoned to discuss national artistic needs. Edmund Oldfield, curatorial assistant in the Department of Antiquities in the British Museum, suggested that, although still desirable, the need for a national cast gallery was ‘not so much as it formerly was, in consequence of the establishment of the Crystal Palace’. He goes on to describe the Palace as exhibiting ‘the finest collection of casts in the world’, no small accolade from a member of the growing archaeological establishment.89 The Crystal Palace was unique in Britain, since it exhibited casts of a wide range of classical sculpture, dating from the fifth century bce to the third century ce, gathered specifically for the purpose of educating the public in the history of art. Moreover, it sought to culturally differentiate, with distinct Egyptian, Greek, and Roman Courts, and made gestures towards grouping sculpture chronologically. It was not until the 1880s that university cast collections for the ‘scientific’ study of archaeology were formed in Britain, lagging behind continental cast collections. The first university collection was at Gottingen (1767), while a new collection of casts opened in Berlin in 1856, arranged as an historic guide to the development of sculpture. Paris’s Musée de Sculpture Comparée opened much later, in 1882.90 The Crystal Palace’s position among these European collections has only very recently been acknowledged.91 85  Newton (1851): 227. 86  Smailes (1991). 87  Beard (1993): 8; Kurtz (1997). 88  Pevsner (1940): 140–3; Wade (2012). 89  HC Paper (1857) no. 2261, 67. 90  Connor (1989) provides a general survey. 91  Swenson (2008); Lochman (2013); Schreiter (2013).



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Wey’s preference for Sydenham over Bloomsbury illustrates the complexity of the relationship between amateur and professional classical archaeological scholarship at mid-century. The ostensibly professional British Museum was characterized by objects in a ‘lamentable state of congestion’.92 The Crystal Palace—a moneymaking venture run by railway magnates aimed at attracting the working man—purported to offer chronological order and clarity.

ARCHAEOLO G Y AT T HE C RYSTAL PA L AC E The Crystal Palace became an archaeological time warp, particularly as the architects of the Fine Arts Courts were so keen to engage with the debates most current in 1854. Despite claims that the collection would continue to develop with new finds, there is little evidence that it did. Its collections and modes of display demonstrate what was considered important public knowledge about Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture, at a much neglected time in the history of classical archaeology. Minute archaeological details preoccupied the Palace architects and the authors of the official guidebook. With typical pedantry and attention to archaeological detail, the main area of the Greek Court was referred to in the official Palace guides as an Agora (marketplace). The frieze bordering the Agora was decorated with the names of poets, philosophers, and artists, in script corresponding to the time period in which each lived, based on the latest epigraphical knowledge; some are visible in Figures 0.3, 5.1, and 6.1.93 The Greek Court’s model of the Parthenon was constructed under the guidance of the architect (and astronomer) Frances Cramner Penrose, adhering to his precisely detailed measurements and groundbreaking findings, which he published in his 1851 Investigation of the Principles of Athenian Architecture. But there were also larger debates with which the Palace engaged. For all the disciplinary nebulousness of the study of classical sculpture at midcentury, two fields of contemporary inquiry emerge quite clearly in the Palace guides and exhibits; the question of whether ancient sculpture was painted, and the relationship between Greek and Roman sculpture. Here I examine how the Palace engaged with these two areas of debate. 92  Siegel (2008): 226.

93  Scharf (1854a): 4.

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Polychromy As archaeological evidence emerged that at least some fifth-century bce Greek sculpture had been painted, intense debate arose over the colouring of ancient statuary.94 In the late eighteenth century, the discovery and publication of finds first at Herculaneum and later at Pompeii, as well as Stuart and Revett’s observations in Antiquities of Athens (1762–94), had alerted attention to the possibility that paint had been a feature of ancient sculpture and architecture. The major debates in continental Europe started with the publication of Quatremère de Quincey’s Le Jupe Olympien in 1814. New discoveries from Temples B and C at Selinus, Sicily, in the 1820s were exhibited in imaginative reconstructions in Paris and Rome in 1824 and published by J. I. Hittorff as Restitution du temple d’Empédocle à Sélinonte, ou l’architecture polychrome chez les Grecs (1851). In Britain, serious discussion of the matter did not really arise until the 1830s, when it was brought to public attention by Owen Jones’s experiments and publications.95 Painted sculpture was such a preoccupation by the mid-1830s that even the pure white status of the Elgin Marbles was questioned. In 1836 the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) formed a committee of eminent archaeologists, sculptors, architects, and physicists, who concluded that the marbles had never been painted.96 The range of areas of expertise involved in this evaluation testifies to the importance of the issue beyond the museum. Controversies continued to flare up, stimulated either by new archaeological discoveries, or contemporary sculptors’ and architects’ polychromatic experiments. By the early 1850s the polychromy debate had shown no sign of abating; there were four articles published in 1851 alone on the matter in the archaeological journal the Museum of Classical Antiquities. Owen Jones’s use of bold primary colours in the courts at the 1851 Great Exhibition had already attracted a great deal of attention.97 His polychromatic undertakings in the Greek Court at Sydenham generated even greater outrage. To the left of the model Parthenon, between the Greek and Egyptian Courts, was a cast of sections of the north frieze of the Parthenon.98 This most populous section, the original of 94  Blühm (1996b). 95  Blühm (1996b): 19; Drost (1996): 65. 96  The matter is still not decisively resolved. See Jenkins and Middleton (1988). 97  Flores (2006): 82–9. 98  The precise slabs are not mentioned in Jones’s account. Using an enlargement of Figure 5.1 alongside photographs in Robertson and Frantz (1975), it is possible to securely identify slabs XXXII–XXVIII.



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Figure 2.4 Greek Court. Stereoview, c.1854, ‘66. Niobe and Family’, by Negretti and Zambra. Painted section of Parthenon frieze above. Author’s collection.

which was on display in the British Museum, depicts a cavalcade of horsemen galloping to the left. Precisely because it was so crowded, it was selected as the guinea pig for what Jones proudly called ‘our experiment’: a restored and fully painted frieze (Figures 2.4 and 5.1).99 The Palace was the first to exhibit such a version, and with its blue background, golden hair, white flesh, pale blue and pink drapery, and red and grey horses (all taken from archaeological precedents, Jones is keen to emphasize), the frieze was a bold statement—especially given the conclusion of the 1836 RIBA committee.100 It was thus not entirely surprising that Jones felt compelled to respond to critics with An Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court (1854). This strident defence was bolstered with comments and quotations from archaeologists and well-known literary figures. The range of contributors to Jones’s Apology—philosophers, museum curators, architects, and prominent periodical commentators—again demonstrates that even supposedly archaeological concerns were widely analysed and debated. Jones presented his intentions as purely archaeological. An early practitioner of what is now called experimental archaeology, he aspired to use archaeological reconstruction as a means of evaluating a range of potential ancient technological developments. Slabs from the 99  Jones (1854a): 17.

100  Jones (1854a): 20–2.

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west and east frieze were left unpainted, for comparative purposes.101 Of the hundreds of images of the Crystal Palace that survive, not one focuses exclusively (or particularly clearly) on the painted frieze; it was evidently not something presented to or demanded by visitors as a souvenir. For all Jones’s archaeological interests, it was not deemed sufficiently noteworthy to feature in its own right in documentary or commemorative Palace material. Jones used the Apology to elaborate his convictions on the use of colour in antiquity. He claimed to have toned down the realities of ancient polychromy, and viewed the Palace as a first step in familiarizing a public unaccustomed to painted sculpture and interiors. The Parthenon frieze was a particularly sensational choice of ancient sculpture for his ‘experiment’, and his rhetoric was no less iconoclastic than the brightly coloured reconstruction: ‘The labours of Phidias, had they never received colour, would have been thrown away.’102 Yet for all the provocative aspects of the undertaking, the Palace’s painted frieze was far from being the first of Jones’s forays into polychromy, and should not be seen as a mere gimmick, as some contemporaries claimed.103 The painted frieze roused commentators to feverish expressions of disgust. In 1855, Samuel Leigh Sotheby, a Crystal Palace shareholder, deemed it as ‘great a deformity to the natural marble as the concealment of the most beautiful portions of the human face, by its assuming the appearance of a Skye Terrier’, a significant (if surreal) affront to conventional expectations.104 Sotheby was anxious that inaccurate archaeological information was irresponsibly being put before the public.105 The Morning Chronicle was similarly censorious, deeming the Palace to have ideas above its station: Let the Crystal Palace stand on its own high and substantial merits; but let it not claim what it does not, or ought not, to pretend to . . . As a people, we do not wish the classical and archaeological reputation of English scholarship to be committed to . . . all the vivid fancies of Mr Owen Jones.106

Yet, as discussed above, Jones’s ‘vivid fancies’ were deeply rooted in contemporary archaeological understanding. 101  Jones (1854a): 18. 102  Jones (1854a): 19. 103  ‘The Crystal Palace – Frieze of the Parthenon’, Morning Post (1 March 1854), V&A1, I, 87; Eastlake (1855): 311; ‘Punch’s Handbooks to the Crystal Palace. The Greek Court’, Punch (19 August 1854): 61. 104  Sotheby (1855): 24. 105  Sotheby (1855): 21. 106  Morning Chronicle (12 June 1854), V&A1, I, 122.



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The Palace’s painted frieze also stimulated new criticism within scholarly publications. The archaeologist Hodder Michael Westropp blasted Raoul-Rochette’s defence of polychromy in the preface to his 1854 translation of the French archaeologist’s Lectures on Ancient Art. In the same year, sculptor Richard Westmacott Jr delivered a highly critical paper ‘On the Colouring of Statues’ to a meeting of the Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland at Cambridge, in response to ‘some experiments that have recently been made’, surely a reference to Jones’s frieze.107 These are the most narrowly defined of comments on the importance of polychromy at the Palace, however. As I discuss in the following chapters, the matter arose time and time again as a symbol of either the successes or complexities of extending a vision of the past to a mass audience. Critics considered its implications to range far beyond the dangers of proffering misleading archaeological interpretations.

Roman Copies and Greek Originals Museum visitors today are still confronted with sculptures identified as a ‘Roman copy after a Greek original’. Over the last thirty years, classical archaeologists have sought to re-evaluate this designation, emphasizing its implication of Roman inferiority.108 When the Crystal Palace opened in 1854, perceived Roman inadequacies were not exactly hidden: ‘The Romans did nothing for themselves. In their earlier days they depended on the Etruscans for all refinements of art, in the same way as at a later date they depended upon the Greeks.’109 This statement from Scharf ’s Roman Court guide is typical of mid-century writing on the relationship between Greek and Roman sculpture. This, however, was a relatively recent development in nineteenth-century archaeological debate. Until the late eighteenth century, Greek and Roman sculpture was not really differentiated. Securely dateable fifth-century bce Greek sculpture was not familiar in Western Europe. Sculpture was known largely through the great Papal and aristocratic collections in Rome, and comprised mostly of works unearthed in Italy and now regarded as Roman.110 Although Johann Joachim Winckelmann asserted the 107  Westropp (1854): iv; Westmacott Jr (1855): 22. 108  Gazda (2002); Marvin (2008); Perry (2005); Trimble and Elsner (2006). 109  Scharf (1854c): 5. 110  Haskell and Penny (1981).

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superiority of Greek sculpture over Roman in his foundational History of Ancient Art (1764), his history was structured around the sculpture held in Roman collections. British familiarity with Athenian monuments and architectural sculpture had increased with the publication of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens (1762–94). The arrival in London of the Elgin Marbles from 1807–12, and the Select Committee debates around their purchase for the nation in 1817, are generally seen as the definitive point of schism, when the canon of sculpture from Rome was relegated to being ‘Greco-Roman’. The displays at the Crystal Palace suggest that this transformation in taste was less clearcut than has often been asserted.111 As more sculpture became known and documented through excavation and cataloguing, the existence of multiple versions of the same Roman statue became increasingly apparent. Travellers had observed this in the eighteenth century.112 However, the new presence of fifthcentury Greek sculpture in Western Europe, combined with Winckelmann’s assertion of Greek superiority, and a romantic emphasis on originality and uniqueness, did not bode well for the status of the canon of sculpture from the great Roman collections. Examinations of the historiography of the relationship between Greek and Roman sculpture tend to step deftly over the period from 1817 to 1893, to arrive at the publication of German archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler’s Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture, translated into English in 1895.113 Furtwängler made a preference for fifth-century Greek sculpture the foundation of an archaeological methodology. His ‘science’ of Kopienkritik sought to establish lost Greek ‘masterpieces’ described in ancient literary testimonia, through painstaking analysis and comparison with extant Roman works. Scholars deemed many Roman sculptures significant solely for what they might reveal about fifth-century Greek statuary. Interest in the Roman context of these works was marginalized by the preoccupation with the supposed ‘masters’ of the Greek world. This has had a lasting effect on scholarship on both Greek and Roman sculpture.114 Furtwängler’s writings are unanimously regarded as the foundation for later writing on copies. Yet their intellectual context has remained 111  Rothenberg (1977): 212–432; 443; Haskell and Penny (1981): xiii, 120–5. Potts (1980b): 151–2 is sceptical about this apparent clean break in taste. 112  Haskell and Penny (1981): 118. 113  Bieber (1977): 1–9. 114  e.g. Pollitt (1996); Richter (1970).



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curiously absent from discussion. In what follows, I suggest that the displays and expositionary writings in the guidebooks to the Crystal Palace reveal existing mid-century views on the relationship between Greek and Roman culture, and how these were communicated to the public. I examine the official guidebook’s descriptions of the major sculptural groups in both the Greek and Roman Courts, and set out how the relationship between Greek and Roman sculpture was articulated at the Palace, assessing the extent to which this both reflected and contributed to contemporary archaeological debate.

Copies at the Crystal Palace Scharf ’s Roman Court guide made clear its position on the relative worth of Greek and Roman sculpture: ‘the arts practised and elaborated amongst the Romans, owed their origin to the inspiration of the genius of the Greek, and served as a secondary development or continuation of his wonderful achievements.’ There was nothing distinct about Roman art; it was a mere ‘secondary development’ of Greek; the Roman Court catalogue proclaimed itself an ‘extension of the Greek Court catalogue’.115 Nearly all of the guidebooks to the Palace reinforced this assertion, as did comment on the Fine Arts Courts in the press and periodicals. Publications aimed at a broader audience tended to lose the archaeological nuances of such a comparison, and perpetuated the idea that Greece and Rome were effectively indistinguishable. Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper deemed Roman sculpture so similar to the Greek that it only merited a cursory glance.116 The Elgin Marbles were regarded as fundamental to understanding the difference between Greek and Roman sculpture. Writing on the chronological arrangement of museums in 1853, Charles Newton asserted: ‘Take away the Elgin Marbles, and the continuity of the series is destroyed; it is as if the keystone had fallen out of the arch.’117 They were securely dateable examples of the supposed zenith of ancient achievement, sculpture of the fifth century bce. The history of art explained in the Palace guidebook followed a similar rhetoric of progress and decline. Scharf ’s Greek Court guide, repeating Newton (1851), claimed that ‘The new standard of criticism furnished by the 115  Scharf (1854c): i. 116  ‘Crystal Palace Supplement’ (1854): 234.

117  Newton (1880): 49.

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Elgin Marbles’ revealed works in the Vatican and ‘other collections of Italy’ to be ‘copies, recollections and translations of earlier designs’.118 The archaeological aspirations of the court architects, and the pretensions of the official guidebooks, suggest a prime position in the Greek Court for these pre-eminent fifth-century works. However, the Elgin Marbles were far from the focus of attention at Sydenham. They were not exhibited in the central court, but in a corridor behind the major display space. The Palace did not have casts made of the entire set. The Ilissus (now referred to as ‘Figure A’) from the west pediment had been exhibited as a stand-alone aesthetic object at the British Museum from 1817–31, positioned on a revolving podium to be turned to catch the best light.119 Neither this figure, nor any of the metopes, was on show at the Crystal Palace.120 Other definitively fifth-century Greek sculpture, such as the frieze from the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae, did not feature in the Greek Court either. Scharf ’s Greek Court guide describes the reliefs from the fifth-century Temple of Theseus in the Athenian Agora as demonstrating ‘a wonderful advance beyond all previous attempts. No period during the whole course of Greek art, affords so striking an instance of sudden progress’.121 Yet they were exhibited in a jumble of other friezes in the relief gallery, barely testifying to the important position they were deemed to occupy in the evolution of art. The Aegina Marbles were widely considered essential to outlining the development of Greek art. In the Crystal Palace, however, they were displayed not at the heart of the Greek Court, but estranged in the far north nave, closer to the ‘Raw material and agricultural implements’ than to Hellas (Appendix 1, ‘U’). Nor did Sydenham engage with the wider world of ‘Greek’ sculpture emerging during the 1840s from the excavations conducted by Fellowes and Newton in Asia Minor. A British Museum guidebook of 1843 noted of Fellowes’s Xanthian Marbles that ‘These highly finished and spirited sculptures, in the opinion of many able judges, vie in excellence with the friezes of the Parthenon in the Elgin Saloon’.122 They did not appear in the Palace, an odd omission given how celebrated were these new ‘discoveries’, both as beautiful objects in their own right and archaeologically and historically important artefacts filling in episodes in the history of art. 118  Scharf (1854a): 93. 119  Jenkins (1995): 77. 120  See further Nichols (2012). 121  Scharf (1854a): 25. 122  Scott and Kesson (1843): 7.



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The sculptures that dominated the central area of the court—aside from the Venus de Milo—were all from the older canon of statuary at Rome (Figures 0.3, 2.1, 6.2). With the exception of the Venus, the guidebook identifies them as ‘Roman copies’; the Discobolos is a ‘repetition’, the Borghese Gladiator ‘most probably an imitation of a bronze of the Macedonian period’, and the Ludovisi Mars ‘probably a repetition of some superior work’. The Laocoon, ‘perhaps the most celebrated of all works of art’, is, nevertheless, regarded as a Roman product of the first century ce.123 It was acceptable for these sculptures to occupy pride of place in the Greek Court, however, since they were deemed (less perfect) substitutes for genuine Greek genius, rather than object lessons in Roman taste. A preference for Greek sculpture, and the denigration of Roman work is often seen as a precursor to the full development of Kopienkritik. Alex Potts has shown that from the 1750s onwards, a spectrum of sculptors and early art historians and archaeologists considered surviving Roman sculptures to be copies.124 But recent writing on the history of the relationship between Greek and Roman sculpture only gestures towards the idea that critics seriously contemplated Roman sculpture as copies or a means of relating to ‘lost Greek masterpieces’ before the 1880s.125 There was no consensus among scholars regarding the relationship between the old canon and the new at mid-century. Raoul-Rochette (1854) noted the lack of fit between the artists detailed by Pliny and Pausanias and the surviving known sculptures, and enumerates a range of acknowledged copies, including the Apollo Belvedere, Myron’s Discobolos, and Polykleitos’ Amazon. He also made clear, however, that ‘this observation does not in any way tend to diminish in our eyes the merit of these excellent works, which are not the less master-pieces, though they may be by unknown masters’.126 Likewise, sculptures at the Crystal Palace were regarded as copies with little detriment to their status as celebrated artworks; Apollo Belvedere and the Louvre Diana may have been copies, but they were allocated an entire vestibule each (albeit in the Roman, not Greek, Court). The displays and guidebooks at the Crystal Palace suggest that Roman copies were avidly discussed and displayed long before 123  Scharf (1854a): 51, 52, 59, 55, 43. See also ‘The Roman Courts at the Sydenham Palace’, Athenaeum (18 February 1854): 218. 124  Potts (1980b). 125  Perry (2005): 78. 126  Raoul-Rochette (1854): 5. See also Westmacott Jr (1864): 118, 181.

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Furtwängler’s methodology was inaugurated. With characteristic forthrightness, Palace guidebooks designate celebrated sculpture previously regarded to be Greek as ‘Roman copies’. The presence of these sculptures in the Greek Court, however, suggests that they were still deemed more Greek than Roman. Periodical articles stimulated by visits to the Fine Arts Courts at Sydenham brought the matter to an audience beyond scholarly circles. The AJ published a series of detailed examinations of the Palace’s courts in 1857, concluding with the bold statement that ‘with but a few grand exceptions, the most renowned productions of the sculptors of antiquity have been lost; and what now stand in the front rank as examples of the power of the chisel in Grecian hands, are themselves generally either reproductions or studies from the masterpieces of antiquity’.127 The Palace displays and guidebooks could be regarded as scrapbooks assembling contemporary archaeological quotations. They indicate that ‘archaeological’ debates were not restricted to museum staff, but extended to the public as a matter of interest. Professional archaeology was emerging and being defined at the time by such figures as Charles Newton. But questions about the status of sculpture were also put before the public. Furtwängler’s method depended on the idea that Roman collectors commissioned exact copies of the most famous works from classical Athens. He held that Roman collectors sought to own as complete and accurate an assemblage of the most famous works from classical Athens; not dissimilar from the cast collections on which nineteenthcentury German universities prided themselves.128 I do not wish to claim that the Crystal Palace itself had an impact on Furtwängler. However, the presence of such vast assemblages of casts of acknowledged copies might well have prepared the ground for the uptake of his ideas in Britain. It certainly enabled the comparisons necessary for his method; the Palace guidebook boasted in 1854 that the four different versions of Apollo Sauroctonos on show in the Roman Court enabled the visitor to compare the different copying techniques of sculptors at Rome (see also the catalogue, appendix 5).129 Sculpture on display does not just reflect archaeological knowledge. It can also shape scholarly concerns. 127  Charles Boutell, ‘A Teacher from Ancient and Early Art’, AJ (1 January 1857): 25–7. 128  Fullerton (2003): 105; Marvin (1989): 39. 129  Scharf (1854c): 48.



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Archaeological Exactitude? The Palace evidently engaged with contemporary archaeological debate in both its prominent exhibition of ‘Roman copies’, and provocative painted Parthenon frieze. It is difficult to say to what extent its displays directly contributed to contemporary archaeological knowledge. The frieze evidently stimulated additional detailed examination of paint on ancient sculpture, and the overt labelling of ‘Roman copies’ demonstrates how widely the relationship between Greek and Roman sculpture was discussed at mid-century. The prime position allocated in the Greek Court to the most famous sculpture from the great Roman collections demonstrates that the shift in taste supposedly precipitated by the arrival of the Elgin Marbles was far from unanimously accepted, even by the 1850s. Yet there was a difference in the status of the statuary from Rome. Their presence in the Greek Court had to be justified by identifying them as Roman copies of Greek works. Such privileging of Greek sculpture over Roman may have contributed to normalizing the notion of classical Greek exceptionalism.130 Yet for all the Palace’s engagement with developments in museums and European scholarship, and the aspirations of the guidebook authors, its actual presentation of archaeological knowledge was haphazard at best. All displays have to deal with practical exhibitionary dilemmas that sidetrack the most fervent of curatorial intentions. At the Palace, archaeology was not the only concern; the displays were also intended to be entertaining and attractive to a new audience unaccustomed to either being in a gallery or looking at ancient sculpture. The official guidebook sought to distinguish display at the Palace from that at museums. ‘To prevent the monotony that attaches to a mere museum arrangement, in which glass cases are ordinarily the most prominent features, the whole of the collected objects, whether of science, art or nature, were to be arranged in picturesque groupings, and harmony was to reign throughout.’131 Photographs (Figure 0.3), and the plan of the Greek Court (Appendix 2) demonstrate that symmetry was an important factor in the arrangement of sculpture. The practicalities of display, and desire for visually attractive arrangements, lent several major advantages to the older canon of sculpture from the Roman collections. It was well known—important given 130  See further Morris (1994): 8–32.

131  Phillips (1854): 16.

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the Palace’s aim to attract a mass audience. Although the Elgin Marbles had been in pride of place at the British Museum since 1817, sculptures from the Roman collections were still more likely to be known by the public. They were prominent fixtures in print media and shows and exhibitions, the major means of popular dissemination of knowledge, whereas the Elgin Marbles did not feature to the same extent.132 They were unlikely to appear in—for example—the pose plastique or as anatomical wax models because of their fragmentary physical state. The Crystal Palace strove to provide the possibility of comparing the contents of different collections as well as different styles of sculpture; the Roman sculptures carried celebrity and international clout—and were a means by which the Palace Company might assert their abilities to acquire a pan-European collection.133 The court architects sought to represent sculpture that was not already visible in London, with a few exceptions for what were identified as key pieces in the story of art. Further, the sculpture from Rome—and the Venus de Milo too— were free-standing works. The status of the Elgin Marbles, however, was the subject of considerable debate during the nineteenth century; were they elements of a larger architectural whole, or stand-alone works of sculpture? The discussion over how faithful the British Museum should be to their original conditions of display on the Parthenon resulted in total stagnation in its Elgin Room throughout the 1850s. A reconstructed pediment was suggested and wrangled over, but never appeared.134 At the Crystal Palace, the Elgin Marbles were exhibited as elements of an architectural whole; the frieze was the subject of an archaeological experiment and the pedimental sculpture displayed next to a scale model of the western façade of the Parthenon. But this meant that—in contrast with the sculpture from the Roman collections—they were not suited to the symmetrical, aesthetic arrangements preferred by the Palace directors for the main display area. Contemporary critics complained that the courts were rife with lost opportunities, lamenting the Palace’s departure from its archaeological, educational aims: ‘The inveterate enemy of the Crystal Palace courts, General Effect, has interposed; and in the Greek Court, as elsewhere, historical truth has yielded to the supposed requirements of picturesque arrangement.’135 132  Images of the older canon of sculpture from Rome dominated the Penny Magazine. Niobe, Diana, Venus de Medici, and Laocoon featured in ‘Crystal Palace Supplement’ (1854): 234. The Elgin Marbles were not mentioned. 133  Scharf (1854a): 93. 134  Jenkins (1995): 91–7.



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Yet such contemporary comments forget that archaeology was only one aspect of the Palace’s remit, and overlapped considerably with the importance of visually stimulating, enjoyable, entertaining exhibits.

C ONC LU SION When the Crystal Palace opened in 1854, classical sculpture was present in London in many different guises. It was the mainstay of the British Museum. It decorated lobbies, was dissected in anatomical museums, provided entertainment and education in tableaux vivants, and was offered as an inspiration to morality and forbearance in magazines. Classical civilizations were evoked at the panorama and in reconstructions of ruins, in firework displays, and novels. Yet many of these venues for mass entertainment also fostered an interest in archaeology and the history of classical sculpture. All of these existing modes of engaging with classical sculpture and architecture were available to new mass audiences, often identified as a signifier of modernity. Intersections between learning and leisure are identifiable across these entertainments. The Crystal Palace wedded the Regent’s Park Colosseum’s concern with effect, to the panorama’s desire for archaeological correctness. The displays of ancient architecture and topography at mid-century presented the ancient world in ruins, or, in the case of the pleasure garden Vesuvius displays, in the dramatic process of devastation. The Fine Arts Courts at Sydenham were a new departure from this mode of representing classical antiquity. Colourful, restored, and complete with an overwhelming attention to detail, they were more like the visually challenging paintings recently produced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, such as J. E. Millais’s Christ in the House of his Parents (1849–50) than the generalizing romantic landscapes conjured by the Regent’s Park Colosseum, panorama, or Vauxhall Gardens show. The presentation of the past at Sydenham was in this way definitively new and of the mid-century, and in the following chapter I examine the anxieties and celebrations that the Sydenham Palace’s modes of representing the past engendered in 1850s London.

135  ‘The Greek Court’, Crystal Palace Magazine of Art, Science and Literature, 1 (1859): 112; Morning Chronicle (23 June 1854), V&A1, I, 139.

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Matthew Digby Wyatt proudly traced the Palace’s prehistory to the mixture of entertainment and education at Alexandre du Sommerard’s Musée de Cluny in 1830s Paris. At the Musée de Cluny, historical objects were prioritized over texts, just as Wyatt and Jones intended at the Palace. Wyatt’s identification with du Sommerard connects the presentation of Greece and Rome at Sydenham with a widely acknowledged landmark in the relationship between archaeological exactness, popularization, and historical consciousness. In a 1978 article on the ‘poetics of the museum’, Stephen Bann identified the Musée de Cluny as the first truly immersive exhibit, presenting a living past for public consumption. The Crystal Palace directorate were evidently aware of the innovative qualities of their exhibits.136 The engagement with archaeology at the Crystal Palace has been ignored by scholars examining the history of museums, and in most twentieth-century accounts of the Palace that characterize it as a ‘playground’. This is partly due to a view of the history of museums dictated by the dominant museological product of the nineteenth century, the sort of display espoused in the British Museum.137 It seems unfair to judge the Crystal Palace by these somewhat different ambitions and standards. Ironically, when the Palace opened in 1854, contemporary display in the British Museum was not remarkably more ‘scientific’.138 The Palace was considered a national institution alongside the British Museum in the 1857 Parliamentary Select Committee debating the requirements for the National Gallery, and James Fergusson, then director of the Palace Company, was called in to testify along with art and archaeological establishment figures such as Charles Newton and John Ruskin.139 Several commentators saw the Crystal Palace as a corrective to what one letter described as the dijecta membra on show at the British Museum.140 At one point it was even suggested that the museum’s collections be housed in the Palace itself.141 Their paths are more closely connected than we might think. Both are fundamental to an understanding of the history of museums and archaeology in the mid-nineteenth century. 136  Wyatt (1854): 22; Bann (1978). 137  For criticisms of this teleological tendency, see Bann (1990): 3; Elsner and Cardinal (1994b): 4; Preziosi (2003) provides a broader discussion of the ways in which the museum has been naturalized into Western culture. 138  See Jenkins (1995): 91–7. 139  HC Paper (1857) no. 2261, 100–11. 140  ‘Letter to Editor’, Morning Post (20 July 1854), V&A1, I, 135. 141  ‘The People’s Academy’, The Architect (7 August 1869), V&A1, II, 61.

3 Reproducing Greece and Rome If it be true, as I imagine, and as few will be disposed to deny, that meditation upon the past is one of the most powerful agents in the intellectual education of the present generation, then it must be obvious that the actual inspection of a restoration of a Pompeian house cannot but instill into the mind sensations more profound than those which are called into being . . . even by the abstract investigations of archaeology.1

Giuseppe Abbate was King Ferdinand I’s official draughtsman for the excavations at Pompeii. Owen Jones and Matthew Digby Wyatt visited Naples in 1852 to acquire casts for the Palace, and enlisted him as a consultant and artistic director for Sydenham’s Pompeian Court. In an 1854 speech at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), excerpted above, Abbate asserts that viewing re-created antiquity can carry greater profundity than the study of its actual physical remains. He mentions the gains to archaeological knowledge that such reconstructions may contribute, but is more concerned with the role that the imagination has to play in the development of ideas about the past. His remarks are even more significant given his archaeological background and associations with the excavations at Pompeii; one guidebook described him as possessing ‘the authority of one risen from the dead’.2 From an archaeologist–artist in the thrall of the historical imagination, Abbate’s comments testify to a more general mid-nineteenthcentury expectation that history and the imagination could work alongside each other, and suggest that the Crystal Palace displays both   Wyatt (1854): 24.

1

  McDermott (1854): 130.

2

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played into and stimulated such ideas. In Chapter 2 I examined the Palace’s engagement with contemporary archaeological debate. Here I set out how it manifested what might be termed an antiquarian sense of the past, via immersive reconstructions of monuments and casts of classical sculpture. I argue that the Palace’s displays contribute to an understanding of historical sensibilities in the mid-nineteenth century that includes both sensual antiquarianism and exacting archaeological approaches; the two are not necessarily antithetical. Sydenham’s antiquarianism, however, was not the more familiar romantic variety, but a specifically mid-Victorian manifestation, its historical imaginings conjured and critiqued in terms of the commercial entertainment industries of 1850s London, and closely connected to new modes and technologies for visualizing the ancient world. Abbate’s speech suggests that the imagination can figure forth a particular variety of authenticity. The findings of ‘scientific’ archaeological evidence were essential to such an undertaking in order to create convincing reconstructions. But these were enhanced, perhaps even subsumed, by an atmosphere of antiquity combined with the visitor’s own play of thoughts. The new means of articulating the past at Sydenham provoked debate about the relationship between past and present, and what might be the most genuine means of offering a past to the public. Here I assess how visitors to the Crystal Palace came to terms with its reconstructive environments, examining first positive, and then negative, responses, before providing a more detailed analysis of Abbate’s Pompeian Court as the meeting ground for ideas about authenticity, archaeology, and entertainment. The second section deals with the varying discourses of authenticity surrounding the plaster casts that populated the Greek and Roman Courts. These objects, manufactured in the 1850s, stood in for centuries of sculptural activity. I examine the changing status of this collection of plaster reproductions, situating the Palace’s collection alongside developments in archaeological knowledge and ideas about authenticity during the Palace’s lifespan. The final section considers changing modes of imagining the ancient world that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century; mass tourism to sites, increasing artistic interest in ‘reconstructing’ Greece and Rome in the later nineteenth century, and new visual technologies of photography and film. How did the Crystal Palace inform these new modes of seeing the ancient world, and how might these new modes have redirected visitors’ expectations at Sydenham?



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Reconstructions and the idea of ‘living history’ were widely debated from the late 1980s onwards in a glut of publications analysing the ‘heritage industry’. Many historians have greeted the idea that the past might become a recreational space with a considerable degree of hostility.3 Heritage sites certainly flourished during the late twentieth century, but they were not entirely new. The reconstructions at the Crystal Palace, offered as an entertaining as well as educational attraction to all sections of society, in some ways foreshadowed such tourist destinations. Chapter 3 unpicks the debates about presenting the past to a mass audience stimulated by 1850s reconstructions, and sets out a longer genealogy for the heritage industry.

AU THENTIC I T Y AND R E C ONST RU C T ION S The Palace architects self-consciously offered their own particular variety of authenticity. Although well-versed in archaeological debate, they were also aware of their limitations. Jones noted that there were no appropriate ancient Greek buildings to copy as a frame for the Greek Court. He openly admitted the artificial nature of his court, composed of a newly proportioned composite of the Temple of Zeus at Nemea, the ceiling from the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, and a few invented sections. But at the same time, he championed its archaeological accuracy: ‘it has been our earnest endeavour so to apply the various features of Greek architecture, as we could imagine the Greeks would have done had they had the same purposes to serve, and the same binding lines to follow.’4 He quite happily admitted that he sought to ‘produce a result that might have existed’, rather than a precise replica.5 Jones’s aims to produce the past were epitomized in his assertion that the painted Parthenon frieze, ‘although not an absolute reproduction of the original, is as nearly as possible all Greek’.6 Contemporary commentators were also preoccupied with the perplexing vision of the past presented at Sydenham. William Rossetti, writer, critic, and founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, eloquently raised the complex issue of authenticity at the Palace: 3   Hewison (1987); Lowenthal (1998); Walsh (1992). Samuel (1994): 259–71 provides a critical analysis of this debate. 4 5 6   Jones (1854a): i.   Jones (1854a): 23.   Jones (1854a): 17.

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Other museums give the brick from Babylon; about which you must find out most things save that it is indubitably a brick, and that from Babylon it certainly did come. This gives not the real brick at all, but a panorama of Babylon, and a panorama more strikingly interesting and more authentic, and of a wider Babylon, than ever was before shown.7

Authenticity is a slippery term. How could something that is ‘not the real brick at all’ appear ‘more authentic’ than a genuine archaeological artefact? If ‘authentic’ is defined as being closest to an object’s original appearance, the restored and painted ‘all Greek’ Parthenon frieze in the Crystal Palace might well offer a more authentic view than the battered original in the British Museum. If, however, prime importance is attributed to the unique history of an object’s reception, or the touch of an ‘artist’ in an original work, then replicas have little to offer. In the context of the public museum or exhibition, the role of visitor experience in construing authenticity might also be important, shifting concerns to the viewers’ sense that a re-creation might be more ‘real’.8 Rossetti acknowledges the artificiality of the displays at Sydenham, but argues that the sense of the past provided there conjured a new sort of authenticity. His anxieties can be connected productively to what Roland Barthes describes in a 1968 essay as the ‘reality effect’, a ‘referential illusion’ produced by attempts to represent the ‘real’ through overwhelming detailed description. Barthes identifies the reality effect in literary realism as a product of modernity, along with the rise of the realist novel, the beginnings of ‘objective history’, and exhibitions of ancient objects. The Crystal Palace ventures are arguably part of this process, creating a new variety of the past for the present. Rossetti’s comments on the Palace suggest that nineteenth-century commentators were well aware of the peculiar visions of ‘reality’ conjured by these productions that were (as Jones put it) both ‘as nearly as possible all Greek’ and ‘a result that might have existed’.9 Poststructuralist and postmodernist critics have been particularly keen to analyse authenticity and replication. In Difference and   Rossetti (1867): 53.   See Phillips (1997): 30–40. Bilsel (2012) examines changing ideas about reconstruction, authenticity, and ancient monuments at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. 9   Barthes (1986). Isabelle Flour set me thinking about Barthes in relation to Sydenham in her unpublished conference paper, ‘Exhibiting Architecture in Three Dimensions: Architectural Cast Collections and National Pavilions at the World’s Fairs’, at Instruction, Amusement and Spectacle: Popular Shows and Exhibitions, 1800–1914, University of Exeter, 16–18 April 2009. 7 8



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Repetition (1968), Gilles Deleuze shifted focus from Plato’s ‘copy image’ created by artists, towards the simulacrum, an autonomous, artificial construct, not necessarily copying or belonging to any existing object in the world.10 Jean Baudrillard’s examination of the simulacrum focuses especially on the USA in the twentieth century, which appears as a place populated almost entirely by waxworks and tawdry replicas of European architectural achievements. Baudrillard and, elsewhere, Umberto Eco, have argued that such emulations have brought about a new state of being, the hyperreal, where imitations are so successful that they supersede the need for originals.11 While certain common threads arise across the ideas about authenticity in the nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, I am not seeking to establish the Crystal Palace as a sort of ur-Disneyland.12 I will return to these more recent commentators in the conclusion to this chapter, and suggest what mid-nineteenth-century debates on authenticity might add to contemporary, twenty-first-century understandings. Mid-nineteenth-century, industrializing Britain lent a particular quality to the debate over the authenticity of the ancient world at Sydenham. The vast array of products on show in the Crystal Palace’s parent building at the Great Exhibition had returned copyright law to the Parliamentary agenda, fully articulated in the 1852 Patent Act.13 Anxieties about mechanization’s capacity to produce exact replicas of objects were avidly discussed.14 The art world too was implicated. With a growing audience (and market), as well as improvements in reproductive technology, the nineteenth century has been dubbed the ‘golden age of faking’.15 Later Victorians were increasingly critical of forgeries.16 At mid-century, however, it appears that people were both fascinated and somewhat ambivalent towards them.17 Debates over the relationship between original and copy were certainly familiar in both the world of ancient sculpture (as discussed in Chapter 2) and art galleries. Critics who fretted over authenticity at the Palace may also have been familiar with the discussions surrounding an 1853 10   Deleuze (2004): 154–6. For an exploration of these ideas through Pygmalion’s ‘living’ sculpture, see Stoichita (2008). 11   Baudrillard (1994); Eco (1998): 3–57. On Baudrillard and the heritage industry, see Voase (2010). 12   On the differences between modernism and ‘nineteenth-century modernism’, see Armstrong (2008): 13–4. 13 14 15   Pettitt (2007).   Kriegel (2004).   Briefel (2006): 3. 16 17   Macleod (1996): 320.   Briefel (2006): 5–10; Thomas (2004): 125–55.

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Parliamentary Report on the scandal of restored paintings at the National Gallery.18 Like the Palace architects, Henry Merritt, the restorer at the hub of the controversy, envisaged himself bringing the past back to life through his endeavours.19

The Advantages of Inauthenticity The popular press, pamphleteers, and unofficial guidebooks wholeheartedly endorsed the Palace’s reconstructions. In patriotic tones they suggested that these new British creations, now readily accessible to all, superseded anything that had been possible in the ancient world. ‘The poorest peasant in the land is now heir to an intellectual wealth, that even a Roman emperor, with all Greece to plunder from, could scarcely have brought together in so small a compass. He could not have touched the Parthenon.’20 The emphatic ‘He could not have touched the Parthenon’ illustrates the excitement at a previously unthinkable intimacy with the ancient world. Stephen Bann has argued that such a combination of touch and sight was fundamental to the formation of historical consciousness in nineteenth-century Britain.21 The physical aspect of a visit to the Palace was widely remarked upon. Otherwise bored by the city’s entertainments, Francis Wey was enchanted by the possibility of personal interaction with antiquity and the newfound proximity to various pasts that the Palace offered, noting ‘Here bodies can travel as fast as the wind’.22 The emphasis on corporeal presence is also a common feature of writing on the new opportunities available at Sydenham. According to the selfstyled ‘cheap miscellany’ the Illustrated London Magazine, the Palace offered a ‘boon of a different kind’ from the usual evocation of the past in historical, literary, and artistic studies. Its environments were so stimulating to the imagination that they brought people from the past ‘bodily before us . . . We seem to step on to the very platform where the Roman transacted the business of daily life’, while Alphonse Esquiros suggested that the Palace allowed its visitors to live among the ancients.23 An engraving of the Pompeian Court in Phillips’s 1854 Guide enacts the idea of living antiquity. It depicts not the usual crowd 19   See Briefel (2006): 86–90.   Merritt (1879): 82; 133; 136. 21 22   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 50.   Bann (1989).   Wey (1935): 157–8. 23   Cockle (1853): 244; Esquiros (1867): 201. See also Crystal Palace (1854): 60. 18 20



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Figure 3.1 Engraving of the Pompeian Court, with a Roman visitor. S. Phillips, Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park (London, 1854): 113. Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

of top-hatted Victorian observers, but a togate man standing before its wall paintings (Figure 3.1). Its reconstructions encouraged flights of the imagination, enabling nineteenth-century visitors to move among Greeks and Romans. However, the Palace reconstructions were also proudly nineteenth century. They functioned as a demonstration of contemporary technological prowess as well as of knowledge of the ancient world. Guidebooks and press noted, with considerable satisfaction, that the archaeologically precise tessellated pavement of the Pompeian Court was produced by Minton’s famous pottery factory in Stoke-on-Trent, and that the bronze sculptures in the tablinum were electrotypes from the prominent Birmingham manufacturers Elkington and Co., a new 1840s technology, which used electricity to produce precise metallic replicas.24 The nineteenth-century viewer also benefitted from archaeological advances, which enabled them to see a (reconstructed) past in a manner denied even to writers from antiquity: ‘what Xenophon trod upon, but saw not, you see’ noted one essay.25 24   Phillips (1858): 90; ‘The Pompeian House of the Crystal Palace’, Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (25 March 1854): 103–4; ‘The Crystal Palace, Sydenham’, Morning Chronicle (24 April 1854); Crystal Palace (1867): 24. On electrotypes see Bilbey and Cribb (2007). 25   Crystal Palace (1854): 54.

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New optical technologies such as the panorama and stereoscope stimulated detailed philosophical discussions about the reality of the worlds that their visual effects produced.26 It was regularly asserted that their images were so convincing that they rendered foreign travel— and its attendant hardships—unnecessary.27 The opening pages of Scharf ’s Greek Court guide noted that the sights it contained had only previously been available through ‘laborious foreign travel’, and even used extracts from Murray’s Guide to Athens to explain its replica Parthenon; the same words could be used to describe a miniature replica in a London suburb as the actual monument in situ.28 Commentators fitted the Palace’s Fine Arts Courts into the same mould; architecture from all over Europe was now readily accessible, even to ‘the poorest in the land’, noted a letter to the Morning Post, ‘surely it is superfluous to think of going abroad’.29 Wey rejoiced in the ease and safety of visiting ancient sites at Sydenham, remarking that ‘The Parthenon, to save us the trouble of a climb has stepped down from the Acropolis to meet us . . . This is Pompeii, where we can visit an admirably decorated house without fear of a fatal interruption from Vesuvius’.30 The comment could be ironic, although this would depart from the general tone of his writings. If intended as a satire, it still suggests that this approach to the past was purported at the Palace. The past at Sydenham was cosily domestic, easily accessible, and far from perilous.31 The reduced size of the reproduced monuments at Sydenham is significant. Along with this homely vision of the past, Wey’s perception of speed and movement (bodies travelling ‘as fast as the wind’) might be profitably related to the skewed spatial and temporal relations that Susan Stewart discusses as a feature of the miniature, and which compromises its authenticity. Miniaturization can present the reduced object as a contained whole, observable, manipulable, and, as was certainly the case at Sydenham, safely domesticated.32

  Crary (1990): 62; 122; 132; Plunkett (2007).   Altick (1978): 181; ‘Stereoscopes; or, Travel made Easy’, Athenaeum (20 March 1858): 371. 28   Scharf (1854a): 7–8. 29   ‘Letter to the Editor. The Crystal Palace’, Morning Post (20 July 1854), V&A1, I, 135. See also ‘The Assyrian Court at the Sydenham Palace’, Reynolds’ Miscellany (6 May 1854): 232. 30   Wey (1935): 157. 31   On preferences for the overtly artificial past, see Lowenthal (1985): 306; 356. 32   Stewart (1993): 65–9. 26 27

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Wey’s description emphasizes the Palace’s magical, almost unreal qualities—not as a matter of concern, but of praise.33 In this ethereal fairyland of replicas it seemed anything could be conjured from the imagination; when the Sultan of Turkey visited in 1867, the Palace choir sang in Turkish so that he might imagine them to be his own subjects.34 Those who praised the Palace acknowledged the falseness of its reproduced antiquity, but found its inauthenticity to be advantageous for several reasons. It demonstrated British technological prowess was less daunting than the actual past, enabled wider access, and permitted physical immersion in antiquity, allowing free rein to the imagination.

Reconstructions and Deception Some visitors, like William Rossetti and the American author Nathan­ iel Hawthorne, admired the Palace’s educative potential, but were also alarmed by the attitude towards the past that such reproductions intimated: ‘it is not quite agreeable to see such very clever specimens of stage decoration; they are so very good that it gets to be past a joke, without becoming actually earnest.’35 The Palace courts certainly had a stagey quality, but the comparison also suggests that the vision of the ancient world presented there was artificial, even misleading, stranded somewhere uncomfortable between the ridiculous and the serious. Rossetti’s description of the Palace providing a ‘panorama’ of antiquity might lead to a similar conclusion. Panoramas were often deemed a little too authentic, and viewers regularly remarked on their unsettling ‘reality’.36 Harriet Martineau worried that the displays at Sydenham were so convincing that they shut out alternative, perhaps even more archaeologically correct, versions of the past.37 Commentators feared for the new audience confronted with a deceptive past that they were ill-equipped to evaluate. Critics also voiced fears that the Palace’s reconstructions confused the relationship between the present and the past, even damaging the status of the originals. Debate over the threat to authenticity caused by exhibiting objects estranged from their original location had arisen 34   Wey (1935): 159.   Crystal Palace Sale Catalogue (1911): 20.   Hawthorne (1997): 426. On Hawthorne, authenticity and the imagination see Briefel (2006): 84–5; 94. 36 37   Altick (1978): 188–91, Hyde (1988): 32–9.   Martineau (1854): 549. 33 35

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alongside the development of museums in northern Europe in the early nineteenth century.38 The concern at the Palace was not so much about destruction of the archaeological record, since its collection was composed of plaster casts. Critics instead worried about how placement in this modern environment might affect visitors’ historical imaginations. The Mechanics’ Magazine noted the absence of an ancient atmosphere to create the ‘elevation of feeling’ required for true appreciation. It devoted most of a general article on the Palace to a digression on the importance of a context of reverence, lamenting the impossibility that ‘the mind will be equally affected by the sight of the sphinx, whose “calm eternal eyes” are fixed, say upon a flower-pot, as by beholding it gazing, as it has gazed for centuries, over the solemn memorials of departed empires’.39 The Palace directors aimed to provide visitors with the experience of viewing monuments as close as possible to their original, pristine state.40 Yet these ‘new’ ancient monuments brought about a strange disjunction in the idea of the past. Rossetti remarked that: ‘the remotest antiquity of which we possess a trace, monuments stained and blurred with the ravage and decay of the centuries . . . are very inadequately represented by models reduced to the ordinary size, coloured like the rooms of a new clubhouse, only a good deal brighter.’41 Seeking to explain the popularity of ancient monuments in 1902, art historian Alois Riegl argued that they were admired due to their ‘age value’. Anyone could identify that something appeared old without specialist knowledge of art or history.42 Riegl’s argument could certainly be applied to the reconstructions of ancient monuments on show elsewhere in London. Despite also being nineteenth-century creations these, as discussed in Chapter 2, presented the ancient world in ruins. There was no decaying grandeur at the Crystal Palace, however; according to Rossetti it even smelt new, ‘of paint and putty’.43 The reconstructions at Sydenham annihilated the physical appearance of age, presenting fragile vestiges of the past in lurid colours. Rossetti viewed the Sydenham reproductions as inappropriate and even potentially destructive to the integrity of ancient sculpture and architecture.   See especially Quatremère de Quincy (1796), (1815).   ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Mechanics’ Magazine, 60 (1854): 486–7. 40   ‘The Crystal Palace’, Daily News (13 June 1854), V&A1, I, 122. 41 42 43   Rossetti (1867): 53.   Riegl (1982).   Rossetti (1867): 53. 38 39

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The Pompeian Court: Archaeology, Antiquarianism, and Authenticity Three related pairs of supposed opposites run throughout Part I: antiquarianism and archaeology, popular and elite, authentic and inauthentic. Leisure and learning, ‘amateur’ antiquarianism, and ‘professional’ archaeology intersected most markedly in the Pompeian Court. Routledge’s Guide described it as ‘among the happiest and most successful of the measures adopted to make the Crystal Palace the means of blending instruction with recreation’.44 Located in the midst of contemporary British life in the Palace’s industrial wing, and originally intended to house a teashop, the Pompeian Court reinforced longstanding associations between the towns smothered by Vesuvius in 79 ce and daily life. As Shelley Hales (2006) suggests, its location was a fitting testimony to, and served to further reinforce, the longstanding associations between Pompeii, spectacle, mass entertainment, and domesticity. The court was identified as the pre-eminent immersive environment at the Palace. The (unofficial) Crystal Palace Magazine of Art Science and Literature, for example, made a clear distinction between the reconstructed, miniaturized architectural features in the Roman Court and the ‘stereoscopic’ effect of its Pompeian counterpart.45 Many nineteenth-century writers struggled with the visual experience of the stereoscope, perplexed that the three dimensional images produced appeared to be more ‘real’ than the object actually photographed.46 The same went for the ‘stereoscopic’ Pompeian Court, where the visitor was entirely surrounded by the ancient world. All critics allowed that the reconstructed Pompeian Court was a nineteenth-century creation. Few acknowledged—despite the official guidebook’s detailed expositions—that it was entirely a product of nineteenth-century archaeological knowledge and engineering. A composite of architectural features from numerous surviving elements of the ancient city, it was a copy that had no original. Boasting its archaeological credentials, ‘We have already shown that every part has its prototype at Pompeii’, the official guidebook concludes that its ideal house made up of fragments could be part of the archaeological   McDermott (1854): 172.   ‘The Roman Court and Corridors’, Crystal Palace Magazine of Art, Science and Literature, 1 (1859): 121. 46   Plunkett (2007): 117; Armstrong (2008): 337–41. 44 45

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record: ‘The house, as we see it, is really a house such as the excavations might reveal.’47 The intricacies of such an argument were lost on many commentators, and the court is frequently described as a copy of the House of the Tragic Poet, the home of Lytton’s hero Glaucus in the Last Days of Pompeii.48 The court came to stand in for a real Pompeian house, its authenticity unchallenged. A written description on the reverse of an 1854 souvenir stereograph, for example, goes into considerable archaeological detail about Pompeian architectural style, building materials, and the history of the rediscovery and excavation of the town. It does not, however, mention that the image it reproduces is itself a pastiche.49 This is not an insignificant confusion but an indication of how the re-created, artificial past can take on its own life.50 It seems to vindicate Rossetti’s and Hawthorne’s anxieties about the potential consequences of such deceptive replicas. Some even deemed the Sydenham version superior to the ancient town itself: ‘we now have our Pompeii nearer to London than is the real Pompeii to the city of Naples . . . The excavated city itself does not now furnish anything so complete and perfect as the Pompeian house that has been erected here.’51 The notion that replicas damage the status and unique history of the originals that they represent seems fully confirmed by such a statement. The Crystal Palace displays always maintained that they were artificial replicas, for all their pretensions to archaeological correctness and a new sort of authenticity. Like the ugly grey cardboard surrounding the photographs on stereograph cards, testifying to the mechanism by which they functioned, there was never any attempt to conceal the illusion of putting ancient objects on show at Sydenham.52 As the Pompeian Court demonstrates, however, the illusion became a reality for many visitors. 47   Scharf (1854b): 65. See also ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Mechanics’ Magazine, 60 (1854): 486–7. 48   ‘Handbook to the Pompeian Court’, Punch (15 July 1854): 14; Crystal Palace: Illustrated Guide (1893), 16. Baedeker (1881): 295, claims that it had been ‘carefully copied, both in form and pictorial decoration, from a building excavated at Pompeii a few years ago’. 49   T. R. Williams, ‘The Pompeian Court’, Crystal Palace, Sydenham, no.5 (London Stereoscopic Company, 1854). For image and full text, see , accessed December 2012. See also Scharf (1854b): 104. 50   For another example, see Hales (2006): 108. On the life of the artificial past, see Lowenthal (1985): 309–18. 51   ‘Letter to the Editor’, Morning Post (20 July 1854), V&A1, I, 135. 52   See Crary (1990): 132.

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PL AST E R C AST S: ARC HAE OLO G Y AND AUT HE NT IC T Y, 1 8 5 4 –1 936 The Greek, Roman, and Pompeian Courts were copies with no original. But what about the status of their plaster-cast contents? Whether embraced for a postmodern kitsch artificiality, or shunned and sold from national collections at auction, the compromised authenticity of plaster casts is often the source of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury engagements with them.53 In this section, I set out specifically nineteenth-century responses to casts, replication, and authenticity. I examine what responses to the plaster fabric of the Palace collections might reveal about the wider issues of authenticity and archaeology at Sydenham. Was the authority of the past exhibited at the Palace compromised by the fact that the contents of the Greek and Roman Courts were plaster casts? The South Kensington Museum (opened in 1857, known as the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1899) serves as a point of comparison throughout. Its Architectural Cast Courts opened in 1873, and the later history of the Crystal Palace casts is intriguingly connected to its famous collections. Twentieth-century critics writing in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1936 or 1939) have been keen to conceptualize the inherent reproducibility of plaster casts as undermining the unique existence of one original.54 According to Benjamin, the reproduction of an object strips it of the ‘aura’ created during its life history. Reproduction brings things ‘closer’, and overcomes their uniqueness, removing objects from the realm of tradition. His argument is, however, extremely opaque, and this brief summary does little to demonstrate its complexity.55 Benjamin’s ‘technological reproducibility’ refers to film and photography, distinctly new media, which he associates with shifts in the nature of perception. The application of his argument to plaster casting, a process dating back to antiquity, should be undertaken with considerable caution.56 Yet Benjamin’s   e.g. Allington (1997); Malvern (2010).   Benjamin (2003). Elkins (2003): 94–102 refers to this phenomenon as ‘The Case of the Benjamin Footnote’. 55   On the complexity of Walter Benjamin’s aura, see Andrew Benjamin (1991): 143– 54; Snyder (1989). 56   On the Roman ‘copying industry’ see Landwehr (1985). For an analysis of plaster casting as a means of ‘mechanical reproduction’ in the light of Benjamin’s argument, see Hughes (1997). 53 54

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writings are a provocative place from which to ask questions about the status of plaster casts. The medium of sculpture itself is inherently reproducible, and copying and casting—in bronze as much as plaster—is integral to the production of sculpture. A finished marble ‘original’ is the result of at least two replicas; a plaster cast of the clay ‘original’, which is then either cast again into bronze, or copied via the process of ‘pointing’. The last two processes were rarely undertaken by the sculptor. Nineteenth-century sculptors would generally exhibit new works in plaster or clay, only transferring to expensive bronze or marble once they had secured a patron; ‘originals’ on show in the nineteenth century were often made from plaster.57 Further, by the mid-nineteenth century, as discussed in Chapter 2, it was increasingly acknowledged (including at the Crystal Palace) that many famous ‘original’ marble antique sculptures were multiples, Roman versions of lost Greek sculptures. This context of sculptural production complicates any claims about the authenticity (or not) of plaster—why single out this medium in particular, given the reproducibility of sculpture and plaster’s role in creating ‘originals’? The liminal terrain that casts occupy has been contested at every stage of their history.58 The established narrative charts a shift from casts regarded as objects of art in their own right to (from the 1870s onwards) explicitly educational instruments, displayed almost exclusively in university galleries to instruct scholars in archaeological chronologies. Where earlier in the century casts had been acceptable stand-ins for the genuine object, by the end they were deemed too inauthentic to have artistic merit.59 This shift is usually attributed to developments in archaeological knowledge. The Crystal Palace Company’s aspirations to use casts for both didactic archaeological purposes and visually enjoyable entertainment arguably situates its collection mid-way between these two poles.

Authentic Plaster Jones and Wyatt self-consciously embraced the opportunities for experimentation that their collection of replicas offered. The reconstructed, 57   Read (1982): 49–65; 27; Bilbey and Cribb (2007). Hughes and Ranfft (1997) examine the serial nature of sculpture as a medium. On multiplicity as a challenge to art history, see Krauss (1986). 58 59   Beard (2000).   Connor (1989).



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painted Parthenon frieze was the most famous of the Palace’s self-­ proclaimed ‘experiments’. Other multiple versions of the same sculpture included, by 1879, two versions of the Venus de Milo in the centre of the Greek Court. One was a cast taken before 1853, the other from 1871. During the Prussian invasion of Paris in 1870–1, the Venus was split into its original two marble blocks and hidden. In 1871, it was reassembled with the angle of the torso newly adjusted to what is now a canonical pose. It transpired that the Venus had been assembled ‘incorrectly’ on its initial arrival at the Louvre in 1821. In 1871, however, the statue redisplayed in Paris was not the ‘corrected’ version, but the more familiar 1821 Venus—Parisians did not see the ‘authentic’ version until 1883. The first modern members of the public to view the now canonical form of the Venus de Milo were visitors to the Sydenham Palace, where a cast had been on show at least four years prior to its unveiling in Paris. The 1879 guidebook to the Crystal Palace proudly noted that ‘the figure reclaimed, what seemed to be impossible, an additional beauty’.60 The Palace sought to offer its visitors as much stimulating material as possible; concerns about undermining the authenticity of one masterpiece were evidently not high on its architects’ agenda. The Palace guidebook descriptions and informed commentators frequently blur the distinction between the original and the cast. Casts are permitted to stand in for originals with minimal comments on their status as reproductions; ‘beauty of form and figures’ was noted with barely a mention of the sculpture’s status as a replica.61 Casts maintained the power of their originals to move Lady Eastlake to melancholic reflection at the Palace, as she lamented the ‘mournful sense of the perishable nature of all things’, not deeming it important that these objects were themselves new.62 The casts at Sydenham clearly had considerable impact on Nathaniel Hawthorne, filtering his first sight of bronze originals in Florence. He records in his ‘First Impressions of France and Italy’ (1857) that ‘Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus stands here, but it did not strike me so much as the cast of it in the Crystal Palace’. Ghiberti’s bronze Baptistery doors, ‘some perfect and admirable casts of which I had already seen at the Crystal Palace’, consequently merited only the briefest of glances.63 The Crystal Palace not 60   Shenton (1879): 14; Prettejohn (2006): 238. For a photograph of the two Venuses at Sydenham see Woburn (1910): 3. 61   ‘A Guide through the Palace’, ICPG (9 June 1854): 114–5. Only Scharf (1854a): 106, mentions the deficiencies of casts. 62 63   Eastlake (1855): 323.   Hawthorne (1871): 797–8.

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only obviated the need for travel, but its collection of reproductions (for Hawthorne at least) mediated the experience of travel and viewing originals in context. Hawthorne’s claim that plaster casts are more ‘perfect’ or ‘striking’ than the originals may well be a means of establishing himself as an iconoclast. Yet that Hawthorne was interested in making, or able to make this comparison between gleaming bronze original and plaster copy is testament to a particular mid-nineteenthcentury moment in the history of plaster casting, when plaster casts were increasingly available and explicitly presented for public viewing. It also suggests the importance of the Crystal Palace as a site for encountering sculpture in plaster, which certainly can stand in for—if not supersede—originals. The catalogue to the Greek Court remarked of the sculpture ‘Cupid bending his bow’ that ‘Many repetitions of this statue exist in various galleries . . . The numerous copies serve to indicate the high estimation of the original’.64 Casts reinforced the celebrity of one particular work, rather than undermining its existence as a masterpiece. Copying is acknowledged here as part of the production of artworks, not a cause for concern. The Palace’s attitude towards the display of multiples was in keeping with its close relationship to design reform, whose agenda and Sydenham connections I examine in detail in Chapter 4. Design reformers approached the reproduction of artworks as a direct means of transferring knowledge. An 1848 article in the design reform journal the Art Union, for example, described the increasing availability of printed copies and casts as ‘a great but silent revolution’, essential for the encouragement of good taste. The magazine envisions casting performing an analogous role to that of the printing press in facilitating public access to great works of literature, suggesting both the value of reproducing art objects for a wide audience, and the apparently unmediated communication of an artwork’s essential qualities that reproductive technologies offered. The artist and the artwork were not damaged but elevated by this process.65 As a point of comparison, the South Kensington Museum assembled a comprehensive collection of Greek and Roman casts, starting in 1864, but pursued in earnest in the 1880s. The author, barrister, and historian Walter Copland Perry, who instigated the collection, intended the classical casts to be a means of national archaeological instruction, although they were never displayed in an ‘evolutionary’   Scharf (1854a): 103.

64

  Taylor (1848).

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manner to instruct in histories of style.66 As at Sydenham, they became incorporated into the museum’s mission of improving public taste and design. The influence of a museum of casts would be felt ‘at Manchester, Paisley, Nottingham, and every other centre of industry’, according to one museum staff member in 1883.67 As late as 1898, classical casts were described as ‘the designer and artworkman’s classics’ by the superintendent of the South Kensington art collections.68 This collection—along with the Greek and Roman Courts at Sydenham— suggests an alternative narrative to the usual one told of plaster casts from the 1870s onwards. They continued to be exhibited for decorative, design, and artistic as much as archaeological purposes. Their inauthenticity was not at issue.

Inauthentic Plaster Inauthenticity and plaster only emerged as problems when related to a broader idea of an industrial society opposed to ‘culture’ (the subject of Chapter 4), and the mass audience that both Sydenham and later the South Kensington Museum attracted. The French critic Hippolyte Taine visited the Crystal Palace in 1862, and singled out the plaster fabric of the sculptures at Sydenham as symptomatic of the Palace’s failings. He associates the casts with the industrial society that had both made the Palace possible, and produced a modern London where ‘any classical form or idea is against the grain’.69 The Crystal Palace symbolized modern Britain to Taine. Drearily machine-bidden, it represented a society incapable of creating original works, instead churning out reproductions of the best of antiquity, in a vain attempt to refine its own dismal produce and cultural shortcomings. Plaster was, at least according to Taine, associated with superficiality and industrialism.70 The association between the Palace’s new audience, plaster, and a lack of authenticity was brought to the fore by the painted restoration of the Parthenon frieze. Lady Eastlake was one among many to opine that polychromy was a crudely populist and ill-advised attempt to please the ‘ignorant’; ‘an element which may be familiar to the sailor in his figure-head, to the mechanic in his tea-garden, and to the child of five years old in the picture-book he has polychromed for himself, 67   Bilbey and Trusted (2010) : 471–5.   Robinson (1883): 70. 69 70   Robinson (1898): 974.   Taine (1995): 9.   Taine (1995): 189.

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but which is simply a puzzle to the ignorant and a torture to the enlightened.’71 Painted sculpture was already associated with non-elite audiences; one commentator opined that if the Elgin Marbles had ever been painted in antiquity it could only have been at the behest of a ‘vulgarised mobocracy’.72 ‘Lifelike’ devotional figurines in churches are one example particularly singled out by nineteenth-century critics; in the British context these were particularly abhorrent since they were also associated with Catholicism.73 Painted sculpture was perceived as superficially naturalistic, and as such deemed attractive to those without an art historical education.74 Even the materials that supposedly represented the most glorious ancient art at Sydenham were vulgar; ‘common plaster of Paris has been soaked with common house paint’.75 The Art Journal noted the ‘gaudy’ ‘overdecorated’ courts, and lambasted the ‘bedaubed’ frieze’, ‘which has lowered the finest work in the world to the level of a print “sold at a penny plain and two pence coloured”’.76 Richard Westmacott Jr branded the painted horsemen on the frieze at Sydenham ‘tawdry toys’; Herman Melville deemed the venue a ‘vast toy. No substance’, appropriate for an audience who were (as discussed in Chapter 1) often described as infantile.77 For these critics, the attempts to please a poorly educated, vulgar audience by painting casts transformed great works of the past into disposable, cheap, childlike commodities. As well as being painted, the cast frieze at Sydenham was complete and restored. This too opened the Palace to charges of sacrificing authenticity by pandering to public taste. Canova’s refusal to restore the Elgin Marbles in 1815 has often been seen to epitomize a new approach, where antiquities in their ‘authentic’, fragmentary state were preferred to those restored by contemporary sculptors.78 However, publications aimed at ameliorating public taste as well as the cheaper guidebooks to the British Museum note that the Marbles had failed to appeal to the populace because of their fragmentary state.79   Eastlake (1855): 311. See also Westmacott Jr (1855): 39–40. 73   Eagles (1857): 275.   Yarrington (1996). 74 75   For other examples see (Blühm 1996b): 42.   Eastlake (1855): 317. 76   ‘The “Future” of the Crystal Palace’, AJ (1 September 1854): 280. 77   Westmacott Jr 1855: 35; Eastlake (1855): 311; Leyda (1969): 576. 78   Potts (1998) . On the complexities of restoration in the late eighteenth century, see Coltman (2009): 84–116. 79   Fletcher (1850): 42; Mason (1847): 15; ‘The British Museum, No. 7’ Penny Magazine (3 November 1832): 305. 71 72

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Anxieties about casting, inauthenticity, and mass audiences were reignited in 1873 when the Architectural Cast Courts opened at South Kensington. A Saturday Review article from 1879 described the casts as ‘ghastly unrealities, visible but intangible, bearing the semblance but not the substance of old and valued friends’. Casts were dead, artificial, nightmarish, artificial ‘sham antiquities’.80 They were, the review conceded, useful for artistic training, but little else; casts could reproduce form, but in terms of materiality, were inherently inauthentic. This is only one essay of many written on the subject of the courts at South Kensington. Most focus more on lack of space than inauthenticity.81 But it is particularly noteworthy for its vehemence, and also its conclusion, which reveals a set of fears about the new audiences for art opened up by casting: On returning to England from a long tour on the Continent, where we have given special study to architecture, statuary, and woodwork, after suffering Roman fever and the loss of much of our luggage, after being wearied, robbed, and bug-bitten, it is disheartening to find that the model working-man can come from the City by the Underground Railway and see in one morning exact models of many of the works of art which we saw at the cost of so much labour, time, and money . . . we look with ungracious eyes at the unsophisticated arrival by the Underground comfortably glancing over in a few hours exact imitations of objects which it took us months to see.82

The ready access granted to the ‘unsophisticated’ ‘working-man’, able to confront casts of artworks not after months of arduous travel, but on the new Underground Railway, seems to have devalued the authenticity of elite interactions with artworks. The hardships of travel, and the time and money expended on seeing sculpture abroad, seem to have constituted ‘authentic viewing’, rather than the originality of the object itself. The ‘working-man’ need not suffer to examine artworks—not that, in this account, he takes much time to scrutinize them; he merely ‘glances’, repeating the mode of evaluating and condemning non-elite visitors that I analysed in 1850s accounts of Palace visitors in Chapter 1. In public display contexts between the 1850s and 1880s, the authenticity of the casts was not so much the problem. It is more often the   ‘Ghosts at South Kensington’, Saturday Review (29 March 1879): 391.   e.g. Robinson (1883); ‘The South Kensington Museum’, Academy (24 November 1888): 341. 82   ‘Ghosts at South Kensington’, Saturday Review (29 March 1879): 392. 80 81

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viewer whose experiences are deemed inauthentic, than the plaster object itself. In fact, the material object rather falls by the wayside; in most of these descriptions the courts in general are referred to, with individual objects rarely singled out.

The Sydenham Casts in the Twentieth Century In the late 1870s, artists, museum directors, and archaeologists began calling for the foundation of a national collection of plaster casts. Objections to this new plan pointed out that ‘a noble, if not an unrivalled, collection of casts now awaits the scholar at Sydenham . . . of the first value and beauty . . . all that can be done in plaster to represent Grecian Art has been done by the company in question’.83 Sydenham had not, then, entirely fallen by the wayside. Royal Academician Edward Poynter similarly acknowledged its collection as ‘very complete’. For Poynter, and the museum directors and commentators that followed him in the twentieth century, the problems with the Palace lay elsewhere. It had taken inadequate care of the casts, and their organization was insufficiently ‘scientific’, demonstrating no ‘definite and consistent idea of the history of art and the evolution of one style from another’. Instead, they were ‘scattered over the building for decorative purposes’.84 In the 1850s, the Palace sculpture courts had been considered the most ‘scientific’ in London; by the 1880s the British Museum had chronological displays and made the Palace seem a disorganized mess. Further, ‘it is obvious that the place is not very well adapted for purposes of study’.85 Suggestions that the South Kensington Museum might purchase the Crystal Palace cast collection were first voiced in 1882, and continued to be debated until 1928. In all of these discussions, the Palace’s association with what a newspaper article of 1910 called ‘swarms of children and Bank Holiday people’ compromise the use of the casts. By the twentieth century the casts were presented as of purely archaeological and art educational merit, not as objects for public amusement as in the 1850s.86 The problem lay not with the authenticity of the casts, but their inauthentic audience. 83   ‘Proposed Instruction to be Given to Public Schools on Greek and Roman Art’, AJ (1 November 1878): 216. 84   Memo from Edward Poynter to the Vice President of the Committee of Council on Education, 28 June 1879, V&A2. 85   Letter from W. C. Perry to E. J. Poynter, 18 April 1881, V&A2. 86   Letter to the Editor of The Daily Telegraph from ‘Antiquarian’, 25 August 1910, V&A3.

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By 1911, display conditions at Sydenham had apparently changed for the worse; ‘Until recently’, the London Art Student wishing to study classical sculpture ‘would have been able to find considerable supplementary material at the Crystal Palace, but the Crystal Palace has lately fallen upon evil days, and the recent history of the fine collection of casts there is somewhat obscure’.87 This does suggest that the Palace had at least once been considered a useful destination for students wishing to study sculpture. But by the 1910s it seems that many of the plaster casts had been moved beneath the floorboards so that the courts could house other displays (a poultry show and the Festival of Empire are mentioned). The precise details are unclear, but a state of ‘general confusion and displacement of objects’ was recorded by visitors from the South Kensington board investigating the casts in 1911, 1912, and 1913.88 The Fine Arts Courts were restored in 1923, however, with the full array of casts on show, and a 1928 letter to the Society of Antiquaries from the V&A director Eric Maclagan notes that the Crystal Palace casts were increasingly better cared for.89 A shift in uses of casts can be detected across this period, but it is far from the familiar story of casts being ousted from public collections in the early twentieth century. Unlike the cast collections at (for example), Cambridge, the British Museum, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Crystal Palace casts were never exhibited alongside originals.90 But the preservation and restoration of the Crystal ­Palace collection in 1923 is surely significant—as were the continued ­(although never fulfilled) calls for a National Museum of Casts well into the 1930s.91 In 1915 the proposed closure of the plaster casting firm D. Brucciani and Co. (founded 1837) for example, was presented by various luminaries of the art and archaeological establishment as ‘a very serious loss to the nation’, while the headline of an Observer article on the cast company’s demise deemed ‘National education in   Cecil Smith, Memorandum on Casts, 30 January 1919, V&A4.   Minute Paper: 4785M, 22 September 1911; Letter from George Starr, General Manager of the Crystal Palace, 13 November 1912; Minute Paper: 346M, 21 January 1913, V&A3. 89   Letter to H. S. Kingsford, Society of Antiquaries, from Eric Maclagan, 28 October 1928, V&A3. See also ‘The Crystal Palace – a Bright Outlook, Restoration of the Art Side’, The Times (16 January 1936). 90   For a challenge to this narrative and discussion of these case studies, see Beard (1993): 20–1. 91   ‘A National Cast Museum. Improvements at the Crystal Palace’, The Times (29 January 1930). 87 88

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Peril’.92 Casts took on a new, imperial role in the early twentieth century, significant ‘not only at home but in the colonies’. The importance of circulating artworks throughout the British Empire via casts is stressed throughout the Brucciani correspondence.93 In all these instances, casts are part of an educative, colonizing armoury; their authenticity is not a matter of interest.

Plaster Casts in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction There are certainly convergences between the ideas stimulated by the juxtaposition of ancient and modern at the Crystal Palace, and Walter Benjamin’s writings on modern technologies. For Benjamin, the decay of the aura was socially and politically significant, not an abstract aesthetic process. Its decline was a result of the increase in the ‘technological reproducibility’ of artworks, and this a consequence of the increasing role of the masses in contemporary life.94 Similarly, at the Crystal Palace, sculpture traditionally associated with power and prestige was replicated, placed among objects from manufacture, and set up principally for mass entertainment and education. The celebratory tones of the Crystal Palace guidebooks, and the ­design-reforming arguments of the Art Union, however, suggest further caution in applying Benjamin’s argument that the reproduction of an object diminishes its aura. The super-imposition of Benjamin’s distinctly 1930s anxieties, written in response to mass art under Fascism, ought at least to be questioned before muting nineteenth-century ideas about replication. Plaster casts were arguably at their heyday in the mid-nineteenth century, their status as educative, moralizing, and design-reforming objects far outweighing the fact that they were ‘inauthentic’. A focus on Benjamin’s ideas about reproduction can cause us to gloss over the earlier delight in plaster. Even critics of the inauthenticity of the casts at Sydenham were not concerned—as Benjamin was—about how replication might affect the status of the original work. Concerns about the inauthenticity of plaster at Sydenham were more to do with its supposedly inauthentic new audience. 92   Minute Paper: 1915/3281, 14 October 1915, V&A4; S. Colvin, ‘National Education in Peril’, Observer (13 April 1919). 93   Letter from Cecil Smith to H. H. Asquith, December 1915, V&A4. 94   Benjamin (2003): 252, 254, 255, 256–7, 264. On Walter Benjamin’s ambivalence about the decay of the aura, see Andrew Benjamin (1991): 146.



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Anxieties about mass audiences and a lack of authenticity have parallels in a diverse body of twentieth-century comment, encompassing the Frankfurt school, the heritage debate in the 1980s, research in leisure and tourism, and 1990s writing on consumer society.95 These have associated popular entertainment with commodification, and identify commodification with a loss of authenticity.96 The Crystal Palace’s attempt to combine mass entertainment with education would not fare well under such an analysis. The commodification at stake in these writings is generally that expounded upon by Karl Marx in the first volume of Capital (1867). At the Palace, commentators such as Eastlake and Westmacott Jr wrote more in an older tradition of fears about luxury and good taste than capitalist alienation.97 The fact that plaster casts in particular were at the heart of their anxieties about mass audiences and inauthenticity gives an added significance to this medium. Not just a tool for teaching or narrating art history, casts were part of a broader cultural understanding of mass interaction with art and its relation to authenticity. Their status as copies heightened and developed the notion that their viewers were similarly inauthentic.

N EW VISIONS OF T HE ANC I E NT WORL D, 1854– 1936 By 1911, the selection of casts at Sydenham (one of the few aspects Poynter and others had praised) looked increasingly outdated—and even less authentically ‘Greek’ in the light of archaeological developments and shifts in taste; ‘some of it is artistically valueless, as one would expect, seeing the date at which it was formed; when Roman copies of Hellenistic work were regarded with as much veneration as the Parthenon Sculptures.’98 The Palace collection never expanded to include the new periods and styles of sculpture that were excavated in the later nineteenth century at, for example, Olympia (1875–81), 95   Adorno (1991). For heritage debates, see n. 3, this chapter. A useful survey of authenticity and tourism is provided in Urry (2011). The readings in Lee (2000) provide ample further examples. For a critical analysis and further bibliography, see Trentmann (2004). On the negotiability of authenticity, see Cohen (1988). 96 97   Miller (1995b): 25–7.   Lubbock (1995): 87–137. 98   ‘The Future of the Crystal Palace’, The Times (30 October 1911); W. A. Propert, ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Times (24 October 1911); E. A. Gardner, ‘A National Cast Museum’, The Times (30 January 1930).

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the Athenian Acropolis (1885–91), and Pergamon (1878–86), which brought to Western Europe’s attention sculpture from the sixth and early-fifth centuries bce, and from fourth-century bce Hellenistic kingdoms. After Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Troy and Mycenae in the 1870s, and Arthur Evans’s at Knossos in the first decade of the twentieth century, the archaeology of ‘Greece’ predated the earliest Greek sculpture displayed at Sydenham, the Aegina Marbles, by a good two thousand years. These finds were discussed at length in popular publications such as the ILN, and widely exhibited; a selection of Schliemann’s Mycenaean and Trojan finds, for example, were displayed at the South Kensington Museum from 1877–80.99 The Crystal Palace’s selection of classical casts would have looked desperately old fashioned to those visitors who paid attention to such developments. Other archaeological and architectural developments may have rendered the reconstructions at the Palace a little less strange than they appeared to William Rossetti in the 1850s. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the widespread restoration of medieval churches, and, with William Morris’s 1877 founding of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Monuments, considerable debate as to the ethics and correct modes of restoration and preservation.100 Restorations of Pompeian houses and shops on site began in earnest under the direction of Vittorio Spinazzola (1911–23), while Arthur Evans constructed a Minoan Palace in reinforced concrete at Knossos between 1905 and 1930.101 On-site reconstructions are of course not necessarily any more authentic than those at Sydenham, but their location, and their connections with academic archaeology, lent them authority. By the 1920s, for visitors who had travelled to Pompeii or Knossos, or at least seen photographs of them, or walked into their local restored medieval church, the re-creations at Sydenham may well have seemed quite ordinary.

Rival Reproductions Reconstructions of antiquity were rife in the art world of the 1860s, and Sydenham was not the only place to display a brightly painted north 99   For a survey of these developments, and examination of their public dissemination, see Barber (1990). On early twentieth-century taste for archaic sculpture see Prettejohn (2012): 190–203. On the ILN, see Bacon (1976). For analysis of Schliemann’s South Kensington exhibition, see Baker (2013): ch. 3. 100   Waithe (2006): 106–15. 101   Brilliant (1979): 220–9; Gere (2009): 91–5; 106–11.

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frieze of the Parthenon. Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1868 painting Phidias and the Frieze of the Parthenon depicts what was widely described as a fifth-century ‘private view’ of the Parthenon frieze.102 High up on a scaffold on the Parthenon, Phidias shows a host of Athenian luminaries his newly completed, freshly painted blue, reddish-brown, grey, and white frieze. The Dutch-born artist is generally assumed to have visited the Palace on his first trip to London in 1862. The painting was purchased before it could be shown at the 1868 Royal Academy exhibition, and was first exhibited to the public in 1877, and again in 1882. Reviews suggest that by this time polychromy was widely accepted—or at least less contentious; criticism focuses on the darkness of the colour palette, rather than dismissing painted sculpture altogether.103 In the early twentieth century, the painting was used to dismiss Alma-Tadema for a lack of archaeological knowledge and for making concessions to tawdry consumer culture; ‘His Phidias has come straight from Daly’s Theatre with a Parthenon Frieze like a bad poster; and yet Alma-Tadema is credited with being an accurate archaeologist!’104 In nineteenth-century evaluations, however, and indeed today, it is presented as an example of his engagement with contemporary archaeological debate.105 The parallels with comments on Jones’s painted frieze at Sydenham are clear. Identifying the many uses to which the Crystal Palace courts were put in nineteenth-century painting is a separate project; here I am interested in tracing other immersive environments that developed in the later nineteenth century to suggest the changing visual horizons of later-century Palace visitors. From the mid-1860s onwards, British academic painters such as Edward Poynter, Frederic Leighton, William Blake Richmond, Edward Armitage, and, pre-eminently, Alma-Tadema, were keenly concerned with reconstructing Greek and Roman architectural settings.106 Their paintings formed the backbone of municipal art galleries in later Victorian Britain, and were widely disseminated through prints.107 From the 1880s, Leighton and  ‘Phidias’, Portfolio, 21 (January 1890): 89.   See ‘Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition’, Athenaeum (5 May 1877): 583–4; ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, Saturday Review (16 December 1882): 792–3; ‘The Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition’, Athenaeum (9 December 1882): 778–80. 104   Collins Baker (1913): 78. 105   Barrow (2001): 45; Prettejohn (2009). 106   Liversidge and Edwards (1996); Barringer and Prettejohn (1999) . 107   Woodson-Boulton (2012); Israëls and Scheffer (2007). 102 103

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Alma-Tadema were also involved in creating archaeological theatrical set designs for productions set in Greece and Rome.108 These images are comparable to the Crystal Palace courts in many ways, not least historiographically. As with the Palace, it is only since the late 1990s that art historians have begun to take them seriously as engagements with the past, rather than dismissing them as mere charming images of Victorians in togas.109 Roger Fry’s 1913 diatribe against Alma-Tadema chimes significantly with the critiques of the Palace examined in this chapter. Fry presents Alma-Tadema’s work as a purely commercial art form which ‘finds its chief support among the half-educated members of the lower middle-class’, and alleges that his work is lacking in archaeological substance or research—a totally unfounded claim.110 Both Palace and Alma-Tadema attracted a vulgar commercial audience; for many early twentieth-century critics this removed any legitimacy from their reproductions of Greece and Rome. Victorian critics celebrated Alma-Tadema’s combination of archaeological details with emotion and atmosphere—the same qualities that won the Sydenham Palace praise.111 Just as the Palace courts were widely held to bring the people of the past ‘bodily before us’, AlmaTadema sought ‘to express in my pictures that the old Romans were human flesh and blood, like ourselves’.112 Contemporary Victorian art reviewers explicitly connected Alma-Tadema’s restorations to those at the Palace. Its courts became an instant and obvious point of comparison for other reconstructions in late nineteenth-century culture.113 Immersive classical paintings were less of a challenge to the Palace displays in the later century, than a two-dimensional continuation and dissemination of the reconstructed environments at Sydenham. As Shelley Hales and Nic Earle have pointed out, such comparative responses exemplify how difficult it is to separate the Palace courts from other nineteenth-century reconstructions.114 Later, American epic film directors Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith famously used 109   Barrow (2010); Liversidge (2012) .   Prettejohn (2002).   Fry (1913): 666–7. 111   ‘The Works of Laurence Alma-Tadema, RA’, AJ (1 March 1883): 64. 112   Cockle (1853): 244; Dolman (1899): 607. 113   ‘Contemporary Art – Poetic and Positive: Rossetti and Tadema – Linnell and Lawson’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (March 1883): 403; ‘Exhibition of the French and Flemish Schools’, Gentleman’s Magazine (June 1866): 884. 114   Hales and Earle (forthcoming). 108 110



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Alma-Tadema’s Rome in set designs.115 In a complex layering of receptions and interpretations of antiquity, the scene depicting ‘Caesar’s triumphal entry into Rome’ in DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934) is based on Alma-Tadema’s 1894 Spring, itself a bricolage of Roman and Pompeian objects—like the Pompeian Court.116 Reformulations of the past can gain their own reality and a certain authenticity once incorporated into other new versions of antiquity. Classical and biblical antiquity had a vital role to play in the early decades of another visual technology that emerged during the Palace’s life: cinematic film. The ‘birth’ of public cinema is usually traced to the Lumière brothers’ first performance in Paris on 28 December 1895. By 1897 touring entrepreneurs took film around Britain, showing it in temporary settings such as fairgrounds and music halls; permanent cinemas did not really take off until around 1912 in Britain.117 The year 1908 saw the release of the first major feature film set in antiquity, Arturo Ambrosio’s Gli Ultimi Giorni di Pompeii (The Last Days of Pompeii). A glut of Italian films set in Roman antiquity followed, characterized by vast sets, large crowd scenes, and an obsession with ‘authentic’ archaeological detail.118 These were widely distributed and were popular in Britain; The Times branded Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 Cabiria, set around the Mediterranean during the Second Punic War, ‘an instant success’ ‘received with much applause by large audiences’. It did also note the ‘kaleidoscope of action’ was ‘sometimes a little confusing’; a sense of overwhelming visual stimulation almost identical to that reported on the opening of the Crystal Palace.119 Visitors to the Palace in the early twentieth century, then, may well have encountered Sydenham’s reconstructions with a vision of Rome derived from the vast ‘kaleidoscopic’ film sets of Italian—and later American—silent cinema. The Palace’s classical courts—even the Pompeian Court—would surely have appeared diminutive, quaint, and increasingly old fashioned in comparison with the monstrously large sets thronging with people that typify these productions. It is no coincidence that the reportedly most popular Fine Arts Court in the twentieth century was the Egyptian Court, populated by a forest 115   Swanson (1977): 43. On the relationship between cinema and wider visual culture in this period, see Nead (2007). 116   Lippincott (1990): 88–90, 40–71. 117   For a concise history of cinema from 1895–1914, see Popple and Kember (2004). 118   Michelakis and Wyke (2013). 119   ‘Progress of the Cinema. Two Notable Films’, The Times (28 September 1915).

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of columns and more obviously resembling the obsession with largescale ‘exotic’ scenes on a film set than any other court.120 But, as cinema historians acknowledge, film was not quite such a decisive rupture with what had gone before.121 The Palace courts (either directly or via late nineteenth-century classical painting) may well have familiarized early filmgoers with the immersive sets of epic film. Lynda Nead has discussed a muscular, participatory viewingin-motion as symptomatic of vision around 1900, developed through cinematic film, on fairground rides, in physiological and art historical writing, magic lantern shows, cars, and more.122 The Palace was surely part of this new mode of viewing. Its courts were presented as environments for visitors to physically explore, and, in its gardens from 1904, Hiram Maxim’s ride, the ‘Captive Flying Machine’ propelled visitors through the air at speed.123 In an appropriately circular manner, a cinema was opened inside the Crystal Palace in late 1920.124 One early twentieth-century oral history recalls piano-accompanied screenings of The Ten Commandments (DeMille, 1923) and Ben Hur (MGM, 1926), immersive and archaeological undertakings that must surely have resonated with the Palace’s surroundings. After screenings, visitors would exit the Palace through the courts, South London’s equivalent of the Hollywood Egypt and Rome, with, apparently, the rather uncanny feeling that the Palace’s statuary was looking back at them.125 The Crystal Palace is, perhaps, the paradigmatic ‘haunted gallery’, accommodating older and contemporary modes of seeing, and incorporating motion into apparently static objects.

Tourist and Traveller The Palace, along with other contemporary means of reproducing art and architecture like the stereoscope and panorama, was regularly described as removing the necessity for dangerous foreign travel. It was praised as a practical replacement for older, aristocratic touring, ‘the 120   The sensational excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in 1922 doubtless contributed to its ongoing popularity, and is noted in Buckland (n.d. [c.1924]): 9. 121   For further bibliography and an account situating early cinema in the context of earlier entertainments, see Kember (2009). 122   Nead (2007): 9–43. 123   On Hiram Maxim (and an illustration), see Piggott (2004): 144–5. 124   The Times (29 December 1920). 125   Scott et al. (1990): 37; on Pygmalionism around 1900, see Nead (2007): 45–104.

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artisan who will pay hereafter his shilling and pace these splendid galleries, will see more of the fine arts of Europe than any nobleman who goes “the grand tour” at the cost of thousands’.126 Yet during the Palace’s lifespan, developments in transportation and travel infrastructures meant that the Roman and (to a lesser extent) Greek sites represented at the Palace were in fact ever more accessible to middle-class men and women. An expanding railway and steam-ship network, as well as the 1871 opening of the tunnel connecting Switzerland and Italy, made a physical visit to Rome a real possibility for middle-class Victorians.127 Murray’s and Baedeker’s first travel guidebooks were published in 1836 and 1842 respectively, providing a catalogue of recommended sights, as well as practical advice; by 1858, Murray’s guides extended to Greece, Pompeii, and Rome.128 Travel, especially around non-unified destinations like Italy, required considerable organizational skill and extensive leisure time. Thomas Cook’s organized tours removed any need for planning. His first outing was a train chartered from Leicester to Loughborough for a temperance rally in 1841; by the mid-1850s Cook was conducting groups of 500 people on circular tours in the Netherlands, Prussia, and France, and by the 1870s to America, Egypt, and Palestine.129 Cook ran his first trip to Italy in 1864, with an option of a day trip to Pompeii and Vesuvius. Pompeii had of course long been visited, but larger-scale tourism was made difficult by the requirement for a permit from the Royal Court at Naples. After 1863, this was repealed and replaced by an entry fee under Giuseppe Fiorelli’s superintendence of the excavations, opening the site to a wider audience, local as well as international.130 Participants in Cook’s European tours included ushers and governesses, London merchants and ‘practical people from the provinces’.131 Cook’s Tours were particularly singled out for enabling women to travel.132 By 1886, it is estimated that there were between eight and ten thousand British visitors to Rome per year; twice as many as in the 1830s, but negligible in comparison with the reported thirty-four million visitors who visited the Palace in its first thirty years.133 Even in the early twentieth century, travel to the Mediterranean was still 127   Wynter (1853): 612.   Pemble (1987): 15–38. 129 130   Pemble (1987): 70–2.   Brandon (1991).   Foss (2007): 34. 131   Yates, ‘My Excursion Agent’, All the Year Round (7 May 1864), cited in Buzard (1993): 59. 132 133   Buzard (1993): 59.   Pemble (1987): 33; Shenton (1879): 2. 126 128

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limited to select portions of the middle class. But how might the Crystal Palace have appeared to those for whom Cook’s Tours had opened up the European sights and sites represented in its courts? And how did the Palace prepare visitors for what they saw in Europe? There are numerous comments discussing the Crystal Palace courts in relation to visits to Pompeii and Rome; none that I have found reference experiences in Greece. This remained a more elite, and apparently challenging destination; even guidebooks characterized it as riddled with banditry and discomforts.134 As such, I focus here on the Palace in relation to the expansion of tourism to Italy. Travel articles on Pompeii in the periodical press habitually call upon the Pompeian Court at Sydenham as a common point of reference; ‘Everyone knows what a Pompeian house is like. You may see one at the Crystal Palace, and this may serve you as a model to imagine half-a-score. Nearly all are built on this one single plan.’135 Jones and Wyatt in 1854 would have doubtless been delighted with the idea that by 1884, when this comment was published in All the Year Round ‘everyone’ would be familiar with the appearance of a Pompeian house thanks to the court at Sydenham. Of interest here, however, is the idea that the reconstructed house in the Palace shaped the horizon of expectations of visitors to the site of Pompeii. It came to stand in for a real Pompeian house, despite, as I discussed above, being a composite of many Pompeian houses. Not one Pompeian house (rather than ‘nearly all’) was ‘built on this one single plan’. Reflecting on the introduction of admission fees and turnstiles at Pompeii, the Musical News in 1878 noted that ‘Pompeii has become as much an exhibition as the Crystal Palace’.136 The Crystal Palace provided a means of approaching and understanding the ancient site.137 As Mary Beard has emphasized, in the nineteenth century, Pompeii was a truly ruined, dilapidated site. Restoration did not start until the early twentieth century, and Victorian visitors habitually remarked that it resembled a modern war zone, making it almost impossible to collapse time and imagine the daily life of its inhabitants.138 The site was regularly described as a city of the dead, entered through the street of tombs, populated by the plaster corpses created by Fiorelli in the 134   Pemble (1987): 48–9. For elite male exceptions, see Eisner (1991); on female travellers, Mahn (2012). 135   ‘A Last Day at Pompeii’, All the Year Round (18 October 1884): 44. 136   ‘What is left of a Pompeian Tenor’, Musical World (27 July 1878): 479. 137 138   See also Beard (2013): 216.   Beard (2013): 213–5.

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1860s.139 Beard argues, however, that there was throughout the nineteenth century an emphasis on viewing ‘bifocally’—with one eye on the ‘dead’ city, and another focused on the re-creating of daily life and the novelties of ongoing excavation.140 Pompeii at the Crystal Palace was almost exclusively presented as a living city, bound up in definitively modern industry and technologies, situated alongside industrial produce from Sheffield and Birmingham. Visitors to the site of Pompeii who had previously visited the Palace may well have approached it as a vital, living place. A post by ‘regoneil’ from 2009 on the community blog ‘Sydenham Town Forum’ suggests the temporal and spatial persistence of memories of the Palace courts: One of my outstansding [sic] memories of the C.P. was the model of the Colleseum [sic], which used to fascinate me and I always had a desire to see the actual building. I was about to make a trip into Rome while serving in Italy during WW2 but on the day, I was suddenly posted home. Just my luck.141

The comment suggests that ticking off the sights of Europe is not exclusively bound up with enriching cultural capital; the Coliseum might be an internationally renowned monument, but it is also, in this case, enmeshed in childhood memories of visiting the Crystal Palace. An interest in the Coliseum, developed (presumably) in the 1920s or 1930s in the Palace Roman Court was strong enough to survive both the destructions of the Palace and of war. It also serves as a reminder that travel and sightseeing are not always optional or under the viewer’s control; indeed, military service was the most common means by which working-class people would have encountered monuments of antiquity in situ until well into the 1950s.142 The Palace courts certainly mediated—largely by domesticating— the experience of foreign travel. Around the fortieth anniversary of the Palace’s opening, the Standard celebrated the Palace for having fostered in ordinary people ‘the desire to travel, and to make acquaintance with lands, hints and samples of whose beauty and whose treasures were exhibited at Sydenham’.143 The Palace did not just familiarize visitors with classical sites, however. It also provided the means of 140   Hales (2011).   Beard (2013): 222.   regoneil (24 November 2009) , accessed 10 September 2012. 142 143   Pemble (1987): v.   Standard (10 June 1893). 139 141

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travelling to them. By 1879, a Tourist Court occupied one third of what had previously been the Mixed Fabrics Court and Ceramics Court (Appendix 1, no. 25). It boasted a map of Europe, ‘the largest ever made; it is 21 feet square, and was produced by Messrs. W. & A. K. Johnston, Geographers to the Queen, specially for this Court’. The laborious details provided, and the evident pride taken in this map in the official guide, suggest the aspirations heaped upon this new court. Travel routes were marked out across the map, and guidebooks and individual sections of the map were also for sale. A booking office in the court supplied Thomas Cook’s tickets, passports, and circular notes (an early form of travellers’ cheques); ‘whether the traveller desire to journey around the world, to Egypt or to Jerusalem, to the English lakes or to Brighton, he can, so to speak, start from the Tourist Court’, boasted the official guide; the Palace was the potential source of global travel.144 In minutes, a visitor could walk from a proudly Victorian reconstructed Pompeian house, to purchase a ticket that would convey them to the actual site of Pompeii, via the speediest modern modes of transport. At the Palace, men and women could imagine travel, but they could also start actual journeys abroad. The connections between the Palace and Thomas Cook run deeper than the establishment of the Tourist Court, however. Reckoning Cook’s achievements ‘among the marvels of the age’ (an accolade it also bestowed upon the Sydenham Palace in the 1850s), in 1873 the Art Journal described the opportunities that Cook’s Tours offered: [F]amiliarising thousands and tens of thousands of persons with the great foreign Fine Art collections . . . enabling these veritable armies of travellers to explore distant lands, and to form a personal knowledge of the different races and nations of their fellow-creatures with an ease, a comfort, and a thoroughness, combined with the strictest economy of time and money.145

These are almost identical, point for point, to the potential identified in the Sydenham Palace; fine art, encountering different races, ease of travel, and, most importantly, expanded access. Negative comments about the inferior class of people that made use of both Palace and Cook’s Tours are also strikingly similar.146 Buzard shows the ways in which attempting to establish oneself as a traveller, not a   Shenton (1879): 90–1.   ‘Cook’s Tours and Excursions’, AJ (1 October 1873): 299. 146   Buzard (1993): 59–65. 144 145

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tourist, developed in the 1860s as a means of staking a claim to ‘culture’. The tourist/traveller dichotomy could also be readily applied to the middle-class accounts of lower-class Palace visitors encountering classical culture at the Crystal Palace that I examined in Chapter 1. Both institutions ought to be considered as enabling from the 1850s onwards new possibilities for non-elite interactions with, and understandings of, a wider world. They certainly reveal elite discomfort at these changes. Jonathan Culler sets out the significance of mass produced (and reproduced) touristic ‘markers’, such as postcards and miniature souvenirs, which do not just reinforce the significance of the ‘original’ to which they pertain, but create these as sights. He notes the frequency with which the image of a monument is compared with the ‘real thing’—and not always favourably (‘It’s not like it was in the picture’).147 For visitors who travelled first to Sydenham and then to Rome or Pompeii, the Palace seems to have functioned as just such a marker, creating and reinforcing the significance of some sights over others (‘regoneil’, for example, focuses on the Coliseum, and none of the other sights of Rome). However, in the sources discussed here, the Palace contents are only occasionally (and perhaps for rhetorical purposes in the case of Nathaniel Hawthorne) discussed in comparison (positively or negatively) with the ‘real thing’. In most instances they are allowed to stand as equals, a shorthand: ‘Everyone knows what a Pompeian house is like. You may see one at the Crystal Palace.’148 Technological developments enabled many of the means of presenting the classical past discussed here and in Chapter 2; the mass dissemination of print culture, the panorama, photography, film. Visitors to the Palace who were more familiar with stereograph cards of sculpture than the marble halls of the British Museum might well have associated classical sculpture with new viewing technologies, rather than antiquity. Classical civilizations are more readily associated with tradition than with technological innovation. The fact that antiquity was depicted by these radically new, even, as Jonathan Crary has claimed, perception-altering means, is of no little significance. Crary argues that by the 1840s, a distinctive ‘modern’ understanding of vision emerged. New optical technologies encouraged the belief that vision   Culler (1988).   ‘A Last Day at Pompeii’, All the Year Round (18 October 1884): 44.

147 148

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was subjectively produced by the viewer, rather than something objective and common to all.149 Classical sculpture was not just depicted by, but also helped to define these apparently radically new, potentially perception-altering means of representation. Classical sculpture (rather than sculpture of any other period) also played a vital role in the formative years of photography. Early photography did not define itself in opposition to classical antiquity, but with and through it.150 Antiquity can thus be seen as a requisite for a medium that has come to define visual modernity. I understand the modes of accessing and viewing the past at Sydenham as a more clearly articulated part of a longer dialogue between classical sculpture and architecture, and modern modes of representation. Liz Prettejohn (2012) has argued for the centrality of classical sculpture in debates over modernism in art; the role of classical sculpture in technologies that have come to define modernity suggests an even broader ‘modernity’ to which the ‘ancient’ might contribute.

C ONC LUSION While some commentators feared that the status of fragile vestiges of antiquity would be irreparably damaged by the Palace’s garish presentations, others embraced them enthusiastically. These enthusiasts celebrated the realistic reproductions, while failing to recognize— or deeming it insignificant—that many of these replica environments were in fact pastiches, copies with no original. The writings of t­wentieth-century critics such as Baudrillard and Eco do overlap considerably with such ideas of copies standing in for originals, or the referent replacing the sign. I do not wish to elide twentieth-century American capitalism with that of mid-nineteenth-century Britain. However, the debates over the reproductions in the Fine Arts Courts at the Palace suggest that varieties of authenticity were both presented 149   Crary (1990). Subsequent studies have asserted the need to examine more closely the particularities of individual viewers, rather than positing a generalized ‘observer’. A more specifically Victorian viewer has been identified, characterized by a fascination with the tension between objectively and subjectively produced vision, although again this is subject to charges of generalization and lack of plurality. See Christ and Jordan (1995); Flint (2000): 2; Calè and di Bello (2010b). 150   di Bello (2010); Johnson (1998); Smith (2010).



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and contested long before the 1950s.151 The classical does not necessarily confer authenticity. The process of reproducing and reworking ancient edifices and sculpture, however, needs to be taken more seriously as a form of engagement with the past than these critics allow. Eco states that ‘surely this hand-to-hand battle with history, pathetic as it may be, cannot be justified, because history will not be imitated. It has to be made, and the architecturally superior America shows this is possible’.152 His distinction between making history and replicating it, however, requires further qualification, for the two are intimately connected. In the wake of Hayden White’s articulation of the parallel lives of the writing of history and literature in Metahistory (1973), historians have increasingly considered historical novels alongside historical writing. The same should go for reconstructive essays such as the Crystal Palace.153 Replicas are not mere disposable flotsam, nor do they appear exclusively in advanced consumer capitalist societies. They are more than just symptoms of alienation from some allegedly prior time of authentic identity with the past. History and archaeology are validated by the historical awareness that new media like the Crystal Palace perpetuate.154 Of course, as Chapter 1 makes clear, visitors do not necessarily take away precise archaeological knowledge from such reproduced environments. But those environments surely contribute something to a sense of the past. The notion that copying, reconstructing, or casting is inherently inauthentic is also questionable; as Marcus Boon asks, ‘what if copying, rather than being an aberration or a mistake or a crime, is a fundamental condition or requirement for anything, human or not, to exist at all?’155 The nineteenth-century views surveyed here suggest that the discussions related to plaster casting and the reconstructed environments of the Palace courts were broad and nuanced. To a certain extent they build upon the existing, and often simultaneously held anxieties and fascinations with ‘simulations of nature’ in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, stimulated by the reconstructed ruins that populated London, which I discussed in Chapter 2.156 151   On authenticity in pre-1950s America, see Orvell (1989). Clayton (2003) discusses postmodernism’s suppression of its continuities with nineteenth-century culture. 152 153   Eco (1998): 28.   Bann (1990); Mitchell (2000). 154 155   See also Bann (1995): 4.   Boon (2010): 3. 156   See further d’Arcy Wood (2001).

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The Ten Chief Courts emphasized the bodily, tangible nature of the past presented in the Pompeian Court, resurrecting ancient Romans through the power it exerted over the imagination: Put your foot into the Pompeian Court, and you step bodily into the first century of the Christian era, and are at once with Tacitus and the two Plinys, a guest of Horace and a friend of Virgil. You have still the roar of the amphitheatre in your ears; the ‘habet!’ of the mob, or the ‘sophos!’ of the literary banquet. A white robed priest of Egypt has just brushed past you; or a patrician, followed by his freedman; you may have returned from the bath or the library, the theatre or the portico, the forum or the circus.157

The physicality of these imaginary interactions with the ancient world—where phantoms ‘brushed past you’— is remarkable at a time usually associated with the development of a ‘scientific’ approach to the past. Evocative of Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii, the passage provides a connection with the means of imagining the past associated with historical novels and earlier nineteenth-century historiography. Invoking Tacitus and Pliny, it is a vision of the ancient world mediated through and given significance by texts. Its ruminations illustrate the importance of understanding the past presented at the Palace as a crossover between ancient and modern texts, archaeological evidence, and a hefty dose of ambient antiquarianism. Such a lived sense of former existence is usually associated with the earlier nineteenth century and the antiquarianism that professional history supposedly displaced.158 The Pompeian Court (in particular) at the Crystal Palace demonstrates that such a relationship with the ancient past continued to be popular and celebrated in the mid-1850s. This crossover between archaeological precision and imagined physical contact with ‘ancients’ arguably continued well into the late nineteenth century in the work of painters like Alma-Tadema—and on into the twentieth, in cinematic film. The Palace’s engagement with archaeological debate, as outlined in Chapter 2, however, testifies to the importance of the increasingly professional ‘science’ of archaeology. Antiquarianism and archaeology are not necessarily rival factions. For all his reservations about the brightly coloured past presented at Sydenham, Rossetti conceded that the reconstructions at the Palace might serve to enhance understanding of   Ten Chief Courts (1854), 40.

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  Bann (1990): 100–18.

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antiquity, concluding that these gains were ‘worth the possible additional weakening of the antique illusion’.159 Rossetti’s account—and the Palace that inspired it—is remarkable for the way that it shuttles between both acknowledging that the ancient world was once a real, pristine place, while remaining preoccupied with imaginative evocations of that place. The displays at Sydenham, however, did not always ‘smell of paint and putty’, as Rossetti put it; they dated extremely quickly. By the later nineteenth century, the selection of casts, for example, looked old fashioned, testimony to the importance of understanding even the classical canon as constantly developing. Archaeological developments continued to overlap with popular culture, however. Indeed, the Palace itself arguably contributed to these new means of appreciating and visualizing antiquity in its ‘cinematic’ settings and its ‘bank holiday’ audience.

  Rossetti (1867): 59.

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Part II Sculpture and the Benefits of Good Taste The Crystal Palace Company Deed of Settlement listed ‘the cultivation of a refined taste amongst all classes of the community’ as key to the ‘Objects and Business of the Company’.1 Owen Jones was far from restrained in his expression of the potential of the Fine Arts Courts, envisaging ‘the commencement of a new era, in which public taste will be raised from its present low standard, and our age, by slow but sure steps, be prepared to rank with the most brilliant periods of the past’.2 These ‘most brilliant periods of the past’ were illustrated in the Fine Arts Courts of the Palace itself. They were both the standard against which taste was to be judged, and the means for improving it. The endeavours of the Crystal Palace architects and directors depended on the principle that there was a fixed standard of good taste, to which people could be educated. This adapted various strands of eighteenth-century British philosophical aesthetics, united by the notion that good taste could be both rationally understood and taught.3 The ultimate arbiter of good taste, the fixed standard to which it was hoped the populace could be raised to appreciate, was Greek sculpture. This view was championed in philosophical discussions in the eighteenth century, by mid-nineteenth-century archaeologists, and in the more practical undertakings of the design reform movement.4 Part II examines both the ideas behind Greek sculpture’s status as benchmark for good taste, and the hopes for the practical applications of the lessons taught in the Fine Arts Courts at Sydenham. Reformers   Crystal Palace Company Deed of Settlement (1856): 5. 3   Jones (1854c): 20.   Beardsley (1966): 178–90. 4   See Romans (2005): 42–4. 1 2

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speculated that the improvement of modern taste would contribute to three main areas: the enhancement of contemporary painting and sculpture, a better quality of industrial manufacture, and the raising of national morality.5 Chapter 4 examines the connections made between Greek sculpture and industrial manufacture, while Chapter 5 concentrates more closely on its potential as a moral educator. The division of these two areas as separate concerns, however, is far from as straightforward as the chapter structure might suggest. The fit of Greek sculpture to manufacture was an apparently natural one to many in the 1850s. And it was not only design reformers who were convinced that Greek sculpture was the ultimate source of good taste. Figures from the fledgling archaeological establishment, including staff of the antiquities department of the British Museum, Charles Newton, Edmund Oldfield, and Samuel Birch, also acknowledged the role of classical archaeology in forming modern taste.6 Further, the taste-enhancing qualities of Greek sculpture proliferated in British Museum guidebooks aimed at a ‘popular’ audience. The 1851 Handbook to the Antiquities of the British Museum, written by the assistant keeper of antiquities, throws chronology aside and begins its exploration of the galleries with Greek sculpture, an art form ‘directly tending to form and elevate the Public Taste’.7

  Taylor (1848).   Birch (1867): 1; Newton (1880): 63; Oldfield (1852): 5. See also Falkener (1860): 27, who edited the archaeological journal Museum of Classical Antiquities (1851–3). 7   Vaux (1851): iii. 5 6

4 Greek Sculpture and Nineteenth-century Commerce A well-known advertiser of a miraculous Ointment . . . recently visited the Crystal Palace. On entering the Pompeian House, the word on the threshold, SALVE! met his eye. He instantly sent to the Secretary and offered a handsome sum if his own name could be prefixed, ‘ “so that the public might know whose salve to ask for.” ’ The Directors are considering the application.8

The commercial aspects of the Crystal Palace were swiftly identified as the pedestrian reality of its operation, in contrast with the refined, aesthetically elevating claims made by Owen Jones, Matthew Digby Wyatt, and many hopeful commentators. Although fictional, this satirical ‘Anecdote from Sydenham’, which appeared in Punch of April 1855, indicates the perceived failings in communication between the Palace court architects, the Crystal Palace Company’s business men directors, and its audience. Jones and Wyatt’s writings suggest that they intended details like the Pompeian Court’s mosaic bearing the Latin greeting ‘SALVE!’ to contribute to a general ambience of antiquity, regardless of whether their audience actually comprehended Latin. This atmosphere would promote reflections on the past, as visitors gazed upon pioneering, archaeologically precise reconstructions.9 The audience as presented by Punch,   ‘Anecdote From Sydenham’, Punch (7 April 1855): 134.

8

  Wyatt (1854): 7.

9

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however, read ‘Salve’ a different way. Far from being steeped in classical references, the Palace-goers were preoccupied with material realities, interpreting the Latin as an advertising opportunity rather than a stimulus to historical or artistic contemplation. Punch derides the uncultivated visitor lacking the most basic of Latin vocabulary, but the real butt of the joke are the Palace’s businessmen directors, content to sacrifice the authenticity of the most widely praised archaeological reconstruction at Sydenham for financial gain. Punch objected not to the directors’ focus on generating profit, but to their overweening attempts to conceal commercial speculation beneath the edifying drapery of fine art. The directorate, and Jones and Wyatt, however, explicitly set out to connect the Fine Arts Courts with the industrial and commercial aspects of their enterprise. It was not altogether surprising that Punch’s apocryphal salve-seller was reminded of worldly business concerns as he wandered into the Pompeian Court. It was, after all, next door to the Birmingham Court, where manufacture from this major industrial city was proudly displayed. The juxtaposition of Pompeii and Birmingham was no accident; art and industry were housed beneath the Palace’s glass roof for a specific purpose. In this chapter, I trace the relations between classical culture and nineteenth-century manufacture, as they played out at Sydenham. The ‘Anecdote from Sydenham’ raises the broader question of the compatibility of commerce and culture. Commerce and culture are readily and regularly opposed in nineteenth-century writings, in satirical comment like that in Punch, and by critics like Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. The distinction has been reinforced by ­twentieth- and twenty-first century research on ideas and practices of consumption in cultural studies, anthropology, and history, which, as I discussed in Chapter 3, have similarly tended to dwell on the difficulties of reconciling commerce with ‘authentic’ culture.10 The notion of an ‘industrial culture’ in nineteenth-century Britain seemed paradoxical in the wake of Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1958) and Martin Wiener’s English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981). Both suggest a seemingly non-negotiable opposition between ‘culture’ and ‘industry’. They emphasize the writings of Ruskin, and later William Morris, which decry the crossover of art and mechanical or industrial production. More recently, Joseph Bizup has convincingly argued the need to modify Williams’s characterizations. Looking 10

  See Chapter 3, note 95.

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beyond Ruskin and Morris, he analyses the development of a ‘proindustrial rhetoric’ among nineteenth-century critics, scientists, and authors. Bizup devotes considerable space to the role played by 1830s– 1860s design reformers in the establishment of ‘industrial culture’.11 In this chapter, I examine the connections between design reform, the Sydenham Palace, and Greek sculpture. The image of a ‘pro-industrial’ artistic culture that this presents offers new readings of the role of both ancient and modern sculpture in nineteenth-century Britain. The relationship between art viewing and looking at commodities is a complex one. It is particularly freighted when it comes to an institution like the Crystal Palace, so closely connected to the culture of world’s fairs and exhibitions. These were dubbed ‘places of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish’ by Walter Benjamin, whose writings have been dominant in both characterizations of exhibitions as purveyors of commodities to a drone-like audience, and in reconceptualizing art itself as a commodity.12 The example of the Crystal Palace suggests the varied negotiations around art and commodities in the 1850s. The industrial connections of Greek and Roman sculpture offer a revealing case study, for classical antiquity has long been marked off as a recourse from the mundane world of commercial speculation; the humour of the ‘Anecdote from Sydenham’ depends precisely upon this distinction. Ancient Greece in particular was well-established as appealing to the imagination and mind, with figures such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold adopting it as a refuge from industrialism and modernity.13 Chapter 4 provides an alternative vision of the relationship between classical sculpture and industrial manufacture in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It contributes a classical chapter to recent scholarship on the contested relationships between visual art and industry, and ultimately, culture and the economy.14 The first part introduces design reform, establishes the Sydenham Palace as a significant location for this movement, and examines the roles that Jones and Wyatt, and contemporary commentators hoped Greek sculpture might play in reforming art-manufacture, and subsequently the   Bizup (2003); see also Rifkin (1988).   Benjamin (1999): 7. On Benjamin, art and commodity see Buck-Morss (1991): 81–2; Markus (2001). On the problems in applying Benjamin’s ideas to world’s fairs, see Edwards (2006): 175–8. For further exploration of these concepts in relation to the displays at Sydenham, see Nichols (2013). 13   Turner (1981): 36–61; Dowling (1994): 58–60. 14   Barringer (2005); Batsaki (2009). 11 12

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British economy. The second section analyses the successes and failures of the connections fostered between classical art and industry at Sydenham, with detailed discussion of two new ventures of the late 1850s, the Ceramic Court and the Crystal Palace Art-Union. Finally, I look at the changing ideas about the relationship between ‘high art’, design, labour, and commerce in later nineteenth-century culture.

DESIG N REF OR M, SYDE NHAM, AND S C U L P T U RE I N 1 8 5 4 Design reform refers to a diverse set of ideas current in Britain from the 1830s to the 1860s, concerning the best way to improve design and manufacture in order to bolster the economy. The relationship between ‘fine art’ and ‘art-manufacture’ was a matter of particular interest, although reformers were far from unanimous when it came to the degrees to which these were related, and the impact each had on the other.15 In 1835/6 a Select Committee on ‘Arts and their connexions with Manufactures’ was appointed, a pivotal moment in British design reform. It set out ‘to inquire into the best means of extending a knowledge of the ARTS and of the PRINCIPLES of DESIGN among the People (especially the Manufacturing Population) of the Country’, as well as into the ‘Constitution, Management and Effects of the Institutions connected with the Arts’. Its report was based on the understanding that improved British design would lead to a stronger economy. To create better designs, an improvement in labourers’ taste was essential. Design reformers had an ‘objective’ view of taste, believing that it was fixed and readily communicable to others. To improve taste, labourers needed to be exposed to examples of fine art. At present, workers apparently demonstrated an ‘earnest desire for information in the Arts’, but had little access to it.16 Schools of Design were established throughout Britain as a result of the Committee’s report. The terms ‘fine art’ and ‘art-manufacture’ require some qualification. Art at the 1835/6 Select Committee encompassed both skilled labour in the production of fancy goods and ‘the fine arts’ of painting and sculpture. ‘Art workmen’ were defined as those engaged in the   For a survey of the design reform movement see Lubbock (1995): 248–70.   HC Paper (1836) no. 568, I, iii.

15 16

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silk trade, ribbon manufacture, pottery, interior décor, furniture. The Select Committee positioned fine art as distinct from, but on a continuum with, manufacture.17 Here I use fine art to refer to painting (on canvas and some walls), sculpture, and architecture, aware of the lack of precision and overlaps that the term contains. In line with the midcentury sources consulted here, I employ the ‘useful arts’ as a general term to encompass objects with some concession to aesthetics that are not fine art; craft, ornamental, decorative, and art-manufacture come within their remit, as do, at times, sculpture and architecture. Art-manufacture is a more specific term. It suggests an industrial, mass-produced element that is not always present in craft, decorative, or ornamental art forms. The significance of fine art to the useful arts varied across reformers; all, however, connected them to some degree, as will become apparent. Design reformers across the board argued that exhibitions and museums provided an important means to combat bad taste. Witnesses in the 1835/6 Select Committee had attributed the decline in British exports to the fact that museums and government-run design schools were not easily accessible to workers, unlike their French and German counterparts.18 The 1845 Museums Act, which entitled any town with more than 10,000 citizens to levy rates to fund a local museum, suggested that museums ‘might give a sound taste in art to the population of that town; and thus enable them to apply the skill they would obtain in the arts to manufactures’.19 The Great Exhibition was likewise conceived in order to improve taste and show off British industry, and its mission continued at the ‘Museum of Ornamental Manufactures’ opened at Marlborough House in 1852. In 1857, its collections were moved and expanded into new accommodation in South Kensington, where it continued to promote the improvement of taste and of the useful arts for distinctly commercial purposes. The South Kensington Museum has long been understood as an engagement with design reform.20 Despite a recent resurgence of interest in design reform, the Sydenham Palace has come under little scrutiny in relation to the movement.21 Indeed, it has been dismissed as providing the antithesis of design education, in contrast with its predecessor in 1851; ‘whereas the Great Exhibition was designed to educate British men and women 18   Gretton (1998).   Gretton (1998): 92–3.   Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 78, col. 381 (6 March 1845). 20 21   Burton (1999): 26–40; Conforti (1997).   See, however, Moser (2012). 17 19

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about industrialization and tasteful consumption, the Sydenham Crystal Palace was, quite frankly, designed to amuse.’22 A founding notion of the entire Sydenham undertaking, however, was the improvement of British manufacture by providing manual labourers and artisans with access to great works of past art.23 It was conceived in part as a response to the failings that the Great Exhibition had made manifest; the lamentable inadequacies of British produce in relation to other European nations, and the cognate urgency of establishing standards of ‘correct taste’.24 Egyptologist and design theorist Sir John Gardner Wilkinson was not alone in deeming the Sydenham Palace’s ‘varied collection’ as ‘a still better opportunity for correcting the ordinary taste’ than its predecessor in Hyde Park.25 The architects of Sydenham’s Fine Arts Courts were important figures in mid-century design reform circles. Owen Jones was one-third of the self-styled ‘Triumvirate of Taste’, along with the influential arts administrators and education reformers Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave, who jointly supervised the South Kensington Museum. In 1856, Jones published the sumptuously illustrated volume The Grammar of Ornament, which, by the late nineteenth century, was established as ‘a turning point in the history of English ornament . . . of immense value to manufacturers, decorators and designers’.26 It outlined thirtyseven principles of taste, guiding the reader through a world and history of ornamental design, from ‘savage tribes’ through Egypt, Greece, and Rome, via Persia, China, India, medieval and Renaissance design. Jones’s endeavours at the Sydenham Palace were (as I discuss further in Chapter 6) in some ways a three-dimensional version of this universalizing reader in good taste. Matthew Digby Wyatt had similarly well-established design-reforming credentials. He was a regular and vociferous contributor to Henry Cole’s JDM, and was responsible for arranging the exhibits at the Great Exhibition in his role as secretary to its executive committee. In 1852 he published The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century, a richly illustrated celebration of the success of exhibitions as ‘healthy stimulants to Industry’, with an introduction that discussed the history of industrial art, from antiquity to 23   Auerbach (1999): 200.   Wyatt (1854): 10.  Lubbock (1995): 261. For a detailed contemporary discussion, see Wornum (1851). 25   Wilkinson (1858): 192. See also Knight (1858–60): xv; ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Cassell’s Illustrated Family Newspaper (25 March 1854): 103. 26   Day (1887): 187. 22 24

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the present day.27 Wyatt was appointed as the first Slade professor in fine arts at Cambridge in 1869. His published lectures demonstrate a sustained interest throughout his career in the interconnectedness between the ‘fine’ and ‘useful’ arts.28 Jones and Wyatt were committed to the idea that design reform could only work if all social classes were educated into ‘good taste’.29 Contemporaries noted that the vast size of the Palace, able to house up to 100,000 visitors, made it particularly well suited to such a public undertaking.30 Its exhibits, connecting a didactic narrative of the history of art with the history of manufacture, were of an entirely new order. Commentators, journalists, and both official and unofficial guidebooks presented the Sydenham Palace as an essential educational opportunity for British manufacture; ‘if this country is to retain its high position among the manufacturing nations of the world’, Routledge’s Guide claimed in its opening paragraph, ‘a higher standard of art education should be aimed at for the intelligent artisan and producer’, while the AJ ran a six-month feature on ‘The Crystal Palace, as a teacher of art and art-manufacture’.31 In its early years, the Sydenham Palace was enthusiastically discussed as an essential venue for education in art and art-manufacture. The Palace’s Greek Court was to play no small role in this process.

Greek Sculpture and Nineteenth-century Design On the second page of the ‘printed exhibition’ The Pictorial Gallery of the Arts (1858–60), Charles Knight (founder of the Penny Magazine) asserted that ‘a familiarity with the beautiful sculptures of antiquity . . . must have an enduring effect upon the manufacture of a Worcester tea-cup or a Paisley shawl’.32 Knight, like all strands of design reformers, did not suggest that designers emulate classical art in their work. The JDM, for example, deemed designs for domestic wares that used classical prototypes to be ‘plagiarism’.33 Classical sculpture’s role in design reform was as teacher of good taste, a position it had occupied 28   Wyatt (1852): vii.   Wyatt (1870).   Wyatt (1854): 7; Jones (1856): 8. 30   ‘The Crystal Palace, as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture. Part I’, AJ (1 July 1856): 217; J. Lotsky, ‘The Crystal – the People’s Palace, Sydenham – no. III’, Mechanics’ Magazine (3 January 1857): 9–10. 31 32   McDermott (1854): iii.   Knight (1858–60): 2. 33   ‘Novelties in Statuary Porcelain’, JDM, 3/13 (March 1850): 18–9. 27 29

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from the outset of the movement. Key witnesses in the 1835/6 Select Committee maintained that Greek sculpture was the ultimate arbiter of good taste, ‘archetypes of art’ ‘a foundation of pure and elegant taste’.34 One even called for manufacturers to set up plaster cast galleries for workers to peruse in their breaks.35 Greek sculptors had attained such excellence because they lived in a society where sculpture played a public role. This was agreed across the board at mid-century, by design reformers, archaeologists, manufacturers, and sculptors alike.36 The Greek Court at Sydenham stimulated new discussions and aspirations regarding public taste, ancient and modern. ‘[T]aste became intuitive’, according to an AJ article on ‘Sculpture at the New Crystal Palace’, since ancient Greeks ‘worshipped and lived among statues’.37 This excellent taste impacted upon all aspects of production and consumption in antiquity, and it had lessons to communicate to the contemporary British public as well. ‘If the advantages arising from this real feeling for the beautiful were better understood at the present day,’ claimed Gardner Wilkinson, ‘we should not have . . . the hideous lamps, the monstrous tea urns, or the whole furniture of our tables and of our rooms, which disgrace our civilisation.’38 Owen Jones attributed present low standards of art and design to the ‘ignorance of the public’.39 Bringing the acknowledged excellence of Greek sculpture before the populace thus became a matter of urgency. The physical presence of such works would elevate taste, cultivating a ‘feeling’ for the beautiful in Victorian society, as there had been in antiquity. Its architects and contemporary commentators promote the Sydenham Palace as a prime location for such an undertaking.40 It would become the nineteenth-century equivalent of public displays of sculpture in antiquity.41 34   HC Paper (1836) no. 568, II, 23. For further discussion of the role of Greek sculpture in this Select Committee, see Romans (2005). 35   HC Paper (1836) no. 568, II, 29. 36   Falkener (1860): 37–9; Raoul-Rochette (1854): 120–1; Pulszky (1852): 2–5; Westmacott Jr (1864); HC Paper (1836) no. 568, II, 23. 37   ‘Museum of Sculpture at the New Crystal Palace’, AJ (1 September 1853): 209. 38 39   Wilkinson (1858): 186.   Jones (1854c): 15–6. 40   ‘The Crystal Palace, as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture. Part V’, AJ (1 November 1856): 345. 41   Mérrimée (1857): 874–5; Wyatt (1852): vi; ‘Museum of Sculpture at the New Crystal Palace’, AJ (1 September 1853): 209; ‘The New Era of Industry and Art’, ICPG, 1/2 (November 1853): 14.

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At the Palace, ancient Greek sculptural practice was evoked as a model for rethinking the relationship between the fine and useful arts. Jones and Wyatt, along with witnesses in the 1835/6 Select Committee, the Art Union, and the JDM, were keen to assert the unity—or at least a strong connection—between the fine and useful arts. Seeking established historical precedents, mid-nineteenth-century discussions found examples in the Renaissance, but drew ultimately from what was understood of ancient Greek sculptural practice.42 ‘We will again call on the Athenian for his authority’ suggested an 1851 JDM article on ‘“High Art” and Ornamental Art.’43 It went on to refer to Pausanias to back up its ideas; others cited Pliny.44 Most, however, simply assert the unity of the arts in antiquity as a given. The lack of an ancient Greek word for artist made Greek sculpture especially applicable to discourses on the unity of the arts. Some philosophers, archaeologists, and classical art historians have extrapolated from this to conclude that Greeks did not separate the ‘fine’ arts from the ‘useful’. Still far from resolved today, the matter was a regular feature of mid-nineteenth-century writing on the relationship between the ‘fine’ and ‘useful’ arts.45 Writing in the Art Union, the Irish journalist, historian, and vehement opponent of the Corn Laws, William Cooke Taylor used the unclear status of the ancient Greek ‘artist’ to promote his own ideals, noting that in antiquity there was ‘a natural and early connection between the pursuits of the Artist and the Manufacturer . . . both were combined in one person’. He lamented the growing divide between artist and manufacturer, and referring to classical antiquity and the Renaissance, called for the ‘bonds by which they are united’ to be ‘drawn closer together in mutual alliance’.46 That a political figure like Cooke Taylor was so invested in this debate suggests the socially reforming significance it was attributed in the mid-nineteenth century. A similar refrain appeared in Owen Jones’s handbook to the Alhambra Court at Sydenham. For Jones, ‘the architect, the upholsterer, the paper stainer, the weaver, the calico printer, and the potter’ were all artists. In ‘all ages but our own’ the fine and useful arts had been united; ‘the painted vases of the Greeks are but the reflex of the   On the Renaissance as a model, see Irwin (1991): 228–30.   ‘ “High Art” and Ornamental Art’, JDM, 4/24 (February 1851): 162. 44   HC Paper (1836) no. 568, I, 111; II, 23; 88. 45   For recent comment on the debate, see Tanner (2006): 141–204. 46   Taylor (1848). 42 43

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paintings of their temples.’ He proposed the displays at the Crystal Palace as a force for their reconciliation.47 The mid-century date of this attempt to reunite Greek sculpture and artisanal manufacture is noteworthy. The ‘division of the arts’, divorcing the fine arts from crafts, is usually attributed to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century; the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768 in particular marked off fine art from the earlier Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (1754).48 Similarly, the notion of an ancient Greek creative artist hero (definitively not a manufacturer) is usually associated with turn of the nineteenth-century Romanticism. In the British context, the artist hero’s presence and status was compounded by the arrival (1807) and national purchase (1816) of the ‘Phidian’ Elgin Marbles. The ‘primitivist’ view—that ancient sculptors and painters were regarded as craftsmen, not artists, is usually identified with the late nineteenth century, and particularly Jacob Burckhardt’s essay ‘Die Griechen und ihre Künstler’ (1887).49 Writing on the history of this dispute has concentrated on formal essays on the subject such as Burckhardt’s. However, debates over design reform from the 1830s to the 1850s, and the plurality of uses to which Greek sculpture was put at the Crystal Palace, suggest that Greek sculptors were commonly affiliated with manual labour, and attempts had even been made to practically apply this ‘unity’ to British manufacture, long before Burckhardt’s writings.

Victorian Sculpture and the Unity of the Arts Nineteenth-century understandings of ancient Greek sculptural practice had implications for the status of Victorian sculpture and sculptors. Commentators throughout the nineteenth century described contemporary sculptors variously as workmen and cultivated artists, and the ambiguous status of ancient Greek sculptors did not go unrecorded, whether championed for its potential for design reform, or refuted outright.50 In his lectures on sculpture to students at the Royal Academy, Richard Westmacott Jr consistently refers to Greek   Jones (1854c): 15–16.   Kristeller (1990). On the classification of the arts within ancient philosophy, see Tatarkiewicz (1963). 49   See Coarelli (1980). 50   On the status of sculptors in mid-Victorian Britain see Read (1982): 49–78. 47 48

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sculptors as artists. He sought to preserve Greek sculpture as the foundation of a fine art entirely distinct from manufacture, and denigrated Egyptian and Assyrian statuary as ‘simply mechanical’.51 In contrast, Wyatt’s 1870 Slade lectures described the ‘peculiar technical origin’ of Greek sculpture, noting that it was ‘but the sublimation of mason’s work’. Discussing the best means of training sculptors in contemporary Britain, he notes that the ‘dexterous workmen’ of classical Athens were subject to a unique education that combined both ‘intellectual study’ and ‘a habit of daily labour’. The practice of both ancient and modern sculpture is elided here; all sculptors are ‘accomplished craftsmen’.52 This approach was characteristic of sculptors like John Bell and Alfred Stevens in the 1850s, and, as Martina Droth has shown, the New Sculptors of the 1880s, who made both the intellectual and practical aspects of sculpture fundamental to their work, eroding the distinction between labour and ideals which (for Westmacott) kept sculpture safely in the camp of high art.53 Bell enthusiastically embraced and employed the continuum between fine and useful arts in classical antiquity as justification for his own advocacy of sculpture as both fine and useful art.54 His work ranges from the vast fine art public commissions of the ‘America’ group of the Albert Memorial and the Crimean monument to the Brigade of Guards on Pall Mall, to the ‘useful’; designs for lamps, cutlery, and park gates.55 He and Stevens (who started his career working for a Sheffield founder) designed and had their works reproduced in cast iron by the Coalbrookdale Company, the iron foundry later designated as ‘the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution’.56 Their work testifies to the new nineteenth-century connections established between sculptors and manufacture. Victorian sculptors produced statuettes and ceramic miniatures for a growing domestic commercial market, reinforcing the connection between the ‘high’ and the ‘ornamental’.57 The industrial materials of sculpture, the medium’s inherent 52   Westmacott Jr (1864): 75.   Wyatt (1870): 146; 176, 175, 179. 54   Droth (2004b).   Bell (1858): 10–1. 55   Bell is employed as the paradigmatic example of the diversity of Victorian sculpture in Edwards (2009). 56   On Stevens, see Barringer (2005): 215–6. On Coalbrookdale in the Victorian imagination see Coleman (1992). 57  e.g. Catalogue of English Art Manufactures. See also Droth (2004a). On statuettes for sale at Sydenham, see ‘The Industrial Department of the Crystal Palace’, Morning Chronicle (28 May 1855). 51 53

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reproducibility, and the new machines that aided the reproduction process cemented its affiliation with manufacture. Further, this crossover was identified as being peculiar to sculpture as a medium.58 Sculpture’s odd position as a meeting point for the fine and useful arts was also suggested by its display alongside manufacture at the Great Exhibition, the Sydenham Palace, and the South Kensington Museum. In the 1860s, the South Kensington Museum even categorized sculpture as an applied art in order to fit it into its overall exhibition schema.59 In Ephemeral Vistas, a founding work on the study of world’s fairs, Paul Greenhalgh argues that the presence of the fine arts at the Great Exhibition prevented it from becoming a ‘mere’ trade fair; they ‘made culture into a hierarchical system, separating the high from the popular, the functional from the ethereal and the expensive from the cheap’.60 The display of sculpture and manufacture at Sydenham, however, seems to have confused rather than clarified any such ‘system’. The connections between sculpture as a medium, labour, industry, and trade were scarcely hidden in the 1850s. Greek sculpture was foundational for these discourses.

Greek Sculpture and Industrial Labour Greek sculpture is perhaps not the most obvious candidate for a role in labour history. But cast in plaster and displayed to mass audiences at the Crystal Palace, it certainly occupied an important place in attempts to reconcile the peculiarly mid-Victorian anxieties about the present and ideal relationship between art and labour.61 After the revolutionary year of 1848, it seemed ever more urgent to maintain (or establish) unity across society. The JDM readily identified the potentially serious impact on society caused by the separation of the ‘fine’ and ‘useful’ arts, and advocated a Greek-style unity as a resolution.62 Concerns about class division pervade what might appear the least likely of articles. Amid the samples for flock paper-­hangings and satin ribbons, an 1850 JDM article on ‘Novelties in Statuary Porcelain’, for example, argues that a ‘mutual bond and interchange of feeling between different classes’ could emerge from the application of fine art to manufacture, which was suggested as a means of forging   Day (1887): 191; The Book of Trades (1841): 343.   Levi (2000); Whitehead (2000). 60 61   Greenhalgh (1988): 198; Teukolsky (2007).   See Barringer (2005). 62   ‘Letters on English Bronzes, no. I’, JDM, 2/10 (December 1849): 150–1. 58 59

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common interests across the class divide, a potential source ‘of safety to society’.63 Design reform was an explicitly capitalist undertaking, and also operated as ‘a prophylactic against social reform’, as Adrian Rifkin memorably put it.64 But a great deal of its complexity is lost if design reform is dismissed as little more than a vehicle for manufacturers to control their workforce. Wyatt presented the intellectual capacity of labourers as being at the heart of the Palace’s endeavours: ‘The great end and aim of the Crystal Palace are to cultivate the imaginative faculty of the workman himself,—to cause its value to be appreciated by the class of employers,—and to make a recognition of it indispensable on the part of the purchasers’. He noted that the best labourers were those ‘possessed of the most ideality’, and emphasized the importance of mental development through the contemplation of art. The Palace, he argued, was a vital site for labourers to come into the requisite contact with sculpture and architecture, and the Greek Court was central to this undertaking. Wyatt’s paradigmatic example, triggering the cycle of improved production and consumption, takes place when a labourer in the Palace suddenly sees that ‘the Greeks made even conventional foliage exquisite’.65 Wyatt’s endeavours were a resounding success, according to an 1864 article from Good Words on ‘The Social Condition of English Workers, judged by French Working Men’. This asserts art education to be equally as important as wages and working environment in the social conditions of workers. It offers the perspective of Parisian and Lyonnese coachmakers, weavers, and bronze workers on the work environments enjoyed by their English counterparts. They list the Sydenham Palace, alongside the South Kensington and British Museums, as a space in which workers might ‘develop the imagination and the intellect, and render them the true directors of labour’.66 Ten years after its opening, the Palace’s art educative potential was identified as one of the most important elements of welfare of English workers. French workers presented the art education provided at the Palace as facilitating self-directed and intellectually stimulating labour, rather than rendering workers obedient and passive. John Ruskin’s chapter ‘The Nature of the Gothic’ (1853), in the Stones of Venice set out a rather different view of ancient Greek   ‘Novelties in Statuary Porcelain’, JDM, 3/13 (March 1850): 18–9. 65 66   Rifkin (1988): 97.   Wyatt (1854): 10.   Ludlow (1864): 874.

63 64

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ornament from that promoted by Wyatt. Ruskin’s famous exposition of the relations between art and industry was widely discussed and circulated. In the year that the Palace opened it was reprinted as a pamphlet and distributed to men at the London Working Man’s College with the subtitle ‘And herein of the true functions of the workman in art’.67 Ruskin argues that the Greek preference for geometrical forms, symmetry, and ‘perfection’ allowed labourers no freedom of expression or imagination. In contrast to the free artist-workers of Greece celebrated by design reformers, Ruskin’s Greek sculptors were servile, trapped endlessly repeating prescribed shapes.68 Where Jones and Wyatt argued that the example of Greek ornament and ancient artlabour practice might help to reform contemporary production, raising the imagination of workers, Ruskin viewed it as the worst possible model for nineteenth-century art-labour. Greek ornament’s tendency to encourage mindless copying was related to a particularly pressing problem that Ruskin identified in an increasingly mechanized Britain, ‘the degradation of the operative into a machine’.69 He vehemently condemned machine-produced architectural decoration as ‘an imposition, a vulgarity, an impertinence, and a sin’. Machine-produced objects, especially cast iron, celebrated ‘the absence of human labour’. Its prevalence had a devastating impact on workers, causing ‘men to sink into machines themselves’.70 Although well known, Ruskin’s were not the only views present at mid-century. Jones was a keen advocate of machine-based design, and Ruskin’s rejection of mechanical work troubled the JDM and even the Gentleman’s Magazine. None of these commentators criticized Ruskin in order to promote unfettered capitalism and profit at the expense of workers. Instead, they argued that design ought to embrace the machine as a means of disseminating tasteful wares to a wide audience at low costs, to spread beautiful things beyond ‘the hands of the few’.71   See Cook and Wedderburn (1903–12): X, lx.   Ruskin (1904): 188–203. Ruskin’s condemnation of ancient Greek carving is selective, and he excuses the Elgin Marbles from the damning state of ‘perfection’. See also Ruskin (1905b): 325. 69 70   Ruskin (1904): 190–3.   Ruskin (1903c): 83–4. 71   ‘Art Applied to Industry, a’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1 (March 1864): 296; ‘Address’, JDM, 2/7 (September 1849): 2; 2/8 (October 1849): 72. On Ruskin’s opposition to design reform, see Lubbock (1995): 271–96; Kriegel (2007): 126–59. On the relationship between Jones and Ruskin, see Flores (2006): 243–7. On design reform as an alternative to Ruskinian thought, see Bizup (2003): 137–8. 67 68

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Where Ruskin was concerned almost exclusively with producers of art objects, by the 1850s, design reformers no longer focused on improving the taste of producers alone, as the 1835/6 Select Committee had done, but that of the entire public.72 Both producer and consumer, of all classes, were fundamental to Wyatt and Jones’s aims to improve national taste through the Fine Arts Courts at Sydenham: ‘the tide will flow from class to class, till ultimately we may hope that, almost insensibly, a better and a clearer recognition of material beauty may extend throughout the country’, claimed Wyatt in his 1854 illustrated souvenir guidebook to the Palace.73 The prominent position that these ideas occupy in Wyatt’s guide suggests quite how central they were to Wyatt’s vision of the Palace’s role. Mid-century design reformers championed the purchase of goods as a means of improving and disseminating good taste, encouraging a workforce composed of art-educated and imaginative labourers, bolstering the economy, and potentially elevating public morality.74 This suggests a more varied picture of the relations between producers and consumers in nineteenth-century Britain than has been previously established. Thomas Richards’s influential 1990 account of the Great Exhibition as the beginnings of commodity culture has entrenched the Crystal Palace building as the foundational nineteenth-century site for consumer culture.75 As Lara Kriegel has noted, Richards neglects the complex discussions of the role of the producer within the designreforming discourse that lay behind the Exhibition, and instead presents the Palace as a space where labour and labourers were entirely erased.76 Richards fixates on the commodity form at the Great Exhibition, critical of the occlusion of labour engendered by commodity fetishism. Yet by fixating on commodity fetishism, Richards’s account also occludes the role of labour at the Palace, documenting consumption in the place of production.77 Even if exhibitions did present labour as alienated from itself, producers visiting exhibitions could contest  ‘Address’, JDM, 2/7 (September 1849): 1; Kriegel (2007): 2–3.   Wyatt (1854): 10. See also Wyatt (1850): 10–4; Wyatt (1870): 327; Jones (1854c): 17. 74   Taylor (1848); ‘Exposition of Arts and Manufactures, Birmingham’, JDM, 2/8 (October 1849): 51. 75   Richards (1990): 17–72. 76   Kriegel (2007): 10–3; 86–125. See also Hoffenberg (2000); Pettitt (2007): 250–1. For a more measured account of the Exhibition’s role in nineteenth-century capitalism, see Young (2009). 77   For analysis of this tendency more generally in writing on consumption, see Daunton and Hilton (2001). 72 73

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and make anew such ideas, as Rancière and Vauday showed in their analysis of worker delegate reports on the 1867 Paris Exposition.78 The potential social benefits of consumption envisaged by design reform offer a rather different perspective to the dominant late twentieth-century understandings of consumer culture, which, as Daniel Miller and Frank Trentmann have pointed out, have almost exclusively positioned manufacture and consumption as alienating, negative phenomena, wrapped up with capitalist excesses.79 Commentators praised the idea that Sydenham would encourage the purchase of tasteful goods, but at the same time condemned excessive and vulgar consumption. The Palace’s courts offered instead ‘elegancies and refinements of life’ as a means of moderating ‘exclusive attention to money-making’ and ‘commercial worship’.80 Trentmann’s dutiful, politically engaged ‘citizen consumer’ was clearly envisaged by design reformers and at the Crystal Palace, but with an aesthetic twist; their role was to consume in a tasteful manner. The later nineteenth century is widely regarded as an increasingly consumer focused society.81 The Sydenham Palace represents a pivotal moment when producer and consumer were conceptualized working together—or even as the same person—within explicitly liberal capitalist design reform discourses.

SU C C E S SE S AND FAI LUR E S, 1854– 62 It is extremely difficult to evaluate the success of Jones and Wyatt’s attempt to raise public taste for well-designed commodities through the combination of Fine Art and Industrial Courts at Sydenham. Responses in the press are entirely inconsistent, berating and celebrating the Palace in practically adjacent sentences. Between 1854 and 1862, the AJ was convinced of the Palace’s remarkable potential for manufacturers, designers, and ‘the industrial classes’ using ‘Art-knowledge’ in their labour.82 It gave examples from ‘competent judges’ that ‘visits here have “told” upon the thoughts and plans of the artisan. Those 79   Rancière and Vauday (1988).   Miller (1995b); Trentmann (2004).   ‘A Pamphlet’, cited in ‘The Crystal Palace, as a Teacher of Art and Art-­Manufacture. Part IV’, AJ (1 October 1856): 305. 81   Gagnier (2000). 82   ‘The Crystal Palace, as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture. Part I’, AJ (1 July 1856): 217. 78 80



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who have been half a dozen times within it . . . are far less easily content with mediocrities than they used to be’.83 The AJ was, however, along with the press in general, just as vocal in its condemnation of the venue’s failure to unite art and manufacture. The fault was not so much with the Fine Arts Courts, which, five years after the Palace opened, were still regarded as genuine vehicles for the improvement of national taste, art, and manufacture; Greek sculpture was doing its job.84 By 1863, etchings of the Fine Arts Courts had even made it into a design manual aimed at ‘both the student and the worker’ (and available far more cheaply than Jones’s lavish Grammar of Ornament).85 The Industrial Courts were the main source of frustration. They presented pathetic visions of lost opportunities, were ‘scantily furnished’, and failed to sufficiently represent the industrial arts of contemporary Britain. The blame lay as much with manufacturers as the Palace Company, for failing to take up the chance to exhibit their wares to a large audience in such opportune display conditions.86 At the time of the Palace’s opening, the ILN imagined ‘the newmarried couple, not only spending hours of honeymoon in lounging through the Art Courts, or resting in the Gardens, but in more domestic mood, discussing, criticising and selecting the whole furniture of a house . . . without leaving the Crystal Palace Company’s premises’.87 The paper had clearly caught on to the intention to integrate art viewing and shopping at the Palace. But did the experience of fine art at the Palace improve visitors’ ability to select tasteful goods on their shopping trips in the south nave, as Jones and Wyatt hoped? Physician Andrew Wynter fretted about the sale of produce at Sydenham. His anxieties related to the social make up of the Palace audience; ‘the middle and lower classes’, who would demand ‘a lower class of goods’: ‘A bedstead or a sideboard, a carpet or a dining-room table, would cost too much . . . But a pen-wiper for “our Mary-Ann” at home; a work box ticketed 10s. 6d. for “Sister Mary;” or “something in the handkerchief 83   ‘The Crystal Palace, as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture. Part IV’, AJ (1 October 1856): 305. 84   ‘The Crystal Palace Art-Union’, ILN (28 May 1859): 517. 85   Newbery (1863): i. 86   ‘The Crystal Palace, as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture. Part VI’, AJ (1 December 1856): 373; ‘The Crystal Palace, as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture. Part I’, AJ (1 July 1856): 219; ‘The Crystal Palace, as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture. Part IV’, AJ (1 October 1856): 305; ‘The Crystal Palace Art-Union’, ILN (29 January 1859): 107. 87   ‘The Progress of the Crystal Palace’, ILN (22 April 1854): 374.

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way for Tom,” will be incessantly called for.’88 Wynter notes that the Palace directors issued regulations ‘to insure the supply of the best class of goods only to the building’. They too were evidently concerned about the sale of tasteless objects. He maintained, however, that ‘It will require the most absolute authorities of this kind to prevent the degeneracy we speak of’. Wynter’s article is speculative, written before the Palace opened, yet the products sold in the 1870s at John Birch Thomas’s toy stall in the nave suggest quite how astute was this observation (see Chapter 1). By 1901 it boasted ‘Over one eighth of a mile of shops’ selling ‘fancy articles, embroidery, toys, porcelain . . . perfume stalls. Glove and Fan stall’.89 It seems unlikely that many items among this array of commodities matched up to Owen Jones’s elevated standards of design manufacture and consumption. Visitors could, and did—according to an 1854 article in the Chronicle—opt to scrutinize ‘a strongly recommended “corn plaster”’ more closely than the sculpture in the Fine Arts Courts.90 The tasteless consumer choices were, according to commentators like Wynter, clearly delineated along class lines. Further, far from art encouraging tasteful consumption, a range of publications identify shopping and spectacle as the cause of distraction from art educational pursuits. An article entitled ‘The People’s Academy’ complained that at first sight the Sydenham Palace was a profusion of advertisements, and observed that ‘Instead of a bright compound of conservatory, sculpture gallery, and museum, you find yourself in a place half bazaar, half eating-house, where you are solicited to buy everything you chance to look at’.91 Commentators maintained that opening the Palace doors to commerce fundamentally corrupted it— regardless of the design-reforming consumption-improving aims of Jones and Wyatt. Some visitors refused to participate in Jones and Wyatt’s mission to connect sculpture with manufacture. Francis Wey found the Palace’s   Wynter (1853): 615.   Crystal Palace Programme and Guide to the Entertainments, 16 May 1901, Reading University Special Collections. 90   ‘The Crystal Palace and the Christmas Festivities’, Morning Chronicle (18 December 1854): V&A1, I, 151. 91   ‘The People’s Academy’, The Architect (7 August 1869), V&A1, II, 61. See also ­Esquiros (1867): 204; Heine (1874): 10; Martineau (1854): 548; ‘The Value of the “Courts” of Architecture and Sculpture at the Crystal Palace’, AJ (1 August 1854): 233; Morning Chronicle (24 July 1854), V&A1, I, 138; ‘The Crystal Palace’, The Times (7 April 1860), V&A1, II, 63. 88 89

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juxtaposition of artistic reproductions and consumables ‘merely bizarre’, complaining that ‘The English do not hanker after purity of taste or general harmony’. Wey sets out to observe the differences between French and English culture. But the confusion between commercial and artistic impulses clearly had a marked impact on how he perceived the sculpture on display at Sydenham; ‘Idealism and reality clash in these precincts’, he noted. Sculpture (‘Idealism’) was embattled against the prosaic trappings of everyday life, ‘stalls where dolls, ironmongery, garden implements, pocket-books and Windsor soap are displayed’.92 Sculpture in the Greek Court consistently appears as peculiarly resistant to assimilation with commerce. Punch delighted in enumerating the bathetic realities of sculpture on show at Sydenham, revelling in the fact that the main area of the Greek Court was supposed to represent the Agora—the Greek marketplace.93 Yet even this satirical publication concludes its ‘Handbook to the Greek Court’ with a serious and deferential nod to the quality of the sculpture it housed; ‘it would be impossible to enumerate all the objects of interest in the Greek Court of the Crystal Palace . . . for genius has given to nearly every one a sort of immortality.’94 Greek sculpture was both part of the fracas at Sydenham, but somehow inherently aloof. Visions of classical art as ideal and distinct from commerce were not easily shaken, and the connections that Jones and Wyatt asserted between classical art and the consumption of saucepans were—for these critics—risible. Others feared that too much emphasis was placed on the fine arts, and not enough on industry for the Sydenham Palace to fulfil its aims. In 1855, one Palace shareholder, the aptly named George Purchase, published a letter criticizing the way in which the Palace utilized classical sculpture in particular, noting that it ‘must not be a Museum for the works of past ages merely on account of their antiquity . . . It must keep in advance of the world’.95 Modernity could not be reached via antiquity. Yet for all the uneasiness about the relationship between ‘fine’ and ‘useful’ art at the Palace, classical Greek produce was the crux   Wey (1935): 158.   ‘Punch’s Handbooks to the Crystal Palace. The Greek Court’, Punch (9 August 1854): 61. 94   ‘Punch’s Handbooks to the Crystal Palace. The Greek Court ctd.’, Punch (26 August 1854): 80–1. 95   Purchase (1855): 8–9. See also ‘Progress of the Crystal Palace’, ILN (22 April 1854): 373. 92 93

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of the one industrial court that The Times, AJ, and ILN unanimously deemed a success. This was the Ceramic Court, ‘thronged daily’, by both ‘admiring’ and ‘studious’ groups.96 It exemplified ‘what the entire institution might have been, and ought to have been’.97

The Ceramic Court Situated in the ‘industrial’ south nave, next to ‘Fancy Manufactures’ and opposite ‘Sheffield’, the Ceramic Court (Figure 4.1, Appendix 1, no. 25) opened in 1856 in what was previously the Mixed Fabrics Court, and offered an enormous selection of original wares as well as copies, dating from Chinese pottery from 2500 bce to more contemporary Sèvres and Wedgwood. It also housed a reconstruction of an

Figure 4.1  Visitors in the Ceramic Court, from ‘The Crystal Palace, as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture’, Art Journal (1 July 1856): 217. Reproduced with permission from an image produced by ProQuest LLC for its online product, British Periodicals, . 96   ‘The Crystal Palace as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture. Part III’, AJ (1 September 1856): 282. 97   ‘Art at the Crystal Palace’, AJ (1 November 1859): 337–8. See also ‘The Crystal Palace Art-Union’, ILN (29 January 1859): 107.



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‘Italo-Greek’ tomb, showing a skeleton buried with Greek pottery.98 This was quite a departure from contemporary display in the British Museum, which ordered vases by size and shape in wooden showcases.99 The court was curated by Thomas Battam, an appropriately well-rounded art-industrialist, who had previously worked as art superintendent at the Copeland porcelain factory, and by the 1850s ran his own firm producing replica ancient Greek pottery. The Ceramic Court displayed Greek pottery as an aesthetic object, a commodity for sale (in replica), and a piece of archaeological evidence, testifying to the multiple aims of the Palace displays.100 Nineteenth-century design reformers held Greek pottery in high regard. The 1835/6 Select Committee included a page of illustrations of vases in its report, and design reformers regularly recommended the British Museum’s vase rooms as a catalogue of examples for artisans wishing to improve their design skills.101 According to the AJ, Greek vases in the Ceramic Court demonstrated ‘the application of classic taste and refined feeling to objects devoted to purposes of familiar and humble requirements’.102 The ordinariness of Greek pottery emphasized by design reformers provides a rather different perspective on the conventional account of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reception history of these objects, which has been held culpable for inflating (and distorting) the status of ancient pottery into an exclusively high art form.103 The Ceramic Court at Sydenham presented Greek pottery as the ultimate example of what art and manufacture could produce in tandem; the finest of the fine arts bettering household appliances. 98   Greek pottery was considered to be Etruscan or Italic, due to its discovery in burial chambers in South Italy. The connection with Etruria, in the north of Italy, was more a product of nineteenth-century interest in the Etruscans than geographical location. Antiquarians began from the 1750s to discuss these wares as ‘Greek’, but the association with Italy and Etruria persisted well into the nineteenth century. On the history of the study of vase painting see Cook (1997): 275–311. 99   Nørskov (2002): 122–3; Jenkins and Sloan (1996); Coltman (2006): 70–96. 100   ‘The Crystal Palace as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture. Part III’, AJ (1 September 1856): 282. 101   HC Paper (1836) no. 568, Illustration Plate 2. See also the responses by the manufacturer Mr Edward Cowper and the Royal Academician R. R. Reinagle in volume II of the same, 49–54; Wilkinson (1858): 249–61; ‘Notes and Illustrations from the Museums of Italy, Practically Applied to the Industrial Arts’, Art Union (1 March 1848): 86. 102   ‘The Crystal Palace as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture. Part V’, AJ (1 November 1856): 347. 103   Vickers (1987) is the chief (and not uncontroversial) proponent of this view.

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The Ceramic Court garnered further praise for bringing to the fore the successes of contemporary British pottery manufacture.104 There was a classical connection here too, since Greek pottery was celebrated anew in the 1850s as the source of inspiration for eighteenth-century pottery entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood.105 It was not just the formal qualities of Greek pottery that Wedgwood emulated, but ancient Greek practice. The Art Union emphasized that just as ‘the greatest artists . . . furnished designs for the vases and bronzes of Greece’, so too ‘the revolution which our Wedgwood worked in the English potteries, was most effectually aided by Fuseli and Flaxman’.106 Battam’s company were praised for continuing in this vein, reproducing Greek pottery not just to celebrate antiquity, but also to advertise their own technical capabilities. Responses to these pieces celebrate ancient and modern producer side by side.107 Greek pottery was a conduit for the display of modern mechanical prowess. The crossover between art and manufacture was once again exemplified by Greek wares, and the success in applying this practice to contemporary British manufacture made manifest to the public in the Ceramic Court at Sydenham.

The Crystal Palace Art-Union The press offered similarly unanimous support to the Crystal Palace Art-Union (CPAU), founded in 1859 and also directed by Thomas Battam. It was presented in the press as an undertaking that might redeem the palpable failures—or better the existing triumphs—of the Palace venture. All commentators identified the urgent need and potential for the Sydenham Palace to draw ‘increased attention to the industrial arts of our country’.108 The CPAU was heralded as a departure from existing art unions. The Art-Union of London had emerged in 1836 from the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures. It aimed to improve public taste, 104   ‘The Crystal Palace – The New Ceramic Court – The Refreshment Department’, Observer (5 July 1856), V&A1, I, 208; ‘The Crystal Palace, as a Teacher of Art and ArtManufacture. Part I’, AJ (1 July 1856): 220; ‘The Crystal Palace as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture. Part III’, AJ (1 September 1856): 282. 105   For a survey of design-reforming ideas about Wedgwood, see Lubbock (1995): 220–5. 106   Taylor (1848). 107   ‘The Crystal Palace, as a Teacher of Art and Art-Manufacture. Part I’, AJ (1 July 1856): 220. 108   ‘The Crystal Palace Art-Union’, ILN (29 January 1859): 107.



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and to generate interest in and demand for new artworks, promoting emergent painters and sculptors. Members paid an annual subscription of a guinea, which entitled them to be entered into a prize draw to win a sum to be spent on a painting or sculpture. From 1838 it also guaranteed them an annual ‘presentation work’ of an engraving after a celebrated British painting.109 The CPAU also aimed to improve public taste, but sought to do so not via paintings and engravings, but prizes and presentation awards of ‘industrial arts’. The press considered the CPAU’s promotion of industrial arts to be an important development of the Palace’s existing mission.110 The taste fostered by the CPAU would be beneficial across ‘high’ and ‘useful’ arts; ‘If this new Union but carries out one-half of what it proposes to effect’, noted The Times, it ‘must eventually exercise a most important and beneficial influence upon all art and art manufactures throughout this country’.111 It averaged 4,500 subscribers annually, although subscription costs starting from one guinea (21 shillings) would have restricted access. Judging by statistics for London, this rate was the equivalent of nearly a week’s wages for an unskilled manual labourer, and about four days for a builder, mason, or carpenter.112 Art-Union membership was a luxury not readily affordable to the ‘public’ at large, although, of course, any visitors to the Palace could at least view the displays of prizes and awards, read about them and admire engravings in the illustrated periodical press, or purchase a souvenir stereograph depicting the prizes (Figure 4.2).113 The Sheffield Court, rather than the Fine Arts Courts, housed all prizes and presentation awards, further reinforcing the CPAU’s connection with industrial manufacture. Awards involved an impressive array of mid-century art-manufacturing companies; ceramics and Parian busts from pottery firms Minton, Copeland, and the Royal Works at Worcester, glass works by Pellatt and Co., ‘inimitable’ reproductions of Greek vases by Battam and Son, and electrotypes from 109   See King (1985); Aslin (1967): Avery and Marsh (1985). On Art Unions outside London, Smith (1989). 110   ‘The Crystal Palace Art-Union’, ILN (29 January 1859): 107; ‘The Crystal Palace Art-Union’, ILN (28 May 1859): 517; ‘The Crystal Palace Art-Union’, AJ (1 April 1859): 115; ‘Art and Artists’, Critic (30 June 1860): 809. 111   ‘Crystal Palace Art Union’, The Times (10 January 1859). See also ‘The Crystal Palace Art-Union’, AJ (1 June 1860): 189. 112   Bowley (1900): 83. 113   ‘Crystal Palace Art Union Prizes’, ILN (28 May 1859): 509.

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Figure 4.2 ‘Two Guinea Presentation Works. Crystal Palace Art Union, Season 1860–1.’ Stereoview, 1860s. Parian miniatures, listed on the reverse as, from left to right; ‘War’ (Kerr and Binns), ‘Enid’ (Copeland), ‘The Bride’ (Raffaelle Monti, Copeland), ‘Italian Style’ round flower stand (Copeland), Oenone (Copeland), ‘Peace’ (Kerr and Binns). Author’s collection.

Elkington and Co.114 These awards celebrated high art, replicating the work of contemporary sculptors. But they also used art-industrial fabrics and means of production. Parian ware busts, like those shown in Figure 4.2, were the most popular choices among prizewinners, a particularly appropriate medium for an undertaking that sought to bridge fine and useful arts. Its marble appearance and name have classicizing pretensions, referring to the most celebrated marble used in antiquity, quarried on the Cycladic island of Paros. Yet it is a ceramic, claimed in 1842 as an invention by pottery firm Copeland, and readily massproduced, giving it a particularly nineteenth-century British twist.115 The CPAU offered much clearer guidance and lessons in taste to its subscribers than was the norm in existing Art Unions. The 1860s London Art-Union prizewinners were able to select their artwork from a large range of London art exhibitions. At Sydenham, however, a committee of ‘experts’ preselected prizes. Taste was to be determined and directed by the CPAU; ‘this Art Union aims to lead rather than to pander to the public taste.’116 This comment in The Critic was almost certainly a swipe at the London Art-Union, which was beset from the   ‘Crystal Palace Art Union’, The Times (10 January 1859).   Smith (1989): 30; 35. See further Shinn and Shinn (1971); Copeland (2007). 116   ‘Art and Artists’, Critic (30 June 1860): 809; ‘Crystal Palace Art Union’, London Review (20 April 1861): 443. 114

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1850s onwards by accusations that it propagated bad art to attract and profit from the support of a vulgar public.117 Taste, according to the CPAU, was objective, and could be communicated, bestowed even, upon those willing to learn. The choice of prizes and awards at Sydenham are illuminating examples of what an art manufacturer like Battam deemed appropriate taste for a middle-class public. The unanimous approval heaped upon these objects in the periodical press and newspapers suggests that a wider public also considered them correct sources of taste: ‘all bear the impress of a pure taste, and teach a refined appreciation of Art.’118 The CPAU prescribed a classicizing taste. The annual presentation awards, guaranteed to all subscribers, comprised industrially made reproductions of classical and Renaissance works, or reduced busts taken from contemporary classicizing sculpture, as Figure 4.2 demonstrates. The prizes, too, looked to the ancient Greek past; in 1859 these included ‘one of the noblest and most impressive copies of the antique bust of Ajax we have yet seen’, and in 1860, imitation Greek vases and a bronze miniature of the Dying Gladiator.119 The CPAU involved a new form of exhibition participation. The prizes were not simply exhibited at the Palace, but, as contemporary commentators noted, became personal possessions, proudly displayed in homes across the nation.120 One piece in the AJ goes as far as suggesting that the CPAU was ‘the highest, as well as the most direct agency’ that the Palace had for communicating taste to ‘all classes of the people’.121 It was essential that these works connote good taste and excellent manufacture.122 The classical evidently performed this role. The clearly defined good taste prescribed for domestic consumption was much narrower than that required for art and taste education in general by Wyatt and Jones in their founding texts on the Palace. Taste education for producers encompassed a far wider remit of medieval and non-Western ornament, and at Sydenham visitors could look at, walk through, and learn lessons of the history of taste from Egypt, the 117   ‘The Art-Union of London. Distribution of Prizes’, AJ (1 June 1858): 183; HC Paper (1866) no. 332, 50. 118   ‘The Crystal Palace Art-Union’, AJ (1 April 1859): 115. 119   ‘Crystal Palace Art Union’, The Times (10 January 1859); ‘The Crystal Palace ArtUnion’, AJ (1 February 1860): 55. 120   ‘The Crystal Palace Art-Union’, ILN (28 May 1859): 517. 121   ‘The Crystal Palace Art-Union’, AJ (1 February 1860): 55. 122   ‘The Crystal Palace Art-Union’, AJ (1 April, 1859): 115.

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Alhambra, Nineveh, and Byzantium. But when it came to objects to own and exhibit in the domestic sphere, the classical was the safest option, and kept its place as the apogee of good taste. The founding of the CPAU perhaps indicates a shift in the Palace’s initial emphasis on art education for all, to art ownership; from aiming to reach a mass audience, to a narrower focus on those with disposable income. Labourers and producers slipped out of view, and the taste of middle-class consumers of art manufacture came to the fore. Classical and classicizing works continued to be the stalwart markers of good taste for this particular audience, obviously connoting beauty in art, but at the same time, appropriate for production by art-industrial means. There was no anxiety about labelling these works of manufacture. Like the ancient pottery on show in the Ceramic Court, they occupy a liminal position and suggest the varied life of classical sculpture in mid-century Britain.

ART, INDU ST RY, AND T HE SYDE NHA M PA L AC E, c.1 8 7 0 –1 9 2 2 The press enthusiastically supported the CPAU, suggesting a continued interest in and development of the Palace’s taste-improving mission well into the 1860s. However, in 1864, Battam packed up the CPAU and left Sydenham for the West End, moving to the Polytechnic Institute in Regents Street, hoping that a decisive move away from the Palace might revive the CPAU’s flagging fortunes.123 By the late 1870s, the Ceramic Court had been replaced by the Tourist Court, largely concerned with selling tickets for Thomas Cook.124 From the mid-1860s, the Palace was reckoned to be descending rapidly into ‘deplorable decadence’ with ‘reckless disregard of the scheme as teacher’.125 In this final section, I examine how classical sculpture at the Crystal Palace figured (or not) in later nineteenth-century and early ­twentieth-century understandings of the relationship between fine art and manufacture. How would its courts have compared to later attempts to elevate taste and manufacture?   Smith (1989): 35; ‘Fine Arts’, ILN (9 January 1864): 42.   Shenton (1879): 90–1. 125   ‘The Crystal Palace and People’s Park’, AJ (1 July 1869): 213. 123 124

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The Palace and Design Reform, c.1870–1922 The Palace Company was in serious financial trouble by the mid1870s. Shareholders’ meetings, an inquiry, and various debates took place, while appeals were published in the editorial columns of The Times, and pamphlets issued on ‘The Palace in Adversity’. These provide an unhappy insight into the state of the Palace. It was not just that the Palace Company had no money; its improving displays, including the courts of machinery in motion and the four sculpture courts in the central transept, were ‘miserably deteriorated . . . Its present condition is simply scandalous and disgraceful’.126 Criticisms abounded of the Palace’s turn towards providing vulgar entertainments, and the abandonment of its courts to ‘semi ruin’.127 However, none suggested that the Palace should be entirely jettisoned. The venue continued to be necessary, and still had potential; it simply required better management.128 Even in 1875 critics remained optimistic that it could have a future in which its initial aims were fulfilled, ‘not only an Exhibition of the very best works of the best Artists, and Art Manufacturers, but . . . the most comprehensive, and best educational establishment in the world’.129 Commentators do not mention Jones and Wyatt’s design-reforming intentions, but they continue to note the fundamental importance of the Palace in bringing before the public the best art and manufacture, and ultimately improving the national taste. There were some success stories across the decades; the designer Charles Ricketts (1866–1931), for example, regularly visited the Palace as a child in the 1870s. In correspondence as late as the 1920s he claimed that the sensory excitement of trips to the Palace, and the wide range of artistic cultures displayed in its Fine Arts Courts, had stimulated his interest in art and design.130 Taste, design, and manufacture, however, were only one potential side effect of the Palace identified in the 1870s appeals, and they became increasingly peripheral in comment and guidebooks. The prime aim of those attempting to revive the Palace in the last quarter of the   Shorthand Writer (1876): 34.   Shorthand Writer (1876): 33. See also The Telegraph (13 June 1861), V&A1, II, 80; ‘Blondin and the Mission of the Crystal Palace Company – Letter to the Editor’, The ­Sunday Times (23 June 1861), V&A1, II, 81; Sunday Review (9 August 1862), V&A1, II, 99. 128   ‘The Crystal Palace and People’s Park’, AJ (1 July 1869): 213. 129   Crystal Palace: Evidence (1875): 26. See also Shorthand Writer (1876): 42, 34; Timbs (1867): 841. 130   Delaney (1990): 6–7. 126 127

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nineteenth century was to ‘secure a magnificent arena of pure and elevating amusement and recreation’.131 In 1879 The Times dismissed Jones’s systematic conceptualization of design as a mere ‘hobby’, and the taste-ameliorating mission of the Palace as a ‘pretty dream’ that ‘has not exactly come true’.132 By 1887 Jones and Wyatt and their design educational aspirations seemed to have been completely forgotten, as one (sympathetic) article sought to remind readers that the building was not always ‘merely a show place and a bazaar’.133 The one later nineteenth-century publication that does mention taste and the Palace in the same breath is hardly complimentary. Rosamund Watson’s hugely popular home decoration manual, the Art of the House (1897) describes the Palace at Sydenham as a ‘monstrosity’, whose decorative horrors were ‘forever being disclosed afresh under some new form’; not exactly the legacy Jones and Wyatt had anticipated.134 Far from consolidating good taste, the Palace seems to have either engendered bad taste, or faded into obscurity. Publications dealing with the Palace in the early twentieth century do not concern themselves with the complex discussions that preoccupied writers in the mid-nineteenth century. Manufacture also entirely disappeared from their pages. The Fine Arts Courts are mentioned, but solely as curiosities, or places where visitors might contemplate beautiful objects. Guides focus instead on the Palace’s imperial role (discussed in Chapter 6), and its history as a destination for firework displays.135 The detailed art-historical examinations and explorations of their potential for taste and design education that characterized even the most general guides from the 1850s and 1860s have vanished. Gone too are the forewords by Jones and Wyatt on the interconnectedness between art and manufacture. Henry Buckland’s 1920s guidebook was keen to establish the difference between it and its forbears: ‘Nowadays there is little or no time for the average person to wade through dull pages of unending detail and statistics.’ The Palace was now presented as a place for ‘wholesome recreation and amusement . . . an inexpensive substitute for forms of pleasure less praiseworthy and desirable’.136 It had become a place more closely associated with fireworks and spectacle than intensive contemplation of Greek sculpture and objects of manufacture. 132   Shorthand Writer (1876): 17.   The Times (5 November 1879). 134   Day (1887): 189.   Watson (1897): 171. 135 136   Muddock (1911).   Buckland (n.d. [c.1924]): 2, 3. 131 133

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From the 1870s onwards, Greek sculpture and manufacture, art and industry, were unmoored from each other at the Palace.

The Arts and Crafts Movement Jones died in 1874, and Wyatt in 1877. Their pro-capitalist and promachinery arguments were drastically out of step with the prevailing design discourses in the later nineteenth century, which were dominated by the lectures, working experiments, essays, and exhibitions associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement. The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was established in London in 1887, but the ideas that led to its first exhibitions had been debated and practically attempted since (at least) 1860, when William Morris set up his firm Morris and Co.137 ‘The movement’, stressed Walter Crane in the formative Arts and Crafts Essays (1893), ‘is a protest against the turning of men into machines, against artificial distinctions in art, and against making the immediate market value, or possibility of profit, the chief test of artistic merit’.138 As with the 1850s design reformers, members of this society asserted the need to unify the artist and the craftsperson. The two differed primarily in the means by which they hoped to accomplish this unity. Where Jones held that industrial manufacture would enable the mass reproduction and dissemination of welldesigned objects, Crane believed industrial conditions to be the cause of the schism between art and craft, not a force for their reconciliation.139 Members of the Arts and Crafts movement took on Ruskin’s anxieties about machine production, and many joined in Morris’s socialist repudiation of capitalist production, a departure from designreforming interests in salvaging the British economy through tasteful consumption.140 The conditions and processes of making objects constituted Arts and Crafts’ main focus. As discussed above, Jones and Wyatt’s essays at the Crystal Palace were also keenly concerned with producers. But they were preoccupied with producers’ taste, rather than their working conditions and social welfare.141 Further, the Arts and Crafts interest in medieval arts not only marginalized classical sculpture, but actively disregarded it.142 The social 138   Naylor (1980); Blakesley (2006): 26–51.   Crane (1893): 13. 140   Crane (1893): 11.   See Naylor (1980): 96–112; Blakesley (2006): 53–75. 141   The Arts and Crafts movement was by no means a complete repudiation of 1850s design reform. See Naylor (1980): 21–2; Flores (2006): 247–9. 142   Crane was something of an exception to this trend. See Jenkyns (1992): 302–3. 137 139

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and political aspects of Morris’s interest in medieval arts have been widely discussed, but his thought on classical art has scarcely been documented.143 Morris was little short of condemnatory when it came to classical sculpture, architecture, or decorative arts, despite his interest in ancient Greek and Roman literature and mythology.144 Where design reformers used the apparent lack of distinction between artist and craftsperson in classical antiquity to bolster their own aspirations to unite the two in contemporary society, Morris offered a very different perspective on ancient material culture. Morris expands upon Ruskin’s contrast between ‘free’ medieval labourers and the ‘narrow limits’ of the ‘perfection’ of Greek art and architecture. He analyses the human cost of classical sculpture, which he presents as a product of slavery.145 Classical art is irredeemably tainted by this connection, and is never mentioned without reference to it—even in lectures on wallpaper patterns.146 While Roman and Egyptian architecture were regularly related to slavery in nineteenth-century writings, including on the Crystal Palace (see Chapter 6), this perspective on Greek sculpture is profoundly atypical. After J. J. Winckelmann’s 1764 History of Ancient Art, as I discuss in Chapter 5, it was usually associated with political freedom, and maintained this association even when Athenian slavery more generally came under criticism during the 1880s.147 Yet the publicity Morris’s lectures attracted, and the emotive rhetorical sway that slavery held in Britain suggests that the view might have been widely heard and registered.148 In the 1880s, then, the most well-known champion of the Arts and Crafts movement was promoting anti-capitalist design, while simultaneously damning Greek sculpture as the product of slavery. There was little space for the 1850s design-reforming vision of the beneficent possibilities of capitalism, with Greek sculpture as ultimate   Waithe (2006); Banham and Harris (1984); Boos (1992).   On Morris and myth, see Birch (1986): on his translations of the Aeneid and Odyssey, Waithe (2006): 103–6. 145   Morris (1914b): 188. 146   Morris (1914a): 160–1; (1914c): 64; (1914d): 218–9. Ruskin described Greek labour as ‘servile’, but does not refer in any detail to the institution of slavery in antiquity. He makes one reference to the ‘helot Greek’ (although this of course refers to Spartan slavery, not Athenian) and the African slave; however, this is not developed or explained as a reason for boycotting the classical, as it is with Morris. Ruskin (1904): 188–9; 193. 147   See Turner (1981): 244–51. On the use of ancient slavery within debates over abolition in Britain, Africa, and North America, see Hall et al. (2011). 148   Huzzey (2012). 143 144

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arbiter of good taste. Design reformers presented Greek sculptural practice as a model for contemporary emulation and unity across social classes; Morris saw both practice and product as emblematic of a society based on exploitation, ‘exclusiveness’ and ‘aristocracy’.149 There were other later nineteenth-century voices besides those of Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, however. Not all Arts and Crafts members were socialists, and nor was the movement entirely divorced from commercial gain. It is noteworthy that one of the more explicitly profit-driven society members, Lewis F. Day, heaped praise upon Owen Jones’s endeavours in 1887, declaring that ‘No man did more than he towards clearing the ground for us’.150 He considered Jones more significant than Ruskin ‘because he appealed to and touched the manufacturers . . . much to the improvement in the taste of their productions’.151 International Exhibitions thrived in this period, and the surrounding rhetoric perpetuated the unity of industrial manufacture and the fine arts. Comments from the AJ on the Paris 1878 exhibition would barely have looked out of step in 1851; ‘by the lessons learnt at the exhibition itself manufactures are improved, invention flourishes, Art is carried a step further on each occasion, and trade and commerce and, consequently, the world at large, are benefited.’152 Christopher Dresser’s designs for machine-produced wares, from carpets to hatstands, cast at Coalbrookdale, were still being produced and turning a profit well into the 1890s. Dresser delivered papers at the Society of Arts in the 1870s and 1880s and continued to speak for the 1850s generation of design reformers, maintaining that ‘Art, then, has a commercial value!’, and arguing for the importance of applied art in the ‘commercial success’ required for any sort of ‘national progress’.153 A pupil of Jones, he was closely involved in the Sydenham Palace, where he occupied the post of Professor of Botany. In his widely circulated Art of Decorative Design (1862) he recommends visits to the Palace for students of applied art, praising the Greek and Alhambra Court in particular.154 Unlike Ruskin, Dresser praised Greek ornament, arguing that it embodied great intellectual power.155   Morris (1914b): 188, (1914c): 65.   The difference between Day’s position and the better-known Arts and Crafts Movement members is evident in Crane and Day (1903). 151 152   Day (1887): 188.   Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue (1878): 13. 153 154 155   Dresser (1872): 435.   Dresser (1862): 8   Dresser (1862): 40. 149 150

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His work arguably perpetuated and developed Jones and Wyatt’s ideas throughout the century.156 Yet the dominance of Arts and Crafts ideas in nineteenth-century design thought is readily detected in a November 1899 article on Dresser in The Studio. He is discussed exclusively in Arts and Crafts terms. The article attempts to situate his work alongside the movement, despite his overt commercialism. On his death in 1904, at the height of the Arts and Crafts movement, his writings were largely forgotten—or worse, deemed Victorian curiosities.157

Labour and Industry in the Later Nineteenth Century The Palace’s aim to improve the production and consumption of manufactures through a general appeal to public ‘taste’ would have appeared similarly dated in the context of shifts in economic, industrial, and labour relations in the later nineteenth century. Although skilled labour was far from entirely eclipsed by mechanized production in this period, there were significant changes. Factories began to replace workshops, and skilled artisans were required only to ‘finish’ factory produced works from the 1870s onwards.158 As labourers had less input into an increasingly mechanized production system, the significance of their taste dwindled. Historians have identified a shift away from production and towards consumption in economic and social life in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In this new consumer-focused culture, value lay not in the qualities of the object to be consumed, but in the fact that consumers were willing to pay for it.159 Jones and Wyatt’s focus on reforming the intellectual capacity and taste of producers was arguably irrelevant in such a climate. In the later nineteenth century, as Gareth Stedman Jones has argued, a distinct working-class culture began to emerge, which refused to be guided by middle-class values.160 Jones and Wyatt’s taste-­reforming aspirations depended on the idea that upper- and middle-class culture might guide the working classes into good taste. By the 1870s such ‘guidance’ was not just old fashioned, it was, according to Stedman Jones, actively repudiated. The Sydenham Palace tells this tale in microcosm. It was established to guide the taste of an idealized artisan workforce, which was to apply the lessons in beauty learnt there to 157 158   Rudoe (2004).   Durant (1993): 40–2.   Samuel (1977).   On the complexities of this shift, and resistance to it, see Gagnier (2000) . 160   Stedman Jones (1983): 179–238. 156 159

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its produce. By the 1870s it had been appropriated by this very workforce as a venue for entertainment, consumption, and political gatherings.161 The Fine Arts Courts sat solidly as a reminder of a previous era.

Museums and Industrial Towns In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, classical art became more readily available outside of London, Oxford, and Cambridge, in publicly accessible regional collections of sculpture and plaster casts. The major industrial towns did not institute public museums until the later nineteenth century; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery opened in 1867, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool in 1877, and Manchester City Art Gallery in 1883. Most of these collections focused on the acquisition of contemporary art, but classical sculpture continued to play a role, not least as it featured prominently in later nineteenthcentury British painting.162 The philosophical underpinnings at Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester were highly localized and idiosyncratic, but were united by their engagements with Ruskin and Morris’s writings on art and social justice.163 This common thread attributes quite different values and purposes to classical statuary from those championed at Sydenham in 1854. Art was displayed not to encourage labourers to produce art-industrial objects and to promote the economy, but as a means of combating the horrors of industrial capitalism. In the 1880s the South Kensington Museum inaugurated its own collection of classical plaster casts. As I discussed in Chapter 3, this was put together quite separately from the main South Kensington cast collection, thanks to Walter Copland Perry’s dogged campaigns. The intention behind this collection was that it be an archaeological style guide, and not part of the museum’s design-reforming enterprise. Their time in South Kensington was short lived, and they were disbanded and sold off to the British Museum and Edinburgh College   Gurney (2001).   Classical plaster casts were (atypically for the time) at the heart of the Harris Library, Museum and Art Gallery, which opened in Preston in 1893. See Moore (2003). Regional collections of classical sculpture were founded at Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter (1868, expanded 1887), Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery (1878, expanded 1891), and Reading Museum (1882). See Donellan (in progress). On middle-class collecting, the taste for highly finished classical-subject matter paintings, and public responses to these images, see Macleod (1996): 340–54. 163   Woodson-Boulton (2007). 161 162

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of Art in 1907.164 Classical casts were seen—and indeed continue to be presented—as quite separate from the practical design education that the South Kensington Museum aimed to provide.165 Medieval and Renaissance casts were permitted to fulfil this role, however, both at South Kensington and the Liverpool cast collection assembled for ‘our Artisans, such as Stone and Wood Carvers’ from 1886.166 The Lady Lever Art Gallery was opened in 1922 by businessman and industrial entrepreneur William Hesketh Lever at his model work community at Port Sunlight, Merseyside, displaying a significant classical sculpture and vase collection alongside eighteenth-century painting and furniture, as well as late Victorian sculpture and classicizing painting.167 Lever’s categorically un-modernist collection suggests continuities in taste across the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century; the contents of the Greek, Roman, and Pompeian Courts may not have appeared entirely anomalous even in the 1920s. Lever championed the interconnectedness of art and commerce. He advocated art galleries in industrial towns, alongside improvements in housing, as the best means of social improvement, and cited ancient Greek artistic education as an example for contemporary Britain.168 But his interest in the relations between art and commerce were more as a general ideal for improving the mental and moral capacities of workers, not (as in Jones and Wyatt’s undertakings at Sydenham) as a teaching tool for design education. Although more widely accessible in industrial towns, by the end of the nineteenth century, classical sculpture was no longer considered to have the potential for reforming objects of manufacture so keenly advocated by design reformers in the 1850s. C ONC LUSION [H]ere is exhibited, in eminently practical form, a realisation of that sometimes abused phrase, the dignity of labour; here may the student of the past and the observer of the present, the learned and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, meet   Bilbey and Trusted (2010) : 471–3.   The classical component of the V&A’s cast collection has been written out of almost every account of the history of the collection; accounts are usually keen to emphasize the difference between the utilitarian South Kensington Museum and the aesthetic British Museum, e.g. Saumarez Smith (1997). 166   Dyall (1888): 18. See further Flour (2008). 167 168   Morris (1980); Yarrington (2005); Waywell (1986).   Lever (1915): 20. 164 165

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on common ground . . . and yet this is a strictly commercial speculation, undertaken, it is avowed, with a hope of direct profit, no less than with a view to the lessons, which cannot but be taught, of beauty and fitness, of progress and refinement, of improvement in taste and manners, and of just and correct ideas – lessons which conduce certainly to the mental wealth of the visitors, and the enjoyment and happiness of the community.169

This passage, from a special ‘Crystal Palace Supplement’ to the popular Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, demonstrates how immersed the Palace was in both commercial and aestheticizing claims. It emphasizes the connection between ‘the student of the past and the observer of the present’ at the Palace. Even the most traditionally elite of high arts, classical sculpture, was not kept apart from industry and economic gain. It was understood to have a pivotal role to play in rethinking British design and manufacture, generating industry, and contributing to the economy. The supplement illuminates the complexities of Jones and Wyatt’s design-reforming experiments at Sydenham. Labourers and processes of production were not eclipsed by the display of sculpture, commodities, and the emphasis on the importance of consuming tasteful goods. Indeed, the Fine Arts and Industrial Courts made manifest ‘the dignity of labour’ in an ‘eminently practical’ fashion. Alongside this concern with producers, however, the ‘Supplement’ embraces the explicitly commercial aspects of the Palace. It envisages the benefits of the enhanced production and consumption to take place at Sydenham extending beyond financial gain to ‘mental wealth’, and for a ‘community’ ranging far wider than its shareholders. It was not an undertaking targeted at one social group for a singular purpose, but a place aimed at creating ‘common ground’. The combination of commerce and aesthetics here is characteristic of contemporary comment on the Palace in the press, guidebooks, and in Jones and Wyatt’s manifestos. It provides further evidence of alternative approaches to the relationship between culture and capitalism in Victorian Britain to those espoused by John Ruskin and William Morris. Design reform and the Sydenham Palace were explicitly capitalist enterprises, aiming to contribute towards industry and generate   ‘Crystal Palace Supplement’ (1854): 234.

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profit. But they identified problems with the status quo, and sought to mediate and moderate production and consumption through good taste. Debate over the ethics of capitalism issued from its supporters as much as its detractors.170 Jones and Wyatt did not advocate consumption for its own sake; they sought to encourage ‘correct’ taste and the production and purchase of good designs. Good and bad consumption were indeed noted and distinguished at the Palace; the same periodicals and newspapers that praise the tasteful consumption practices encouraged by Jones and Wyatt at Sydenham condemned the Palace’s association with cheap goods and spectacular entertainments from the 1860s onwards. Greek sculpture was particularly identified as a force that could mediate between avaricious consumption and the purchase of correct and tasteful wares. In his survey of the Greek Court, Charles Knight concludes that the plaster casts displayed there ‘lure us into the realms of poetry and imagination . . . and give us themes for speculation apart from the money-getting passion of the present day’. Like Arnold and Ruskin, Knight presents Greek sculpture as a refuge from buying and selling. Yet just pages later, he asserted the important role that Greek sculpture had to play in modern manufacture of items such as teacups and shawls.171 Aesthetic value could accrue in ordinary objects, and play a part in some refined aspects of trade. It was not restricted to, but encouraged by, Greek sculpture. The degree to which art and manufacture were combined in nineteenth-century discourses on both the production of industrial goods and the making of ancient and modern sculpture indicates an even wider role for ‘manufacturing culture’ than that suggested by Bizup in his eponymous monograph. It was not just that fine art offered examples for manufacture. Mid-century interpretations of the practice of ancient and modern sculpture were grounded in ideas about the unity of manufacture and art. Greek sculpture had to become part of daily life in order to disseminate its apparently inherent taste. Yet the concept of sculpture as taste enhancing depended on its being ideal and removed from the quotidian. Its established role in the canon, its age, and the physical qualities of ‘order’, ‘perfection’, and ‘beauty’ that Victorians identified in Greek sculpture enabled it to have practical uses. But this practical role depended at the same time on maintaining its prestigious status as something apart from the objects it was intended to reform.   Searle (1998).

170

  Knight (1858–60): xxxii; 2.

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The directorate reconciled these apparently contradictory statuses through generalizing appeals to the transcendental ‘beauty’ of Greek sculpture. The debate over the display of nude sculpture, which I discuss in Chapter 5, however, suggests that in practice ‘beauty’ was not always an adequate justification where the new mass audience—and concerns about their welfare—were concerned. Campaigners hoped that the consequences of taste improvement would reach farther than the realm of commerce, and the story of design reform is only partly told by focusing on its concerns with improving manufacture. The Art Union argued in an 1848 article on ‘The Mutual Interests of Artists and Manufacturers’ that ‘the extension . . . of artistic taste, will afford the philanthropist most powerful leverage for securing the moral and social elevation of the British people’.172 Chapter 5 examines ideas about the role of Greek sculpture in the improvement of morality, expanding the story of taste elevation beyond the purchase of fancy goods.

  Taylor (1848).

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5 Greek Sculpture, Beauty, and Morality On 8 May 1854, The Times published a letter addressed to the Crystal Palace directorate. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of London, St. Asaph, Winchester, Lichfield, and Salisbury as well as Lord Shaftesbury, were among the petitioners who claimed that they ‘might have multiplied signatures in its support almost to any extent’. They were anxious about ‘the present condition of the nude male statues of the human form’ exhibited at the Palace. ‘We are persuaded’, noted the protesters, ‘that the exhibition, to promiscuous crowds of men and women, of nude statues in the state there represented, must, if generally submitted to, prove very destructive to that natural modesty which is one of the outworks of virtue’. It concluded with a demand, ‘but a small thing, not at all a sacrifice in point of artistic beauty – viz., the removal of the parts which in “the life” ought to be concealed, although we are also desirous that the usual leaf may be adopted’. The Times noted that ‘an extensive order for the earliest fashions of Paradise was never before issued’, and there were fears that the Palace’s grand opening would be delayed while plaster manufacturers hastily assembled sufficient fig leaves for a semblance of decency.1 The letter was joined by a flurry of vociferous anti-nudity pamphlets, and in 1862, Susan Flood, a young member of the Plymouth Brethren, was apparently so affronted by the nude pagans displayed in the Crystal Palace (or ‘the very temple of Belial’ as she described it), that she smashed several plaster casts with her parasol.2 Ideas about religion and personal morality in classical antiquity—and modern Britain—were brought to the fore by the Palace’s unparalleled exhibition of plaster casts of sculpture to a mass audience.   ‘The Crystal Palace’, The Times (8 May 1854).

1

  Gosse (1908): 292–4.

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When the Palace directorate capitulated to the demands of the bishops and peers, Owen Jones purportedly reacted with ‘horror’.3 Jones had specifically set out to exhibit the unclothed forms of classical sculpture in order to improve morality among the Palace’s new mass audience. He had even suggested that money spent at Sydenham ‘would save many thousands more from being spent on building gaols’.4 He was backed up by other contemporary commentators, who fitted the Palace—one of the first publicly accessible locations to encourage art viewing as a pastime for all sections of society—into a well-established association between viewing art and elevated moral conduct.5 Before the Palace had even opened its glass doors, conflicting ideals beset and hindered the exhibition of sculpture. Classical sculpture was not, however, simply considered either transcendentally beautiful, representing a pure ancient world, or alternatively a corrupting symbol of pagan immorality. The petition from the bishops and peers makes this quite clear; it seeks only to modify the statuary, rather than remove it altogether. The casts are still esteemed as objects of ‘artistic beauty’. In this chapter, I explore the ideas behind these varied understandings of classical sculpture. I unpick Jones’s claims for sculpture’s moral imperative, before examining the hostilities to the display of ‘heathen’ sculpture, setting the bishops’ letter in the context of the artistic and social history of the nude, ideas about sexuality and obscenity, and mid-nineteenth-century religiosity.

TH E BEAU T I F UL AND T HE G O OD IN 1854 Debates over the relationship between art and morality have been a longstanding feature both of philosophical and public-policy-related debate, and continue to occupy an important position in both today.6 Are aesthetics and ethics analytically connected? Mutually constitutive? Is art that is moral more beautiful? 7 At the Crystal Palace, matters were no different. An important aspect of the Palace’s role was the aesthetic education of its new audience. 4   ‘The Crystal Palace’, The Times (8 May 1854).   Jones (1863): 56.   Wey (1935): 159–60; Eastlake (1855): 304. 6 7   Bermúdez and Gardner (2003).   See Gaut (2007): 6–9. 3 5

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In his opening speech, Samuel Laing spoke of the Palace ‘awakening instincts of the beautiful’, and an article in the Athenaeum remarked that ‘This building must advance the refinement and civilisation of the age, it must bring rich and poor into contact, and fill them for a time with a common sympathy for the Beautiful’.8 The Palace directors’ and architects’ aspiration that art might ‘advance’ the populace depended on a connection between morality and the contemplation of beauty. The Sydenham venue was identified as particularly significant because it allowed this to take place in a mixed class environment. Greek and Roman literature and philosophy were well established in British Humanist thought from the sixteenth century onwards as a realm offering ethical improvement.9 Sculpture does not so ­obviously offer moral guidance as episodes from, for example, ancient history. Greek sculpture (and not Roman, as will become clear), however, had the unique quality of a longstanding association with beauty.10 Greek beauty is constantly referred to in discussions of the improving possibilities of the Palace. According to the archaeologist Edward ­Falkener, one ‘Advantage of the study of Antiquity’ lay in the connection between Greek sculpture, beauty, and morality: ‘He who studies constantly the beautiful and the grand . . . cannot be a bad man; and if this effect be produced on the professor, the more general cultivation of the fine arts must instil principles of quietness and contentment in a nation’.11 Greek sculpture was ripe for morally improving, even pacifying, contemporary Britain. Beauty was a highly debated concept throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the association between it and morality was far from taken for granted. Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) had made the relation especially problematic.12 In later nineteenthcentury England the writers and painters associated with aestheticism continued to separate art from utility, including morality.13 The connection between art and morality remained fundamental, however, to John Ruskin and many other mid-nineteenth-century social critics, 8   Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (1855): 3; ‘The Sydenham Palace’, Athenaeum (3 June 1854): 684. 9   Fussell (1965); Turner (1981): 15–76. 10   As discussed in Chapter 2, what is referred to as ‘Greek’ in the Crystal Palace is somewhat different from what archaeologists today label Greek; it encompasses pretty much everything that is not a Roman portrait bust, and excepting the Aegina and Parthenon marbles, comprises what is usually referred to today as ‘Greco-Roman’. 11 12   Falkener (1851): 3.   See Kemal (1992): 165–6. 13   See Prettejohn (1999b): 1–6.



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including the architects of the Crystal Palace. Greek sculpture was pivotal in this debate, due to its well-established status as unquestionably beautiful, and as the ultimate arbiter of good taste, as discussed in Chapter 4. Further, the writings of art theorists had established a connection between ancient Greek life and Greek sculpture, which I explore in the first section of this chapter. Aesthetic criticism was something of a casualty of the development and enthusiastic uptake of the methods of critical theory in the 1980s and 1990s. Since the early 2000s, however, a turn to the ‘new aestheticism’ has argued for the importance of addressing aesthetic experience as a means of new critical insights.14 Beauty is also enjoying something of renaissance in art-historical discussions, but it is still far from central to current scholarship, and archaeologists are certainly ill at ease with the idea of aesthetic elements playing a role in the evaluation of ancient sculpture.15 Here I demonstrate the centrality of beauty to evaluations of classical sculpture in the nineteenth century, even in self-proclaimed ‘scientific’ archaeological debates. The Crystal Palace’s championing of classical sculpture for a combination of aesthetic and practical ethical purposes offers an invaluable insight into a wider social role attributed to Greek sculpture in the nineteenth century beyond teaching dates and art-historical chronologies, discussed by philosophers, artists, social reformers, politicians, and early archaeologists alike.

Beauty in Guidebooks and Classical Archaeology The Crystal Palace guidebooks are effusive about the beauty of Greek sculpture. The amount of detail varies, but very rarely does Greek sculpture appear in a sentence unaccompanied by beauty as its attribute. Press comment, descriptions in the summary, cheaper handbooks, and children’s guides and stories about the Palace, reveal little more than bland clichés where ‘beauty’ describes anything pleasing. It is, however, almost exclusively used with reference to Greece: ‘for only there does the mind feel satisfied in the contemplation of beauty and truth.’16 14   See further Joughin and Malpas (2003); Matthews and McWhirter (2003). Martindale (2005) is an interesting intervention in classical studies. 15   Elkins (2006); Prettejohn (2005); Taylor et al. (1994). 16   ‘Letter to the Editor’, Morning Post (9 September 1854), V&A1, I, 135.

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Figure 5.1  South-side corridor of the Greek Court, with painted Egyptian figures to the left, and the painted Parthenon frieze in the centre to the rear. Unknown date. Bromley Local Studies and Archives (CP2B).

The beauty of Greek sculpture is usually emphasized in contrast with its counterparts in the neighbouring Egyptian Court. Commemorative photographs and stereograph cards dramatically stage the face-off between Greek and Egyptian statuary in the south side of the Greek Court (Figure 5.1). Guidebooks, journals, and newspapers reiterate the General Guide to the Crystal Palace’s description: On the one side of him is an Egyptian wall inclining inwards, with its angular pictorial decorations, and the passive colossal figures guarding the entrances. On the other side are the beautiful columns and bold cornices of the Greek Doric, surrounded by statues characterised by beauty of form and refined idealised expression.17

17   Phillips (1854): 47. See also Adams (1861): 63; Esquiros (1867): 226; ‘The Assyrian Court at the Sydenham Palace’, Reynolds’s Miscellany (6 May 1854): 232; ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (25 March 1854): 103. On the relationship between Greece and Egypt at Sydenham, see Moser (2012): 151–5. On Egyptian and Greek beauty in nineteenth-century Britain, Colla (2007): 45–60.

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The majority also describes Roman sculpture in unfavourable terms, as ‘degenerate’, displaying ‘wanton luxuriousness’ in contrast with ‘a grandeur of conception, a delicacy of sentiment, a poetical refinement’ identified in Greek sculpture.18 The Romans were ‘warriors and men of business’, and the centre of the Roman Court was occupied not by sculpture embodying beauty, but models of the city.19 Further, Lady Eastlake’s comparison of the Greek and Roman Courts holds the Romans responsible for contemporary society’s divorce from the beautiful (i.e. Greece): He [the Roman] it was who separated us from that beautiful antique world which was as foreign to him as to ourselves, and far less sacred. Here we see the men with whom the instincts of beauty and the reign of ideality ceased, but with whom the hard practical work and system of this world of ours began.20

In all these comments, the beauty of Greek art is seen as self-evident, not meriting explanation. While the more detailed guides to individual courts and the Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor engage much more closely with discussions of why Greek art was beautiful, none question its status as such. The association of Greek sculpture with beauty was far from limited to the Palace guidebooks. These reflected prevailing approaches to Greek sculpture in contemporary art-historical discussions, lectures, and histories of Greece and archaeological writings. Charles Newton, for example, is renowned for his insistence on the importance of the historical context of sculpture. He argued that a wide range of Greek artefacts should be chronologically organized, rather than exhibiting selective masterpieces. Yet even he justifies this proposed system of arrangement by appealing to the desire to find beauty: ‘We cannot appreciate art aesthetically unless we first learn to interpret its meaning and motive.’21 Ethnologist Francis Pulszky’s writings on the importance of chronological order in museum arrangements have likewise been explained solely as an example of the new ‘scientific’ archaeological concern with demonstrating the evolution of art.22 Yet his pleas for chronology were predicated on a desire to show off the beauty of sculpture, and thus to enhance its ethical potential. He decried the disorder of current museum arrangements, where ‘The sentiment of 19   Phillips (1854): 51.   Crystal Palace (1893): 6.   Eastlake (1855): 328. See also ‘To the Public’, ICPG, 1/1 (1853): 9. 21 22   Newton (1880): 68.   Jenkins (1995): 67–8. 18 20

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the Beautiful . . . remains undeveloped in the mind of the public; but it cannot be doubted that purity of imagination, bent on the noble and the beautiful, is the best support of the moral feelings’.23 The connection between Greek art and beauty evidently had a considerable grasp on archaeological thought in the mid-nineteenth century.

Winckelmann and Greek Beauty It would be difficult to conceive of any of these discussions—from Palace guidebook to archaeological essay—without Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art (1764). Greek sculpture had long been described as beautiful, but it was Winckelmann’s writings that emphatically made the connection between Greek sculpture and beauty.24 Today Winckelmann is known primarily for his formulation of a chronology of Greek art, and for associating developments in art with ‘external factors’ such as climate and social life, thus writing a history of art.25 In the nineteenth century, however, he was also read for his evocative prose and discussion of beauty.26 Beauty is central to Winckelmann’s discussion of Greek art and is the name given to one of his four periods of sculpture, that which archaeologists today label ‘late classical’.27 He asserts that one of his prime reasons for journeying to Rome was to make amends for the lack of available writing about sculpture in ‘a philosophic spirit and with a well-grounded exposition of the truly beautiful’.28 Several of Winckelmann’s essays, including ‘Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture’ (1755), were available in English translation from 1765, and the method of the History was evidently known in England by the 1770s, although not universally accepted.29 In 1849, G. H. Lodge’s translation of the Greek sections of the History appeared in English, and is referred to throughout the official Palace guidebooks. The enthusiastic reception of the History ensured that ancient sculpture was at the centre of educated discussions of beauty across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.30   Pulszky (1852): 1. Falkener (1860) has a whole chapter on ‘The Beautiful’.   Dowling (1996): 10–2. 25   On the continued influence of Winckelmann’s framework in classical archaeology, see Donohue (1995): 327; Fullerton (2003): 92–102. 26 27   Prettejohn (2005): 15–39.   Winckelmann (1880): III, 133. 28 29   Winckelmann (1880): II, 119.   Stern (1940): 92–8. 30   Marchand (1996): 7–35; Chytry (1989); Hatfield (1964). 23 24



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Greek sculpture was not simply beautiful; through Winckelmann’s writing it came to represent the very idea of beauty. Winckelmann concluded that ‘freedom’ in the city-state provided the optimal conditions for the creation of sculptural beauty. Beautiful sculpture thus became an indication of political freedom. The beauty of Greek sculpture therefore was the unique product of fifth-century Athenian democracy.31 The importance of ‘freedom’ in the genesis of beauty filtered into a variety of writing on classical sculpture. Scharf ’s Greek Court guide, for example, notes that ‘Greek sculpture, from the time of Lysippus, underwent little change as long as the country remained free’.32 An 1853 AJ article on the potential of the Fine Arts Courts at Sydenham summarizes the general understanding of the relationship between sculpture, beauty, and morality: ‘The Greeks were passionately fond of sculpture, and made the contemplation of beautiful forms a sort of moral instruction. This in some degree resulted from the peculiarities of their public life.’33 Winckelmann’s ideas about the relationship between beauty and freedom also contributed towards the notion that beauty was a moral good.34 He opposed the belief that moral improvement was the sole, or even principal purpose of art, since this rendered the artwork a mere vehicle, devaluing the aesthetic aspect of the viewing experience.35 His conception of Greek sculptural beauty as a product of the connection between Hellenic art and life, however, lent itself to a moralizing imperative. Although these associations between beauty and society are fundamental to the History, Winckelmann also problematizes them. He concludes that in looking at ancient art we see ‘nothing but a shadowy outline left of the object of our wishes’, enticing the viewer to inspect it more closely.36 Part of the beauty of Greek sculpture lay in the distance between the modern viewer and the ancient object of contemplation. The modern viewer is both struck by its beauty yet frustrated by the knowledge, enhanced by the study of history, that they will never fully comprehend it. The desire to establish Greek sculpture as a universal measure of beauty sits uncomfortably with the concept of the History 31   Winckelmann (1880): III, 339. Challis (2008b) examines the continuing importance of the ‘democratic ideal’ in the display and understanding of Greek sculpture. 32   Scharf (1854a): 44–5. 33   ‘Museum of Sculpture at the New Crystal Palace’, AJ (1 September, 1853): 209. 34   Chytry (1989): 23–4; Falkener (1851): 8. 35 36   Morrison (1996): 64–5.   Winckelmann (1880): III, 364.

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as an historic account of the particular conditions under which art is produced.37 The authors of the guidebooks to the Crystal Palace took on Winckelmann’s more general ideas about beauty, and widely reference his writings. They do not contemplate, however, the contradictions between a universal beauty and the specifics of history. This enabled them to promote a more straightforward connection between Greek sculpture and life.38 Indeed, the idea that art was representative of history fits closely with the mission of the Crystal Palace, where sculpture stood both for the history of art and of society.39 After Winckelmann, Greek culture and sculpture were synonymous; marble forms came to embody the values associated with Greek society.

The Beautiful and the Good The more detailed Crystal Palace guidebooks attribute the beauty of Greek sculpture to an innate love of beauty that characterized ancient Greek society. Those guides that offer evidence for these claims (it is notable that they are not always seen as requiring proof) refer to the inscription of ‘kalos’ on vases depicting young men, dedications on monuments, and the famous beauty contests recounted by ancient authors.40 The connection between beauty and morality emerges in the search for an explanation of the apparent Greek love of beauty. Archaeological handbooks in the 1840s to the 1860s widely cite Plato’s notion that beauty was a moral and intellectual quality. They propose that the admiration and creation of beautiful sculpture was a product of an ancient Greek belief that beauty and morality were mutually constituted. The Greeks deemed sculpture beautiful because it was connected to a moral good.41   Potts (1994); Davies (1994).   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 60–5; Scharf (1854c): 5–14; Scharf (1854a): 15–44. 39   Phillips (1854): 38. 40   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 60, 62–5; Westmacott Jr (1864): 79. For more recent comment, see Crowther (1985); Neils (1994); Hawley (1998). 41   Falkener (1860): 65–6; Raoul-Rochette (1854): 133–4, 136–9. Paradoxically, the conflation of visual beauty with goodness may have been a result of the imposition of later aesthetics onto Plato’s discussions. Aestheticians have argued that beauty in ancient Greece was a more general term that did indeed encompass moral goodness, but was not specifically identified with ‘visible beauty’. Beardsley (1966): 41; Collingwood (1925): 161–2; Kristeller (1990). Moreover, as stressed by Tatarkiewicz (1963): 231, beauty and art were not specifically associated with each other in classical Greece. 37 38

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The preoccupation with beauty and morality put Plato at the centre of discussions of Greek sculpture by the mid-nineteenth century. In his lectures to the students of the Royal Academy, sculptor John Flaxman even asserted that the best Greek sculptors refined their work on the basis of Plato’s writings.42 A comparison with classical archaeology in the twenty-first century is illuminating here; in the standard textbook on ancient sources for Greek art today, Plato’s writings feature as a subdivision of one of the four categories of ancient analysis of artworks, and Pliny’s Natural History dominates.43 In the 1850s, however, Plato is referred to at least as much, if not more than Pliny, a marker of the shifting preoccupations governing the interpretation of sculpture. Plato was increasingly prominent in academic circles from the mid-nineteenth century, as Benjamin Jowett’s reforms in Oxford installed his philosophy at the heart of the university curriculum.44 The Crystal Palace guidebooks adopt the same approach as mainstream 1850s archaeological guides, and present the beauty of Greek sculpture as a product of the ancient belief in the moral qualities of beauty. None explicitly mention Plato, but his ideas evidently form the background to their assertions, not least via the archaeological books they reference.45

The ‘Ideal’ and the Morally Good The ‘ideal’ nature of Greek sculpture was something of a cliché by the 1850s, and has a significant role to play in the connection between sculpture and morality expounded by the Palace directorate, guidebooks, and architects. The notion that classical sculpture is ‘ideal’ has a long history—and one often taken for granted, or at least left unquestioned.46 Winckelmann was not the first to formulate the notion that the ideal was the ultimate goal of Greek sculpture and culture, but he put it decisively in an essay of 1755: ‘It is not only Nature which the votaries of the Greeks find in their works, but still more, something superior to nature; ideal beauties, brain-born images, as Proclus says.’47 Winckelmann here refers to the commentary on Plato’s Timaeus by fifth-century ce Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus. He 43   Flaxman (1829): 47.   Pollitt (1974): 9–11.   Dowling (1994): 67–71; Turner (1981): 369–446. 45   Phillips (1854): 51–2; Scharf (1854c): 26–30. 47   Winckelmann (1765): 4. 42 44

  See Stewart (1990): 78.

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explicitly connects Plato’s doctrine of ideas to the perceived perfection of ancient Greek sculpture. Artists were envisaged selecting the best aspects observable in nature, and combining them to form a perfect ideal. The celebrated story of the fifth-century bce Greek painter Zeuxis selecting the best attributes of the five most beautiful girls from the city of Crotona for a painting of Helen of Troy is regularly reiterated in this discourse.48 In the nineteenth century, British critics grafted Winckelmann’s notion of ‘ideal beauty’ to the intellectual concept of the ideal elaborated by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy.49 Reynolds’s Discourses, delivered to students of the Royal Academy in the 1780s, argued that ideal (or general) beauty was imperative for the good of society. In looking at the ‘general’, the mind is always carried forward in search of something more excellent than it finds, and obtains its proper superiority over the common senses of life . . . Whatever abstracts the thoughts from sensual gratifications, whatever teaches us to look for happiness within ourselves, must advance in some measure the dignity of our nature.50

For Reynolds, moral rectitude was an essential characteristic of beauty, and the combination of his concepts of ideal/general beauty with Winckelmann’s expositions of the beauty of Greek sculpture bound together more closely the ‘ideal’ and the moral. Although he deems sculpture to be more limited in its remit than painting, Reynolds identifies a special characteristic in the sculpted form; the foregrounding of perfect beauty, an intellectual, and non-sensual pursuit.51 Beauty is not physical, but ideal, in the sense that ‘it is an idea that subsists only in the mind; the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it’.52 The ideal quality of beauty is constantly referred to in debates over the morality of nude sculpture. If sculpture is ideal, then claims that it represents a real naked human being are nonsensical. In a Reynoldsian understanding, the nude forms of Greek sculpture were untainted with sensuality. The Crystal Palace architects operated from this perspective; the idea that the undraped sculpture in the Greek and Roman Courts might be problematic does not seem to have even occurred to Owen Jones.  e.g. Ten Chief Courts (1854): 62–3. See further Mansfield (2007). 50   Turner (1981): 43–4.   Reynolds (1997a): 170. 51 52   Reynolds (1997b): 176–7.   Reynolds (1997a): 171. 48 49



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The Crystal Palace guides, and the majority of mid-nineteenthcentury writing on sculpture, easily elide the association of Greek sculpture and beauty, and that of beauty and morality. The Crystal Palace displays prompted the Ten Chief Courts, a guidebook aimed at a popular audience, to reimagine classical sculpture in nineteenthcentury, industrial, and working-class guises: ‘Venus is now at the loom; Diana among the spindles; Mars works at a boiler; Mercury teaches at a ragged school; and Vulcan looks grimy as a stoker.’ It went on to assert the transcendental qualities and potential of Greek beauty, even in these new contexts, ‘among the roar, the gush, and hiss, and the rattle, din, and pounding of shop and workroom, these eternal types of possible beauty will soothe and elevate, and be as angel dreams and whispers of hope and perfection’. It explicitly affiliates Platonic ideas of moral beauty with ancient Greek sculptors. ‘The minds that wrought these things may have been ambitious, restless, and fickle, but they could not have been gross or brutal.’ Finally, it associates, on Winckelmann’s precedent, Greek sculpture with Greek society. ‘Immured within these stones lies the Greek spirit – the spirit of Homer and of Aeschylus, of Sophocles and Plato.’53 This is just one example of the Palace inspiring reflections on the relationship between classical statuary, morality, and ancient life. However, as will become clear, not all those who perceived Greek art as beautiful also thought it inherently moral. The tension between the historical context of fifth-century Athens and the apparently universal qualities of Greek sculpture that so troubled Winckelmann in his conclusion to the History runs throughout nineteenth-century discussions of Greek sculpture. This is particularly marked where beauty and morality are concerned, even more so when attention turns to the morality of nude art. Greek sculpture offered a universal beauty that could communicate lessons of taste across the centuries. Yet its appearance was also peculiar to its historical circumstances, grounded in the physical and political activities of the ancient Greeks. For those who revered the ancient Greeks, the inherent connection between Greece and sculpture increased the importance of encouraging a mass audience for these morally improving works. But ancient Greek life did not have exclusively positive associations in the nineteenth century. The equation between Greek sculpture and life did not always stand in its favour.   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 53–4.

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In his polemical The Statue Question, the pamphleteer William Peters deemed sculpture at the Sydenham Palace to be ‘objects which a perverted taste may cherish, but fitter for the hammer of the indignant, than the study of the artist’.54 The fact that the Palace directors were sufficiently anxious to meet the demands of the ‘statuary letter’ cited in the introduction to this chapter indicates at the very least fears about the possibility of complaint. The Daily News praised the fig leaf solution for its practicality in the wake of ‘the printed and written applications of “Fathers of large families”’, and notes that opposition to the exhibition of nude sculpture ‘has been exceedingly general and emphatic’. The paper contrasts this with a more elite view: ‘disciples of high art may regret this concession to popular opinion’.55 The directorate were certainly widely criticized for capitulating. In January 1855, Punch featured a mocked-up letter from the Palace secretary, admonishing fictitious moralists for sending ‘sheepskin coats’ and ‘petticoats of Whitney flannel’ to keep Apollo and Venus decent and warm through the winter. Punch was clearly riled by what it perceived as the pettiness of the campaign, especially in the light of more pressing political events. The postscript vituperatively suggests that campaigners seeking more grateful recipients of clothing might ‘Try the Crimea’.56 The ease with which a debate on art shifted to being a debate on sex and morality indicates the pervasiveness of sexuality in nineteenthcentury public culture. The protests were more than a matter of aesthetic preference; the casts of classical sculpture generated genuine concerns related to morality, health, and spiritual sanctity. I do not wish to dismiss concerns with the morality of nude art as mere Victorian prudery, or to champion Jones as liberated and therefore ‘modern’. One purpose of this chapter is to offer a nuanced reading of ideas about classical sculpture and sexuality, which moves beyond what Michel Foucault identified as the polarized understanding of nineteenth-century sexuality as either repressive or liberated.57 I assess   Peters (1854): 20.   ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Daily News (3 May 1854), V&A1, I, 95. 56   ‘Cant in Crystal’, Punch (6 January 1855): 7. 57   Foucault (1998). Mort and Nead (1996) provide a succinct analysis of twentiethcentury preoccupations with Victorian sexuality. 54 55



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these concerns as serious engagements with the challenges that classical sculpture posed to (some) Victorian mores. Discussions of the social and cultural role of the nude in the ­nineteenth-century have focused particularly on nineteenth-century painting and sculpture. Many refer to the artistic authority that classical sculpture confers upon nudity, but there has been no sustained discussion of classical sculpture and the nude in nineteenth-century Britain.58 Here I examine the exhibition history of classical sculpture in the nineteenth century more closely, and suggest that debates that surrounded its display have a significant role to play in the formation and legitimization of the category of the ‘nude’. I also ask how the redeployment of classical sculpture in nineteenth-century exhibitions both reflected and contributed to ideas about sexuality in contemporary society. Classical sculpture is of particular interest since it offers unclothed males and females; the female nude increasingly dominated contemporary painting of the 1850s.59

The Nude in Victorian Britain The Palace’s exhibition of the human form in plaster to a mass audience coincided with a growing concern with sexual morality. In the 1850s activists were raising awareness of the problems associated with prostitution and discussing methods to control it; the year 1857 saw the passing of acts on marriage, divorce, and obscene publications, as state regulation of sexual conduct increased.60 Art was by no means disentangled from these debates. The use of life models was debated in Parliament in 1860, and many commentators considered artistic representation to be related to the spread of licentious behaviour. Outside of private elite institutions such as the Royal Academy, the use of ancient sculpture (not to mention actual living models) in the training of artists was controversial, and casts of the Medici Venus and Apollo Belvedere were banned from the Government Schools of Design.61

58   Pollock (2007): 22–4; Smith (1996): 115–21. Salomon (1996) offers a feminist critique of the continued reverence for the classical female nude, and its impact on the discipline of art history. On the significance of classical sculpture for the formation of modern debates about gender, pornography, and representation, see Squire (2011): 69–114. 59   Smith (1996): 90–5; Myrone (2005). 60 61   Bristow (1977); Roberts (1985); Weeks (2012).   Smith (1996): 17–44.

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Nudes were rare in gallery exhibits of British painting of the 1840s and 1850s.62 The Great Exhibition had helped to create a wider audience for the nude with sculptures such as Hiram Powers’s (controversial) Greek Slave.63 The September 1853 AJ noted that a series of plates of antique statues had been withdrawn from the Penny Magazine after complaints about their indelicate nudity. The AJ deemed this a public misunderstanding of Greek sculpture (but not an atypical one), and hoped that the Crystal Palace would promote greater understanding of the beauty of Greek art, preventing such future misconceptions.64 For all these anxieties about the nude in art, nude bathing continued both at the seaside and in municipal pools from the 1840s until well into the 1870s.65 There were clearly different expectations for the supposedly ‘respectable’ milieu of the gallery and the broader cultural environment.

Nude Sculpture and New Audiences for Art In Chapter 6 I discuss in detail the association of Greek sculpture with the ancient Greek physique. Here I assess the perceived inability of the Palace’s new audience to distinguish between the artistic ‘nude’ and the real bodies that they might represent. Kenneth Clark famously distinguished between the naked and the nude in The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (1956): To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body: the body re-formed.66

Nakedness is identified with the real human body, nudity with artistic representations of that body, a balanced and ‘re-formed’ version of the naked. As Clark understands it, looking at a work of art can be an erotic experience, but this aspect of viewing should be kept in check, since it might ‘risk upsetting the unity of responses from which a work of art derives its independent life’. He concedes that viewers might obtain a ‘biological’ pleasure from looking at a representation of an unclothed 63   Smith (1996): 90.   Teukolsky (2007): 89–93.   ‘Museum of Sculpture at the New Crystal Palace’, AJ (1 September 1853): 210. 65 66   Hyam (1990): 70.   Clark (1956): 1. 62 64

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human body, but holds that ‘the amount of erotic content which a work of art can hold in solution is very high’.67 In The Female Nude (1992), Lynda Nead problematizes Clark’s attempts to keep the sensual, physical, ‘naked’ body apart from the art-historical ‘nude’. Clark’s nude can only exist in relation to the naked. Yet his naked presupposes an unmediated, natural human body standing outside social convention and signification; Nead argues that ‘There can be no naked “other” to the nude, for the body is always already in representation’.68 At the Crystal Palace, Owen Jones and George Scharf viewed the casts in the Greek and Roman Courts as ‘nude’, in Clark’s terms. These sculptures were ideal, pure, definitively associated with art, and able to stave off erotic content. To the iconoclast Susan Flood and the pamphleteers, the naked and the nude were inseparable categories, and exposing a mass audience to such sights was ethically dubious. An 1854 moralizing pamphlet, The Crystal Palace: An Essay Descriptive and Critical asks: ‘Is it possible that “a female figure undraped,” means just the same as “a woman naked”?’69 As Nead makes clear, the nude is not a transcendental category; it has been formed through art criticism and institutions like museums, galleries, and art schools.70 Clark’s reference to ‘educated usage’ of the term nude is pivotal. An audience without this cultural ‘set’, like many of those attending the Crystal Palace, may well have approached the nude as something quite different from the epitome of high art. As discussed in Chapter 1, many commentators noted the Palace audience’s preference for stuffed animals and ethnological models over the casts of sculpture. The imitative and ‘real’ may well have informed the means by which the ‘promiscuous crowds of men and women’ (as the bishops and peers put it) approached classical sculpture as well. Some commentators caution the potentially detrimental effects of the nude on those without an art education, partaking in a discourse on beauty that attributes importance to the particular qualities of the person viewing rather than those expressly in the object.71 Discussing the fig leaf question in May 1854, the Post put it somewhat bluntly: ‘in a work of art true to nature, the indelicacy is not so much in the object 68   Clark (1956): 6.   Nead (1992): 16. 70   The Crystal Palace (1854): 44.   Nead (1992): 43–6. 71   In the nineteenth century, this approach was particularly identified with Associationism, which argues that beauty is not a quality of objects, but a feeling in the perceiver’s mind, a positive association of ideas derived from experience. See Beardsley (1966): 205–7. 67 69

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exhibited as in the mind of the person who cannot view it without associations which the truly pure would never feel.’72 Richard Westmacott Jr similarly cautioned against uneducated viewing of the nude, noting that ‘very few who contemplate undraped statues can have the necessary knowledge to form anything like an accurate judgement upon their merit’.73 Critics were most concerned for groups considered morally vulnerable, the poor, women, and children—the sections of the populace that the directors hoped would comprise the new audience at the Crystal Palace. The author of The Crystal Palace: An Essay does not distinguish between different sorts of viewers; the nude is damaging to all, regardless of their education. He does remark, however, that the circumstances for viewing in the Crystal Palace intensify the immorality of the art on show: ‘If in peaceful churches, or in a tranquil Belgian Museum, harm may be done, how much more among men fresh from their wine in the Palace!’74 Class was also a decisive factor, and commentators were concerned that the honest working man’s sensibilities would be affronted by the ideals of the Palace architects. William Peters viewed Jones and Wyatt’s attempts at taste-enhancing displays (or, as he put it, ‘disgusting beauties and enormities’) as a violation of the protective moral relationship between masters and workers. He reported that workmen at the Palace ‘were astounded and horrified at the objects which their masters were about to expose’, and noted that nine out of ten visitors also pronounced the statuary ‘loose and immoral’.75 Such complaints fit well within the tendency of middle-class moralists to present themselves as the guardians of common sense and moral rectitude, standing against the disreputable upper classes and the uncivilized lower classes.76 The exhibition of unclothed statuary was considered to breach more than one traditional protective relationship. The concerned husband and author of The Crystal Palace: An Essay worried that the Crystal Palace encouraged the viewer to believe that nude art could not be immodest: [Y]ou get your taste elevated up to the point of standing complacently, with your wife on your arm, before a great naked man; but turning to   ‘The Crystal Palace and Gardens’, Morning Post (9 May 1854). 74   Westmacott Jr (1855): 44–5.   The Crystal Palace (1854): 52. 75 76   Peters (1854): 22.   Weeks (2012): 35–7. 72 73

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your son and daughter, yet in their teens, you find their eyes are averted from each other, and both are half-ashamed to be seen looking.77

The family was the focus of many moral campaigning groups in the 1850s. The disruption to domestic harmony caused by the exhibition of the nude at the Palace was commented on in several pamphlets of the 1850s, instituting this matter as part of a wider culture of purity campaigns.78 Nudity was not simply opposed because it was deemed immoral. As the Palace became more established, the press focused less on the moral degeneracy that might be caused by exhibiting the nude, and instead ridiculed the notion that nude beauty could cultivate a purer moral way of life. Acknowledging that beautiful forms have their part to play in the formation of taste and finishing of education, the Post argued in February 1855 that ‘we disbelieve utterly that they will eradicate vice, lay the foundations of moral virtue, encourage the performance of social duties, or purify those deep seated springs of human corruption’. It continued, ‘Place a person of impure habits in the Crystal Palace, with its nude statues, will any amount of dilation upon the artistic beauties of the Venus de Medici, or the Greek Slave, turn the unclean current of his mind into a channel of holier and purer thought?’79 The mental faculties of the viewer were of fundamental importance. The particular qualities of artworks could enhance or degrade the individual observer, but it was ultimately the viewer’s existing moral standing which would determine whether their moral fibre be enriched by contemplating statuary. The Palace stimulated discussions in the popular press which interestingly converge with more widely recognized nineteenth-century philosophical debates; in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886) Nietzsche, for example, mocks the fact that ‘our aestheticians, who side with Kant, never tire of insisting upon the fact that the fascination of beauty can induce one to contemplate in a “disinterested” way even statues of naked women’.80 Responses to the Palace display of Greek sculpture demonstrate that the debate over the   The Crystal Palace (1854): 47–8.   Similar fears about disruption to the family were also noted at the Great Exhibition by ‘[A] Lover of Painting and Sculpture’ (1851): 12. On the importance of the ­family as a source of stability against immorality, see Weeks (2012): 33–9. On the centrality of the family to evangelical doctrine, see Englander (1989): 20–1. 79   Morning Post (26 February 1855), V&A1, I, 158. 80   Cited and discussed in detail in Stoichita (2008): 4. 77 78

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possibility of an art contemplation that divorced the sensual from the intellectual was not restricted to philosophers. The Crystal Palace debate captured the contemporary imagination. In August 1857, Parliament was debating the definition of ‘obscene’, as it was to be classified in the Obscene Publications Bill, concerned with the sale of prints and books.81 Two different discussants refer to ‘the memorable Crystal Palace controversy’, which appears as an extreme example of artworks that the Bill might deem obscene.82 When anxieties arose in the 1880s about the public display of nudes in galleries, the Palace sculptures were once again a point of reference.83 The Palace nudity debate had become part of the vocabulary for examining ideas about public interactions with potentially shocking material. Twenty-first-century definitions of ‘obscenity’ would be unlikely to include an ancient sculpture of Hercules sporting a skimpy lion skin, or Venus clad in nothing at all. Their presence in museums all over the world stands as testimony to their respectable, institutional, and authoritatively classical status. The Crystal Palace debate shows that classical sculpture remained on the borders of respectability in the 1850s, when the public was less familiar with the nude-as-art. The Palace’s contribution to the history of the category ‘nude’ lies in its dissemination of the unclothed human form, exhibited as ‘art’, to a wide range of people. The debates that arose around this exhibition involved a further audience—the press readership—with discussions about the potential of classical sculpture. The British Museum also exhibited nude classical sculpture, but its galleries raised no similar outrage, presumably because it was less attractive to a wide audience, and by mid-century was a well-established institution. Visitors became more accustomed to nudity. Given the focus on families and the vulnerable morality of children in the 1850s campaigns at the Palace, it is noteworthy that by the 1890s even children’s books on the Palace were quite content to describe and even illustrate children intently contemplating undraped statuary. The illustration of the Greek Court in Peter’s Paradise: A Child’s Dream of the Crystal Palace (1890) shows young Peter standing in a pose that mirrors a semi-nude Venus Victrix (Figure 5.2). Peter’s fussy, over-dressed sailor   Roberts (1985); Nead (2000).   Parl. Debs. (series 3) vol. 147, col. 1483 (12 August 1857); col. 1864 (19 August 1857). 83   ‘The Decline of Art: Royal Academy and Grosvenor Gallery’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (July 1885): 11; Smith (1999). 81 82

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Figure 5.2  Peter and Venus Victrix in the Greek Court. Illustration by James Denholm, in G. H. Robinson, Peter’s Paradise: A Child’s Dream of the Crystal Palace (London, 1890), not paginated. Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

suit draws even greater attention to Venus’ nudity, which is, however, safely sublimated as being ‘so noble, so true’ by the accompanying text. W. T. Stead, the journalist who published the ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, a sensational report on London child prostitution in 1885, also penned the 1911 children’s guidebook to the Crystal Palace. The morality of unclothed sculpture was clearly not an issue for Stead; his guide celebrates nudity, and describes the contents of the classical courts as ‘undressed to show the grace and beauty of their bodies’.84

Sculpture and the Sensual The male nude was the major cause of concern for anti-nudity protesters, and even comment that approves of the Crystal Palace’s exhibits registers surprise at the display of nude males.85 What made the nude male form so threatening? And how did the female nude largely escape censure?   Stead (1911): 37.

84

  Chronicle (7 October 1853), V&A1, I, 83.

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Naked Males The relative scarcity of male nudes in contemporary painting may have contributed something to this anxiety. Sydenham, by contrast, offered a range of male nudes, from the hyper muscled Farnese Hercules on show in the transept to the languorous Apollo Sauroctonos (who appeared in four different versions in the Roman Court). None of the Palace anti-nude campaigners distinguish between these different male bodies on display; it seems that any representation of the male nude was problematic. The absence of unclothed male bodies in contemporary painting and sculpture of the 1850s is, of course, part of a larger phenomenon, the normalization of the female nude as the ultimate high art form.86 Far from an innocent process, the establishment of the female nude is part of a broader societal interest in the regulation of female sexuality.87 Implicit within this formal acceptance of the classical female nude as ‘art’, and the male nude as troublesome, is the historical dominance of the white male heterosexual gaze. As Laura Mulvey famously discussed, the split between the active male and the passive ‘to be looked at’ female is endemic in ‘a world ordered by sexual imbalance’, where ‘the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification’.88 Certainly, at Sydenham the unclothed male nude was not readily sublimated into ‘art’. Given the productive importance of the male gaze, could the fig leaf letter’s fears about the Greek male nude be connected to concerns about male homosexuality? Male homosexuality did not become a matter for intensive social, medical, and legal debate until the later nineteenth century, and it is not explicitly referenced in the writings of 1850s anti-nudity campaigners.89 The bishops’ and peers’ letter did, however, assert that male nudity was ‘not surprising’ given the ‘habits of life’ that ‘prevailed in the heathen cities of Greece and Rome’ (the religious aspects of this are discussed in more detail on pp. 188–98). Could these ‘habits of life’ be related to same-sex desire? By the 1850s, paederasty was increasingly acknowledged as part of ancient Greek life in the scholarly circles within which the bishops and peers operated.90 The anxieties (and pleasures) associated with men looking at male nudes are far from clear cut; the male nude became a more popular subject 87   Solomon-Godeau (1997).   Nead (1992): 19; 43–6. 89   Weeks (2012): 125–30.   Mulvey (1975): 12. 90   Dowling (1994): 74–7; Orrells (2011): 97–145. 86 88



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than ever in British sculpture in the 1880s, in the climate of increased fears about homosexuality.91 Some 1850s medical writings held that while educated men could control their impulses (and so look at nude sculpture without danger), excessive sensory stimulation (typified by art gallery going) was extremely dangerous for young women, leading to menstrual disorders and nervous breakdown.92 If the mental health of females could be compromised by unnatural sexual thoughts, then to cover male forms that might excite them to such deviant ponderings was only proper. Medical writing at mid-century does not countenance the possibility that women might find female nudes arousing; letters between Edith Cooper and her aunt Katharine Bradley in the 1880s, and their poetic output as ‘Michael Field’ however, suggest that Venus did indeed have a role to play in late Victorian homoeroticism.93

Nude Females The institutionalization of the female nude as the ultimate high art form serves to safely remove it from the realm of the sensual. This is readily apparent in the handbooks to the Crystal Palace, where the female nude offers viewers access to a perfect vision of womanhood. The Venus de Milo was ‘The very personification of womanly loveliness’ according to one 1867 ‘pictorial guidebook for tourists’ to the Crystal Palace, while the Ten Chief Courts deemed the Medici Venus ‘the most perfect conception of pure female beauty’.94 Further, writings that emphasize the moral purity of sculpture single out the ancient Greek female nude in particular for praise. A Guide for the One Day Visitor to the British Museum (1836), for example, states that: [t]here is nothing more worthy of admiration, in the works of the Greek sculptors, than the exquisite purity and chasteness of their female forms . . . Perhaps not a single female statue has descended to us, which includes an expression, either of face, form, or deportment, that can be called voluptuous, in our sense of the term . . . [they] do not appeal to the mere bodily passions.95 91   Hatt (1999). On the male gaze and the male nude, see Solomon-Godeau (1997): 43–97. 92   Tilt (1852): 211. Tilt was senior physician to the Farringdon general dispensary. 93   Evangelista (2009): 100–2. 94   Crystal Palace (1867): 21; Ten Chief Courts (1854): 53. 95   Guide for the One Day Visitor (1836): 13.

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The British Museum guide (like the Palace guides) was aimed at nonspecialists, and strongly asserts that the nude female form in Greek art was entirely non-sensual. As such, it was an appropriate and even moral subject matter for contemplation. Phillips’s 1854 Guide to the Crystal Palace takes up a similar refrain, making no apology for nudity. He even deems the Roman institution of draped and armoured statues to appeal more to the senses than the ‘pure’ vision evident in the open nude forms of Greek sculpture, noting that in Roman sculpture ‘a material and sensual feeling more or less prevails, appealing to the passions rather than to the intellects and high imaginations of men’.96 The emphasis in both Phillips and the British Museum Guide on intellectual (rather than sensual) contemplation of sculpture has longstanding precedents in Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Discourse X’.97 The Palace’s emphasis on the perpetually non-sensual aspects of the Greek female nude also provides a mass-marketed alternative to a better-known contemporary art-historical discourse, which connected the supposed decline in art after Phidias in the fifth century bce to an increasing focus on the sensual, embodied in the ‘Praxitelean’ innovation of the female nude in the fourth century.98 Inherent in the notion of decline, though, is an acknowledgement that Greek sculpture was at least originally characterized by the non-sensual female nude. Running counter to these guidebooks’ claims for the non-sensual qualities of nude female Greek sculpture, however, is a long tradition of (both imagined and real) romantic encounters with sculpture. The British Museum guide’s suggestion that the ancient Greeks were a people ‘wholly intellectual’ in their appreciation of sculpture ignores the infamous tale recounted by Pliny of the ‘stain’ left by one man’s lustful ‘embrace’ of the first standing female nude, Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Cnidus.99 The popularity in later nineteenth-century painting and literature of the Pygmalion myth suggests that classical sculpture could also appeal to ‘the mere bodily passions’ of Victorians.100 The fantasy of sculpture coming to life, especially in an erotic context, tests to the limits the possibility of intellectual rather than sensual perception. Throughout history, male statues have moved, bled, given oracles, and even murdered people, but it is predominantly female statues   Phillips (1854): 52. See also Ten Chief Courts (1854): 53. 98   Reynolds (1997b): 176–7.   Turner (1981): 46–53. 99  Pliny, Natural History, 36.21; Pseudo Lucian, Amores, 13–7. See further KoloskiOstrow and Lyons (1997). 100   Arscott (2000); Nead (2007): 58–69; Yeates (2010). 96 97

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that come to life through erotic encounters with men.101 The sexuality of the naked female sculpture is evidently only partly sublimated through the respectable clothing of the art-historical category ‘nude’. One example from the working-class autobiographer John Birch Thomas is particularly suggestive. Discussing the Palace sculpture courts, he notes that ‘I liked those of ladies best and could hardly believe that ladies could look so beautiful when they had nothing on, so smooth and soft looking, not all knobbly like boys are’.102 This suggests how widely spread was the idea that sculpture (and especially nude Greek sculpture) was intimately connected to the real human body, straddling artistic form and corporeal reality. But this is also strongly gendered in Thomas’s account; the female nude comes to stand in for sculpture in general. A sculpted female nude becomes the real female body; it is smooth, its hard marble form soft under Thomas’s imagined touch. These ‘ladies’ step down from their pedestals and are contrasted with real flesh and blood ‘knobbly’ boys—but not with male sculptures. This is not an abstracted suggestion of the workings of the male gaze, nor a clinical description which clothes the naked sculpture with art-historical nudity. It suggests how one (at least) male visitor to the Palace wanted to present his interaction with the female nude. And it emerges rather suggestively after Thomas’s recollections of the sculpture courts as venues for elicit flirtation and fornication.

Colour and the Sensual For many, the beauty and morality of sculpture depended on its treading the fine line between real and ideal. It is here that the issue of ancient polychromy featured in debates over the sensual qualities of nude sculpture.103 Colour would instantly render it ‘real’, an ‘offensive waxwork’, deceptive and imitative.104 In ‘Discourse X’, Joshua Reynolds had argued that painted sculpture would encourage a sensual appreciation of art, entirely out of kilter with the ‘higher kind’ of intellectual pleasure that sculpture as an art form ought to encourage.105 The British Museum Guide for the One Day Visitor that was so emphatic about the pure morality of the Greek female nude, stood similarly firmly against polychromy, stating that ‘it is to its freedom from deception, 102   Gross (1992); Hersey (2009).   Thomas (1983): 127. 104   Hatt (2001): 38–42.   Eagles (1857): 277, 290. See also Drost (1996): 71. 105   Reynolds (1997b): 176–7. 101 103

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arising from its absence of colour, that sculpture owes its chief power of affecting us’.106 Contemporary sculptors experimenting with colour, such as John Gibson, were faced with similar criticisms; ‘whiteness removed the object represented into a sort of spiritual region, and so gave chaste permission to those nudities which would otherwise suggest immodesty’, noted Nathaniel Hawthorne, who felt ‘a certain sense of shame’ when looking at Gibson’s Tinted Venus (1851–6).107 Here too the ideal Venus became an all too real ‘naked, impudent English woman’.108 Richard Westmacott Jr opposed colouring in both ancient and modern sculpture on moral grounds, believing that the enhanced realism would lead to a degrading class of subject matter for art, ‘easily rendering it an instrument of corruption, rather than the means of refining and elevating the taste of a people’.109 The ideal/real debate and the immorality associated with ‘realistic’ (i.e. painted or tinted) nudes became so central to discussions of polychromy that those defending the addition of paint to sculpture were forced to address the issue. In his entry in Jones’s Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court, the philosopher and literary critic George Lewes notes that ‘The Greeks did not aim at reality, but at ideality; and the painting of sculpture is thought to be only an attempt to imitate reality’. Empirical evidence, however, led him to conclude that the Greeks did paint their sculpture. To negotiate this, he argues that colour was not necessarily a means of attempting realism.110 The notion that realism was immoral, and idealism morally elevating, was evidently pervasive.

CH RIST IAN MOR AL I T Y AND ‘H E AT H E N’ S C UL P T UR E Alison Smith’s Victorian Nude offers a sensitive and nuanced discussion of Victorian attitudes towards the body. However, despite the 107   Guide for the One Day Visitor (1836): 3.   Hawthorne (1871): 794.   ‘John Gibson, RA’, Athenaeum (3 February 1866): 172. Gibson’s Tinted Venus was also associated with Owen Jones, who designed the pavilion in which it was exhibited at the 1862 International Exhibition in South Kensington. See further Blühm (1996a): 122–3; Drost (1996): 65–6; Read (1982): 25–6. 109   Westmacott Jr (1864): viii; Westmacott Jr (1855): 45. 110   Jones (1854a): 27. 106

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significant role assigned to Protestantism as the prime force operating against the nude, Smith characterizes Victorian Protestantism as monolithic. Apart from a brief mention of ‘the emphasis on personal and public morality disseminated by the Protestant tradition and inculcated by evangelicalism, with its negative view of the body’, the particular religious context of the anti-nudity debates are not mentioned again, nor are the alternative Protestant traditions which celebrated the human body tarried with.111 As I have shown, anxieties about what art might do to people were certainly not restricted to evangelicals; there was a well-established discourse in art theory, which held that art perceived in a sensual fashion could indeed be potentially morally deleterious. In what follows I examine the background to a range of religious responses to the morality of Greek sculpture, as raised by the endeavours of the Crystal Palace Company. Although religious attitudes are examined here separately from the rest of discussion, this is not to imply that they figured in isolation from broader social and political developments. Neither do I wish to elide the various strands of evangelicalism. I discuss common trends among these conversionist Anglican reformers, rather than the movement as a coherent whole. In his monograph on the Sydenham Palace, Jan Piggott dismisses the bishops’ and peers’ protest as ‘philistine Evangelical Puritanism’. Yet the complexity of the issues lying behind the letter suggests something far more interesting.112 It weds ‘Christian and Protestant England’ to a tradition opposed to the nude forms of Greek sculpture. Further, it holds ancient Greek religion culpable for the practice of sculpting the nude, and other unpalatable aspects of ancient social life. Finally, for all its protestations, it demonstrates an ambivalence to the nude forms of classical sculpture. Many of the signatories of the letter, most notably the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Bird Sumner, and Lord Shaftesbury, were prominent evangelicals. But what did this signify for their understanding of the relationship between Greek sculpture, ancient religion, and contemporary Christian ethics? The 1850s have been described as ‘the evangelical day of national authority’, with an evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury and several prominent and powerful political figures. At least 2,000 clergymen were members of the evangelical Church Pastoral-Aid Society; some contemporary sources estimated (probably excessively) that one-third of clergy in the 1850s were evangelical.   Smith (1996): 16.

111

  Piggott (2004): 52.

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They did not occupy a similarly dominant position in popular opinion, however. In his monumental study The Victorian Church (1966), Owen Chadwick contends that ‘The British public . . . despised evangelicals’.113 But vociferous evangelical protests regarding culture and morality were potentially influential, and merit investigation.114 The Crystal Palace was already established as a site of evangelical protest over the issue of its proposed Sunday opening. William Peters’s The Statue Question claimed as natural allies ‘at least 186,000 of my fellow country men’, who had signed the petition to Parliament against the proposed Sunday opening of the Sydenham Palace.115 The same group of bishops and peers that composed the sculpture letter had successfully protested over Sunday opening. Despite the almost total occlusion of the Palace in history writing in general, Chadwick devotes several pages to the Sunday opening and fig leaf questions. He argues that these joint successes at Sydenham stimulated further Sabbatarian campaigns, attributing to the debates stimulated by the Palace a broader impact on interventionalist evangelicalism, and consequently British social and cultural life.116

Evangelicals and Culture Evangelicals have been characterized as engaging with culture only in an attempt to campaign against the threats it posed to Christian life, suspicious of the visual arts since they both lacked biblical sanction, and were associated with Catholic idolatry.117 Doreen Rosman, however, argues that this assumption is more a matter of trying to tidy up the incoherencies of evangelical statements on the visual arts, than a reflection of nineteenth-century evangelical attitudes. Painting and sculpture were certainly rejected in worship. Some rejected the visual arts in the same way that they rejected anything without immediate religious purpose. But outside of chapel and in the realm of the gallery and exhibition, many not only accepted the arts, but actively participated in them.118 The expectation that evangelicals would automatically reject classical culture is likewise not borne out by recorded reading habits. There was some unease about the ‘false’ ideas of classical religion, but 114   Chadwick (1966): 440, 446.   Englander (1989): 16, 18. 116   Peters (1854): 7.   Chadwick (1966): 462–4. 117 118   See Dyrness (2007): 145.   Rosman (1984): 152–65. 113 115

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many evangelicals read classical literature, some even rendering their own translations of ancient texts.119 The Eclectic Review was founded in 1805 as the evangelical equivalent of the Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews. In an 1812 article on the Elgin Marbles, a Baptist minister and essayist, John Foster, praised the sculptures as ‘contributions from Greece to discipline our faculties to a more correct perception of beauty in forms’. He argued that early Christian iconoclasm was quite justified, since sculpture still wielded pagan associations at the time. In contemporary society, however, sculpture posed no threat to Christianity, and operated instead as a timeless instance of perfection and beauty.120 Evangelical thought emphasized the cultivation of the mind, rather than the senses. The senses were dangerously associated with ‘man’s lower nature’. Any art form that cultivated the passions, irrationality, and sensuality was tantamount to an invitation to Satan. For some evangelicals, the unclothed human form would always inculcate the sensual and temptation.121 Satan was never far away from such instances of an impious lack of bodily shame, and the threat was compounded by the fact that these works sprung from the chisels of—as The Crystal Palace: An Essay put it—‘Heathens far advanced into the immorality of progressive superstition’.122 But if, as John Foster did, one deemed classical sculpture an idealizing, intellectual pursuit, and nothing to do with the physical human body, then the pursuit of Greek forms could cultivate the mind, and assist in ousting the devil.

Victorian Protestantism, the Body, and Classical Sculpture Scholarship over the last thirty years has questioned and complicated the notion of Victorian sexual repression, yet the explanation for Victorian anxieties about the nude is almost always, and unproblematically, attributed to Protestant (and, if refined, to evangelical) disgust for the body, rarely explained in terms of Christian theological understandings of the body.123 In what follows I begin an analysis of comments on the nude body in evangelical writing on sculpture. I hope   Rosman (1984): 174–6.   Foster (1812): 357, 358–9. See also Ten Chief Courts (1854): 54–5. 121 122   Rosman (1984): 52.   The Crystal Palace (1854): 50. 123   Mason (1994): 63–115, for example, devotes a whole chapter to evangelicals and sex, but does not discuss evangelical ideas about the body. See, however, Alderson (1998); Moran (2001); Levine (2008): 191–2. 119 120

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to elucidate what religious concerns arose, and to suggest why the nude Greek plaster casts at the Crystal Palace were conceptually so horrifying.124 Awareness of the unclothed human form was, of course, associated with the very beginnings of sin, the fall of man. The fall was a particular doctrinal preoccupation for evangelicals.125 Although man had been created in God’s image, potentially allowing a celebration of the human body, evangelicals very rarely referred to man as created by God. The fall had definitively separated the two.126 The human body could no longer represent divinity in Christianity as it had in classical sculpture.127 There was nothing to celebrate or find redeeming in the nude form of man, as The Crystal Palace: An Essay notes: ‘In a state of purity, wherein beauty could never excite turpid thoughts, doubtless it would be natural for the eye to gaze freely upon it. But such a state man has long lost. It is no more human.’128 William Peters condemns the Crystal Palace for flouting both the second and fourth commandments.129 The failure to abide by the fourth commandment—to observe the Sabbath—is a predictable criticism of the Palace. But Peters’s emphasis on the second commandment—decreeing that believers should neither make idols nor worship them—perhaps explains some Protestant hostility, especially to the human forms of Greek sculpture. An idol constituted any representation of life on earth; the sculpted human forms in the Palace were, in Peters’s reading, inescapably idolatrous. As Dominic Janes (2009) has explored, idolatry, broadly conceived, was a preoccupation in Protestant thought from the 1840s onwards. Further, debates over idolatry were not the exclusive province of theologians; they had, for example, been central to British art theory in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.130 The potentially salacious aspects of the nude can only have compounded the anxieties felt. Even the sober reflections of John Foster, discussed above, noted that some took admiration of art too far, becoming ‘bewitched’ by its properties.131 An opposing tradition to the purported evangelical and Protestant fear of the body was the phenomenon of ‘muscular Christianity’. Its 124   For an overview of the relationship between bodies of the gods and the body of God, see Squire (2011): 154–201. 126 125   Rosman (1984): 48.   See Englander (1989): 17. 127   On the shift from ‘pagan’ to Christian conceptions of the body, see Brown (1988). 128 129   The Crystal Palace (1854): 45.   Peters (1854): 10. 130 131   See Haynes (2012).   Foster (1812): 359.

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defining features were ‘an association between physical strength, religious certainty, and the ability to shape and control the world around oneself ’.132 In Charles Kingsley’s writings, the ancient Greek body— epitomized in classical sculpture—was described as a desirable form for the emulation of the muscular Christian, and the promotion of superior national health.133 He even argued that the anthropomorphic nature of ancient Greek religion ‘which we sometimes too hastily decry’ had contributed to a general focus on physical health in antiquity, which in itself was a means of praising God. In an 1872 essay on ‘The Science of Health’, he outlined a plan for health education for British men and women. This involved contemplating the ‘tender grandeur’ and ‘chaste healthfulness’ of sculpted Greek bodies as examples of ‘what man could be once; of what he can be again if he will obey those laws of nature which are the voice of God’.134 He thus combined admiration of Greek sculpture and praise for personal physical prowess, as a means of worshipping God. The term ‘muscular Christianity’ was coined in an 1857 review of Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago, but the phenomenon was already an important presence in the 1850s. A muscular Christian approach to Greek sculpture may have been more influential at Sydenham than the evangelical fears that nude sculpture would erode national virtue. Kingsley himself was a keen supporter of the Crystal Palace, ranking it alongside free libraries and museums as a positive for the average handworker in ‘eating of the tree of knowledge . . . of far more use than many average sermons and lectures from many average orators’.135

‘Heathen’ Sculpture and ‘Heathen’ Religion In a letter to the AJ protesting the proposed Sunday opening of the Palace, one ‘Kendal’ argued that Greek sculpture was unfit for contemplation on the Sabbath, since subjects ‘from heathen mythology or from the ancient history of heathen times’ were unlikely to ‘lead the mind of man to his Creator and Redeemer’.136 The letter from the bishops and peers similarly demonstrated anxieties about displaying objects affiliated to ancient religious practices; ‘It seems to us not surprising that 133   Hall (1994a): 7; Vance (1985).   Adams (1994).   Kingsley (1902): 44; 42. 135   Cited in S. Flood Page, ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Times (9 February 1887). 136   ‘The Crystal Palace and the Sabbath’, AJ (1 February 1854): 55. 132 134

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this custom [male nudity] prevailed in the heathen cities of Greece and Rome, knowing what we know of the habits of life which resulted from their religion’.137 It is difficult to assess exactly what the signatories of the statue letter would have meant by Greek religion. Ancient ‘religion’ was, to a certain extent, created by nineteenth-century Christianity, which sought to congeal ancient worship into a coherent whole in order either to condemn it, or to identify its positive aspects as a useful parallel with contemporary religious practice.138 The signatories of the statue letter evidently hoped to distance themselves from, rather than identify with, antiquity. Frank Turner asserts that by the nineteenth century, the fear that pagan mythology might be used as a viable alternative to Christianity had abated. In his analysis, Greek myths at mid-century were largely de-sexualized, and regularly used as examples in contemporary society.139 Yet a new vision of an unrestrained and debauched Dionysus was becoming increasingly central to mid-century discussions of Greek religion.140 Dionysus’ presence was certainly a source of anxiety for those protesting nudity at the Palace; William Peters singled out statues of the god as ‘living monuments to drunkenness and vice’.141 The disparaging comment in the bishops’ letter on the ‘habits of life’ cultivated by ancient religion could encompass a variety of sins beyond mere nudity. It was widely acknowledged that nudity was part of ancient life, and, after Winckelmann, many art commentators attributed the successes of Greek art to ancient artists’ familiarity with the unclothed human form.142 The letter’s signatories would have been well acquainted with classical texts; Walter Kerr Hamilton, the Bishop of Salisbury, for example, had read Greats at Oxford (1827–30), and was a Fellow at Merton College (1833–41). A whole range of ancient vices—from the sexual licentiousness of the gods catalogued in Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the discussions of same-sex desire in Plato’s Symposium—were known to classically educated Victorians.143 Further, Dominic Janes has shown how 1850s tracts about ‘Idolomania’ brought to widespread attention the associations between Greece,   ‘The Crystal Palace’, The Times (8 May 1854).   See Kippenberg (2002); Turner (1981): 103–4. 139 140   Turner (1981): 79–82.   Kippenberg (2002): 100–2. 141   Peters (1854): 10. 142   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 65; Flaxman (1829): 292; Müller (1847): 330; Winckelmann (1765): 9. 143   Dowling (1994): 74–7. 137 138

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Rome, and primitive phallus worship pursued in antiquarian studies of comparative religion.144 The connection between Greek sculpture and Greek religion was widely discussed at mid-century. Classical sculpture’s subject matter had always been associated with the gods and mythology, in standalone pieces such as the Apollo Belvedere and Laocoon from the Vatican. In the nineteenth century, sculpture was brought to northern European museums from the very pediments of Greek temples. This cemented the connection between ancient worship and sculpture.145 Archaeological handbooks, lectures to artists at the Royal Academy, and guidebooks and commentary on the Crystal Palace noted that Greek sculpture was the product of a religion that worshipped gods in human form. An AJ article on Sydenham noted of the ancient Greeks that: ‘With them a statue was not only a thing of beauty but a sacred impersonation.’146 Greek religion was one reason, nineteenth-century critics asserted, for the successes of ancient Greek sculpture. It is no surprise, then, that the letter from the bishops connected sculpture with ‘heathen’ religious practices. The association with ancient Greek religion did not necessarily condemn Greek sculpture for all Christians, however. Lord Lindsay’s 1847 Sketches of the History of Christian Art was the first publication in English to deal with early Italian painting and sculpture. Lindsay was heavily influenced by the French Catholic A. F. Rio’s De la Poésie Chrétienne (1836), which denounces Greek sculpture as ‘pagan’. Lindsay, however, went to great pains to develop a Protestant mode of history writing that could incorporate Greek sculpture into the story of Christian art.147 He praised it as ‘the voice of Intellect and Thought . . . feeding on beauty and yearning after truth’. It was fundamentally limited, however, by being unfortunate enough to pre-date true religion: ‘The highest element of truth and beauty, the Spiritual, was beyond the soar of Phidias and Praxiteles.’ The aspects of Greek art that do appeal to Christians are those which suggest a ‘striving’ and ‘yearning’ towards   Janes (2009): 111–30.   For recent discussions of the relationship between ancient visuality and the sacred, see Elsner (2007): 1–48; Tanner (2006): 40–55. 146   ‘Museum of Sculpture at the New Crystal Palace’, AJ (1 September 1853): 209. See also: Falkener (1860): 47–8; Flaxman (1829): 147, 292; McDermott (1854): 43, 54; Müller (1847): 11–2; Raoul-Rochette (1854): 121; Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (1855): 110; Ten Chief Courts (1854): 49, 58–60. 147   Steegman (1947); Brigstocke (2000). 144 145

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Christian spirituality.148 Despite his own preference for the Gothic, John Ruskin’s thought enabled some Christians to reconcile pagan statuary with their beliefs. For Ruskin, the worship of nature was a form of worshipping God.149 In an 1880 article on ‘Hellenic and Christian Views of Beauty’, Ruskin’s friend and correspondent, the Anglican Rev. R. St John Tyrwhitt, asserted that ‘Nature was to Pheidias . . . a raiment whereby we see God, or the mirror wherein He shows us of Himself ’.150 Even the Ten Chief Courts argued that ‘The very spirit of the Greek religion is a love of the beautiful in nature’. It identified the Elgin Marbles as ‘relics of a dead religion but an imperishable art . . . an art that civilizes and refines the Christian as much as it did the Pagan’.151

The Dangers of Rome Classical statuary carried with it another religious association just as troubling and idolatrous as ‘Paganism’ for many nineteenth-century Britons: Catholicism.152 The Crystal Palace: An Essay made much of a comparison between the moral standards of ‘the favourite cities of art’, analysing the statistics of illegitimate births and murders per capita in Rome, Paris, and Munich. Art could not be held entirely responsible for their citizens’ moral degeneracy; it was a toxic cocktail of Catholicism and nude classical sculpture that brought such cities into disrepute: ‘the state of those cities proves that when a fallen religion and a fallen Art “seducing each the other,” conspire to re-instate heathenism under Christian pretences, the result is disastrous to mankind.’153 ­Catholicism is not just connected to ‘heathenism’ here; it is presented as a front for ancient ‘religion’. Further, prior to the opening of public museums in the nineteenth century, the most famous collections of classical sculpture were housed in the Vatican Museums, and the viewing of nude sculpture definitively associated with Rome. Peters’s Statue Question exclaims that ‘It is no wonder then that Italy, where taste for the fine arts in obscene and scarcely less objectionable nudity has been for ages cultivated to excess, should for ages have been the country to a proverb 149   Lindsay (1847): 3–4.   Ruskin (1903a): 46–50. 151   Tyrwhitt (1880): 479.   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 81; 49. 152   On anxieties about Catholicism and sculpture at the Great Exhibition, see Cantor (2011): 112–14. 153   The Crystal Palace (1854): 51. 148 150

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of jealousy and the stiletto’.154 Some evangelical thought attributed the political instability of continental Europe to its sexual immorality.155 This compounded the association of nudes with ‘Foreign’ and ‘Continental’ tastes. Their startling appearance in Britain was deemed quite inimical to English reserve and virtue. All of the sources critical of the Palace’s exhibition of nudes, even the more cautious journalistic descriptions of the fig leaf saga, note the strangeness of the exhibition of nudes to English eyes.156

Hellenism and Hebraism The demands of the bishops’ and peers’ letter demonstrate the complexities of evangelical thought at mid-century. The anxieties about the display of Greek sculpture were compounded by the fact that the objects on show were ‘heathen’, but the principal fear was of the symbolic capacities of the unclothed male human body. Once they had achieved the ‘removal of the parts which in the life ought to be concealed’, the signatories were, however, content that the statues remain in the Palace. In Culture and Anarchy (1869), the critic Matthew Arnold railed against what he considered a superficial morality proliferating contemporary society.157 It is likely that he would have been appalled by the narrow nature of the letter’s demands. However, the tension that the letter displays between anxieties about ancient nudity, and praise for the statues’ ‘artistic beauty’, relates interestingly to Arnold’s famous discussion of the differences between ‘Hellenism and Hebraism’ in Culture and Anarchy. Arnold argued that ‘Hellenic’ or ‘Hebraic’ principles had alternately governed human life throughout history: ‘As Hellenism speaks of thinking clearly, seeing things in their essence and beauty, as a grand and precious feat for man to achieve, so Hebraism speaks of becoming conscious of sin, of awakening to a sense of sin, as a feat of this kind.’158 Arnold’s Hellenism and Hebraism did not pertain specifically either to ancient Greece or Judaism, but to an idealizing notion of Greece derived from German Hellenists, and to Protestant nonconformists.159 It is noteworthy that beauty appears again here as the obvious descriptor 155   Peters (1854): 10.   Bristow (1977): 40–1.   Peters (1854): 8; The Crystal Palace (1854): 53; Morning Chronicle (7 October 1853), V&A1, I, 83. 158 159 157   Arnold (1994): 91.   Turner (1981): 21.   Arnold (1994): 10–1. 154 156

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for Greece. Hebraism provided the necessary discipline to remedy the moral laxity of Hellenism, but its restrictions limited the exuberance of Hellenism. Arnold was writing in opposition to the tendency to ‘Hebraise’, ‘to sacrifice all other sides of our being to the religious side’.160 Yet the evangelical signatories to the letter protesting the exhibition of fully nude sculpture at Sydenham were, to a certain extent, partaking in a similar discourse on the relation between Hellenism and Hebraism. Matters would be different if they had sought to remove the sculpture altogether. The attachment of fig leaves onto Greek sculpture could be understood as a literal imposition of Hebraic consciousness of sin onto Hellenic vitality.

C ONC LUSION The debate over the morally elevating or deleterious potential of Greek sculpture was a significant engagement with antiquity in the mid-nineteenth century. The two ostensibly different approaches to sculpture were perhaps not as disparate as they might seem. The sculptor Richard Westmacott Jr, for example, straddled both camps. He believed strongly that the beauty of sculpture could enhance individual morality, deeming sculptors guardians of the public taste. Yet he also saw sculpture as a potentially corrupting device, if the audience were not sufficiently educated to look at it. Both approaches were concerned with the effects of work on an audience, and perceive a causal connection between art and morality. Both attribute a considerable power to artworks. For the architects of the Palace Fine Arts Courts, and the supporters of Greek sculpture, its inherent beauty made contemplation morally elevating. The aesthetic aspect was of less interest (in general) to the protesters against the nude. They too saw art operating on public morality, but negatively. Their approach gestures towards what philosopher Berys Gaut calls an ‘intrinsic’ relation between art and morality, that the morality of an artwork conditions its beauty.161 Greek sculpture was inherently immoral, because nude and connected with ancient Greek life. Thus it either could not be beautiful, as Peters and The Crystal Palace: An Essay argued; or its beauty was somehow compromised,   Arnold (1994): 11.

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  Gaut (2007): 8.

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as the letter from the clergy held. It is helpful here to revisit the dichotomy that Winckelmann enunciates at the end of the History, between the historical evaluation of sculpture, and understanding it as a transcendental object of beauty. If a foundational text of art-historical criticism is unable to reconcile its conceptions of classical statuary, it is hardly surprising that such contradictory responses arose on its exhibition to the public.162 The anguished public wranglings over the moral potential of Greek sculpture provide some background to the later nineteenthcentury repudiation of the connection between beauty and morality by the painters and writers associated with aestheticism. In the visual arts, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting Bocca Baciata (1859) has been viewed as an exhilarating declaration of art’s independence from moral concerns, luxuriating in sensual female beauty.163 The French notion of ‘l’art pour l’art’ was developed in Britain by the poet Algernon Swinburne and the critic and essayist Walter Pater in the 1860s and 1870s.164 Pater castigated the contemporary, overly intellectual viewing of Greek sculpture: ‘the grey walls of the Louvre or the British Museum . . . encouraged a manner of regarding it too little sensuous.’165 I do not wish to suggest that Rossetti, Swinburne, and Pater divorced art from morality in frustration at the moralizing debates over the display of Greek sculpture at the Crystal Palace. When Dante’s brother William reviewed the Fine Arts Courts of the Crystal Palace in The Spectator in 1854, however, he did describe the purely visual experience (which he called ‘aesthetic’) of contemplating Greek sculpture: ‘Her medium for sublimating your feeling is through your sense of beauty.’166 The public nature of the Palace discussions may well have contributed to the general moralizing tone of art criticism and perception, against which later nineteenth-century aesthetes rebelled. My focus here, on what the viewer might experience when looking at art objects, is offered in part as an alternative to the rather mechanical association between museums and discipline so rife in contemporary museum studies, as I outlined in Chapter 1. The experience of viewing sculpture in a museum is more personal and volatile than functioning solely as a ‘Civilising Ritual’ interspersed with ‘organised walking as 163   See also Prettejohn (2005): 21.   Prettejohn (2007): 38–42.   Prettejohn (2005): 124–30. 165   Pater (1880): 190. See further Østermark-Johansen (2011). 166   Rossetti (1867): 63–4. 162 164

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evolutionary practice’.167 The slippage between curatorial intent and actual visitors’ responses is particularly obvious in the case of the debate over the Crystal Palace nudes. The range of possible responses to artworks—although, of course, culturally conditioned—should not be underestimated, as Peter Gay remarks in his discussion of nude art in the nineteenth century: ‘what one spectator might experience as an inducement to aesthetic contemplation, or, for that matter, to derisive laughter, another might take as an invitation to erotic excitement. We can neither legislate arousal nor predict indifference’.168

  Duncan (1995); Bennett (1995): 179.

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  Gay (1984): 381.

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Part III An Unattainable Model? Karl Marx famously asked in 1857 how it was that in the age of ‘selfacting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs’, the various arts of ancient Greece ‘still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model’.1 The Crystal Palace’s juxtaposition of industry and antiquity raised pressing questions about contemporary Britain’s relationship to the classical past. The Ten Chief Courts lavished praise upon Greek sculpture, and deemed its achievements all the greater, since the Greeks were not as technologically advanced as the British: ‘They had no cities of columnar chimneys reaching up into the clouds; no trains from Thebes to Corinth, with branch lines to Athens and Sparta; no electric-wires from Delphi to Dodona; no suspension bridges over the Dardanelles.’2 By the middle of the historically conscious nineteenth century, philosophers of history had provided various frameworks that— however inadvertently—influenced the notion that the past (and the classical past in particular) might be an appropriate place to seek contemporary guidance.3 This final section examines what it means to use the classical past as a model.

2   Marx (1973): 110–1.   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 58.   Bann (1995): 179–84; Burrow (1981); Bowler (1989); Culler (1985); Forbes (1952). For a survey of the philosophical approaches governing uses of Greece in the nineteenth century, see Turner (1981): 11–13. 1 3

6 Greece, Rome, and the Modern British Nation [I]n our judgment, VICTORIA, seated in Her People’s Palace, will be a nobler sight than was ever beheld in the ages when representations of debased peoples, harnessed to the chariots of despotic princes, were universally deemed the most fitting ornaments of palaces and temples. It will show how great a distance slow, successive steps have borne us, and in England it will strike, before all nations, a sublime and lasting contrast between the ancient and the modern – barbarism and civilisation – the shame and glory of the race.4

Contemporary British identity was a matter of great importance at the Crystal Palace.5 Its architectural predecessor, the Great Exhibition of 1851, had bequeathed it national and international standing, and its status as ‘the People’s Palace’ was elaborated upon in pamphlets, speeches, and journalism. Its national role was regularly conceived of in comparison with the ancient civilizations re-created in the Fine Arts Courts. The physical remains of the Roman Empire—its visually arresting architecture, building materials, and sculpture—loomed particularly large in such discussions. The Mechanics’ Magazine article of 1854, quoted above, develops its assertions by contrasting the decadent greed embodied in Nero’s imperial palace, the Domus Aurea, with the flourishing national ‘culture and elevation’ available to all at the People’s Palace at Sydenham. Critics held that the Sydenham Palace epitomized the difference between nineteenth-century Britain and   ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Mechanics’ Magazine, 60 (1854): 485.   The sources, as is typical of the time period, use Britain and England interchangeably; see Langford (2000): 11–15. I have tended to use Britain for the sake of continuity. 4 5

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the ancient civilizations it contained. An article entitled ‘The Crystal Palace’ in the mass circulating, self-styled ‘cheap miscellany’ the ­Illustrated London Magazine, for example, focuses not on the displays at Sydenham, but instead compares ancient Rome (unfavourably) to modern Britain at considerable length over two separate editions.6 Chapter 6 examines what the presentation and responses to classical civilizations at the Crystal Palace might reveal about Britain’s perceived national and international status. Unlike the Great Exhibition, Sydenham encompassed the art and architecture of the past as well as contemporary industry and art. History—or mythologized history—is commonly ascribed an important role in the construction of national identity.7 This usually involves the nation’s individual history. Ancient Greece and Rome have frequently been incorporated into the pasts of nations geographically remote from Greece and Italy, either as biological ancestors, via analogy, or through ancient imperial networks.8 Here I examine the ways in which Greece and Rome were assimilated (or not) into a narrative of British history at the Palace. How might the Crystal Palace have contributed to British ideas about empires in the past and the present? How did Britain’s international outlook affect the way that the ancient world was constructed, understood, and written about in this particular venue?9 The national and imperial character of museums has become a staple of museology and cultural studies.10 Historical accounts of the formation of collections have also stressed how British imperial influence enabled, even compelled, the acquisition of objects from other countries. The ongoing debate over British ownership of the Elgin Marbles has kept classical antiquities at the forefront of such discussions.11 Research on the Great Exhibition and the subsequent World’s Fairs and Expositions Universelles has similarly focused on their importance in national and imperial self-presentation. Explicitly international, and involving the participation of both colony and metropole, these temporary shows were locations where the home populace might   Cockle (1853): 244–6; Cockle (1854): 33–7.   Hobsbawm (1983); Smith (1991): 64–70, 86–98. 8   Stephens and Vasunia (2010). 9   It is primarily in reference to its role in fostering imperialism (or not) that the Sydenham Palace has found its way into secondary literature. See Crinson (1996): 63–5; Hassam (1999); Levell (2000); Hoock (2010): 393–4; Ryan (1999); Ziter (2003). 10   One-fifth of Carbonell (2005) is devoted to ‘The Status of the Nation and the Museum’. See also Boswell and Evans (1999); Barringer and Flynn (1998); Mackenzie (2009). 11   Cuno (2008); Hoock (2010): 206–72. 6 7



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physically confront the idea of colonies, and cultivate and explain the notion of their own national supremacy over these territories.12 Described by historians as the ‘first truly national spectacle’, the Great Exhibition occupies an important place in such stories of nationhood.13 In his study of international exhibitions in Britain, India, and Australia, Peter Hoffenberg captures the slippage between intended meaning and the actual messages that visitors comprehended.14 This tempers a pervasive trend that assumes visitors passively accepted the national and imperial ideas promoted at these exhibitions.15 As I argued in Chapter 1, the communication of meaning at Sydenham was far from straightforward. Hoffenberg emphasizes how some ­nineteenth-century critics thought that exhibitions displayed ‘contradictions, weaknesses, and inequalities in Victorian society and political economy, in the state, and in imperial governance’.16 Such scepticism does not, of course, diminish the importance of studying exhibitions as cultural representations of nation and empire. The fact that they generated criticism and comment arguably underlines the significance attributed to them. The Sydenham Crystal Palace stands slightly apart from these temporary, state-funded enterprises. For all its national and international claims, it is important to remember that the Palace was a private business venture in a South London suburb. It was not at the heart of the metropole, nor was it (until 1911) controlled by the state. The first section here examines in detail the various national roles played by the Sydenham Palace, and analyses how its architectural plan communicated messages about the relationship between ancient and modern empires. The Palace boasted a unique Natural History Department, which exhibited tableaux of models of extra-European peoples alongside taxidermied animals and tropical plants, engaged in ‘characteristic’ activities.17 In the second section, I examine these models in the context of what were increasingly coming to be seen as representations of the ur-Europeans; the sculpture in the Greek Court. I show how the historiography of Greek sculpture intersected with contemporary ethnological theories and writing on anatomy. How significant was it that sculpted Greek ‘bodies’ were on show in the same venue as statues of extra-Europeans? 12   Auerbach (1999); Breckenridge (1989); Greenhalgh (1988); Hoffenberg (2001); McClintock (1995): 56–61; Rydell (1984). 13 14   Auerbach (2008): x.   Hoffenberg (2001): 12–17. 15 16   e.g. Greenhalgh (1988): 53.   Hoffenberg (2001): 14; Kriegel (2001). 17   Latham and Forbes (1854): 54.

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Histories of the British Empire have asserted the importance of the Roman Empire for British imperial governance and political thought since their very beginnings in J. R. Seeley’s 1883 lectures published as The Expansion of England.18 The received narrative traces a dominant interest in Athenian colonization in the first half of the nineteenth century, linked particularly with political radicals.19 British commentators tended to associate Roman imperialism (and indeed the word ‘imperialism’ altogether) with French despotism in this ­period.20 Later in the century Roman imperialism was more systematically embraced, a flexible analogy, regularly providing warning lessons as well as positive guidance for governing a rapidly expanding empire.21 The final section of this chapter looks in detail at the presentation of the Roman Empire at Sydenham, examining changes over the period 1854–1911. The classical empires were, however, far from the universal or even automatic choice for emulation, as Duncan Bell has recently demonstrated. Nineteenth-century uses of the past should be taken seriously as active engagements with earlier times, not solely as a veneer to be scratched away to reveal an underlying ideology.22 This reductionist reflex is particularly marked in studies keen to identify the machinations of imperialism as the sole force at work in cultural presentations. The significance of the chronological arrangements of the Palace Fine Arts Courts, discussed in the first section of this chapter, is one example of the need to look closely at what appear to be obvious statements of national superiority. There is much more at work in the various mid-nineteenth-century senses of the past than imperialism alone, for all its pervasiveness. Classicists have long explored the relationship between the Roman and British Empires; Seeley, for example, had been a professor of Latin and edited an edition of Livy’s History. In the late twentieth century, classicists and archaeologists engaging with post-colonial theory have argued that their disciplines have been constituted by imperialism, and suggest that ‘it cannot come to historical self-consciousness without attention to these connections’.23 The Crystal Palace provides 19   Eldridge (1984): 3–5.   See Turner (1981): 189–204.   Koebner and Schmidt (1964); Thompson (1997). There were exceptions; see Edwards (1999b). 21 22   Bell (2007): 207–30.   See also Melman (2006): 8–9. 23   Goff (2005): 6. See also Hingley (2000); Webster and Cooper (1996); Mattingly (1997). 18 20



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an opportunity to examine further the relationship between classics, nationhood, and imperialism in Britain, looking beyond government policy and the civil service to show how the Athenian and Roman Empires were offered to audiences without a classical education ‘at home’ in London.24

T HE CRYSTAL PAL AC E AND NAT IONA L IDE N T IT Y

Private Enterprise and State Functions The Crystal Palace Company director Samuel Laing defined the purposes of the Sydenham venture in a speech at its opening, as ‘a fitting ornament of the greatest metropolis of the civilized world, an unrivalled school of art and instrument of instruction, and a monument worthy of the age and of the British Empire’.25 The Palace was to act both as an embellishment of London, and as a symbol of British power. Praise for the undertaking was, right from the start, usually bound up with some variety of national pride. ‘A building of purely English architecture’, the entire endeavour was a product of the ‘enterprising liberality of Englishmen’.26 Liberal capitalism also had a role to play; the Palace was ‘proof and evidence of what a free industrious nation can do for itself ’.27 As Henry Atmore has discussed, the jointstock principle upon which the Palace Company was based gave further credence to its claims to be a Palace of the People, both owned and attended by all classes.28 The Daily News emphasized that a commercial venue for the amusement and education of the populace would be impossible elsewhere in Europe ‘where freedom is a dead word and despotism a living

24   The ‘New Imperial History’ has, over the past twenty-five years, emphasized the impact of the colonies on life in Britain; for an overview see Hall and Rose (2006). Bradley (2010a) provides further case studies of the relationship between classics and imperialism. 25   Laing’s opening speech, cited in Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (1855): 3. 26   Speech on the erection of the first column of the Palace, 5 August 1852, cited in ‘Opening of the Crystal Palace’, Morning Chronicle (12 June 1854), V&A1, I, 122; Phillips (1854): 38. 27  ‘London’, Daily News (2 November 1853). See also Esquiros (1867): 197. On independent business ventures and Britishness, see Porter (1983–4); Parry (2001). 28   Atmore (2004).

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reality’.29 ‘Constitutional freedom’ made the Palace a uniquely English phenomenon, its equivalent deemed unlikely to appear on the Continent for many years, if at all.30 The Palace opened less than three months after Britain and France declared war on Russia in the Crimea. Commentators considered it ‘the symbol of what England, we trust, is battling for’.31 In contrast with the ‘despotic’ Russian imperial foe, the Palace embodied both a ‘spirit of progress’ and ‘the animus, the “inner life” of the great nation’. 32 One surprising omission was a permanent Indian Court, inexplicable, according to the Morning Chronicle, ‘as we are so frequently reminded that the Crystal Palace is a national undertaking’.33 Interest in displaying India to Britain developed in the second half of the nineteenth century.34 But India was not represented on any scale at Sydenham until the 1905 Colonial and Indian Exhibition.35 An exhibition of ‘Indian manufactures’ appeared in 1856, in the (apparently rarely frequented) upper galleries above the Greek Court, and received scant praise.36 The lack of Indian representation seems even more peculiar given the prominence and popularity of the Indian Courts at the Great Exhibition, which had played a significant role in instituting India as the ‘Jewel in the Crown’. At the Great Exhibition, India was produced and established as both an antiquated civilization, and a highly skilled source of commodities desirable to the contemporary West, refusing relegation to ‘timelessness’.37 The difficulty of fitting such a contradictory vision into the schema of ‘ancient’ Fine Arts and ‘modern’ manufacture at Sydenham may go some way to explaining its absence. An Indian Court simply does not seem to have been important in Jones and Wyatt’s overall schema. This does not mean that the Sydenham undertaking was divorced from imperial concerns. But it might suggest that in 1854 at least, the interests of those responsible for the Palace courts lay in providing a clearly defined visual history of art and architecture (which did not include 29   Daily News (2 November 1853), V&A1, I, 83. See also ‘The Crystal Palace Railways’, Daily News (11 September 1856), V&A1, II, 220. 30   ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle (5 November 1853). 31   ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Mechanics’ Magazine, 60 (1854): 485. 32   ‘Winter and War’, ICPG (1 February 1854): 49. 33   ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Morning Chronicle (22 May 1855); Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (1855): 148; Levell (2000): 36–8. 34 35 36   Mathur (2007).   Auerbach (1999): 210.   Piggott (2004): 77. 37   Kriegel (2001).

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India), rather than in directly representing contemporary nations under British governance. Its size, popularity, and physical association with the Great Exhibition made the Palace a choice venue for a number of public events closely connected with national and imperial self-representation. These were even described as ‘state functions’, despite the fact that the Palace was a proudly independent business venture.38 Crimean war relics and sketches showing ‘all the miseries of that terrible campaign’ were exhibited in the Stationery Court in 1855.39 In May 1856, 12,000 visitors watched the Queen inaugurate a replica of the memorial at Scutari in the south nave, and a peace trophy in the north nave, accompanied by a parade of around 600 veterans, ‘an imposing ceremony worthy of an important event’.40 In 1872 the Palace was the location for Disraeli’s speech promoting the empire as central to the British nation, and in 1897 it housed the Imperial Victorian Exhibition.41 In the early twentieth century, as Paul Greenhalgh and Deborah Sugg Ryan have noted, popular entertainments such as pageants and exhibitions emphasized the abundance and productivity of the colonies and dominions, while politicians and educated commentators expressed anxiety about the future of the British Empire.42 The vast 1911 Festival of Empire featured in the Palace grounds scale models of major colonial buildings and settlements. It offered the ‘All Red Tour’, ‘A journey by Electric Railway and Mechanical steamboat through our Overseas Dominions, with realistic scenery, Colonial life and activity accurately represented and illustrated’.43 Contemporaries deemed the Palace a particularly appropriate location, offering ‘all the charm of rural England . . . sufficiently near the Empire City for the throb of the great heart of London to be audible’.44 The Festival of Empire gave the Palace a new role as an imperial space. It became ‘an imperial duty’ to save the Crystal Palace from demolition (the Company had been placed in receivership in 1909), and future exhibitions from colonies

  ‘The Crystal Palace Fete’, ILN (4 November 1854): 445.   Emily Hall, Diary, 21 September 1855, Bromley Archives, 855/U933. 40   ‘Peace Fete at the Crystal Palace’, The Times (10 May 1856). 41   Auerbach (1999): 203–4. 42   Hyam (1999); Greenhalgh (1988); Ryan (1999): 120. 43   Festival of Empire (1911): 16. 44   Festival of Empire (1911): 22; Crystal Palace Sale Catalogue (1911): 3. 38 39

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and dominions suggested as a means to ‘forge another link in the chain which binds the Old Country and Her Dominions together’.45 The first incarnation of the Imperial War Museum was housed at Sydenham from 1920–3. The Greek Court was cleared of sculpture and re-hung with the Museum’s art collection; Greece maintained its connection with the arts, even in a military museum.46 The north side-vestibule of the Greek Court, originally housing busts of Athenian political luminaries, became the Cenotaph Court. In Figure 6.1, the names of prominent Athenian politicians and military figures, Pericles, Phormion, Nikias, and Demosthenes are still visible on the architrave. The location was highly appropriate in the new culture of war commemoration, which embraced classical architecture anew as a source of (supposedly) universal and permanent forms for memorials and graves.47 The Sydenham Palace continued to be a location where national identity could be performed, not least in the Greek and Roman Courts, where the changing resonances of classical culture could be communicated to popular audiences. None of these nationally significant undertakings necessarily mean that the Palace was perceived exclusively as a space related to the nation or the empire.48 As discussed in Chapter 1, it was a venue available to whoever could pay, from the Ancient Order of the Foresters, through temperance groups, to co-operative rallies. It is also important to understand the Greek and Roman Courts in the context of the other (often changing) displays at the Palace. The Crimean Court, for example, evidently impressed visitors, and was commented upon and recorded in journals that otherwise barely mention the displays.49 There a visitor might have swelled their national pride (or been dismayed at the expenditure of life), before examining the remains of ancient Rome. They might have observed models of ‘Hindoos’ hiding behind the fronds of exotic plants in the Natural History Department before wandering into the Pompeian house next door. This unusual venue for viewing ancient sculpture may well have fostered an array of associations and connections in the minds of visitors. But what about more explicit assertions of the relationship between past and present? 45   Muddock (1911): 79. See also ‘The King and Queen in South London. Opening of the Festival of Empire’, The Times (13 May 1911); ‘The Crystal Palace as the Grounds Of Empire’, The Times (24 August 1911). On the fortunes of the Palace Company in the early twentieth century, see Piggott (2004): 173–8. 46 47   Kavanagh (1994): 146–51.   Carden-Coyne (2009): 110–59. 48   See also Hassam (1999): 176. 49   Emily Hall, Diary, 21 September 1855, Bromley Archives, 855/U933.



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Figure 6.1  The Cenotaph Court of the Imperial War Museum housed in the north side-vestibule of the Greek Court, 1923. © Imperial War Museum (Q 31568).

Chronological Display, Progress, and Decline When the Palace opened in the 1850s, the fledgling ethnological and archaeological scholarly communities were increasingly adamant that museum displays should be chronologically arranged. They argued

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that this was no mere organizational preference, significant only to those in the museum and art world. In an 1851 lecture on ‘the arrangement of a national museum’, Francis Pulszky claimed that ‘A nation, which is not conscious of its position in the order of the world, remains but a subordinate member of the great human society, and will be overwhelmed sooner or later by races of a more powerful organization’.50 Museological chronology was a vital means of establishing Britain’s status and position in the world order, and necessary for the preservation of the ‘race’—or nation (Pulszky’s elision of the two terms was characteristic at the time).51 Greek and Roman sculpture had an important role to play in this chronological structure. Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art (1764) explicitly connected Greek sculpture to a narrative of progress and decline. Fifth-century Athenian sculpture was the apogee of all art, its Roman counterpart the marker of art’s waning. Late twentieth-century critics have been particularly keen to analyse chronological arrangements in nineteenth-century museums and exhibitions as progress-ridden narratives, emphasizing the superiority of European art and culture, ‘organized walking through evolutionary time’, as Tony Bennett puts it. For Bennett, objects in a museum ‘serve as props for a performance in which a progressive, civilizing relationship to the self might be formed and worked upon’.52 Recent writing on the Sydenham Palace also emphasizes the apparently progressive narratives of its displays.53 But did visitors take home a narrative of progress and British prowess from the layout of the courts? ‘There is no step in the march of civilization which has not its illustration in this great gallery of the progress of the world’,54 claimed the Post on the Palace’s opening. The official guidebook outlined an explicitly value-laden chronology of architecture and sculpture on display, where visitors could walk from Egypt to Greece and physically experience how sculpture and architecture was ‘improved, added to, and perfected’.55 The open arrangement of the Palace courts and the carefully arranged vistas reinforced the visual differences between the art and architecture of each court (see Figures 5.1 and 6.2). Within the courts, the rhetoric of progress and decline was also important, 51   Pulszky (1852): 14.   Mandler (2006): 72–86.   Bennett (1995): 179–86. 53   Auerbach (1999): 210; Challis (2008d): 182–3; Hassam (1999): 180; Levell (2000): 29. 54 55   Morning Post (10 June 1854), V&A1, I, 108.   Phillips (1854): 31. 50 52



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Figure 6.2  1850s Stereoview through the Greek to Egyptian Courts, showing Venus de Milo, Discobolos, and Ludovisi Mars. In the Egyptian Court, Osiride Portico from the Ramesseum, Thebes. From the collection of Jonathan Lill, published with his kind permission.

and Scharf ’s Greek Court guide explicitly followed Winckelmann’s explanation of the progressive development of Greek art. The ground plan (Appendix 1) of the Crystal Palace, however, confuses this chronologically driven account. A visitor following the prescribed route would walk from first-century ce Rome, to ­fourteenth-century ce Alhambra, through to the Abu Simbel Egyptian tomb (thirteenth century bce), which bordered on the ninth-and eighth-century bce Nineveh Court. The plan of the sculpture galleries

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of the British Museum reveals a directed visit, with sculpture separated from displays of other material.56 At the Crystal Palace, there was complete freedom of movement between courts. Phillips’s Guide led the visitor through the courts in chronological sequence, but maintained that ‘as a reference to the plans will show, there are many other roads open, which may be explored in future visits’.57 Further, the narrative was not one of unmitigated, linear progress. The relationships between the ancient civilizations on show were conceived of in cycles of rise and decline, the significance of which I examine in the final section of this chapter.58 The Roman Court, as discussed in Chapter 2, was nearly always viewed as an artistically inferior version of the Greek. The Crystal Palace Company revelled in their unparalleled collection of plaster casts, illustrative of the history of the evolution of Greek art.59 Yet they were not arranged within the Greek and Roman Courts in any means that might demonstrate this apparent progress. Greek and Roman sculpture were jumbled together, with reliefs from the emphatically Roman Trajan’s Column on display in the Greek Court. As detailed in Chapter 3, the Palace was just as committed to providing a generalized ‘antique’ atmosphere as it was to archaeological exactitude. A number of publications did not recognize the performance of progress towards the glories of nineteenth-century Britain as a motive behind the Palace. Routledge’s Guide criticized its failure to maintain chronological order. The mass circulating Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper noted that chronology was intended, but rendered impossible by the constraints of space, and dismissed it as irrelevant to most visitors in any case. A shorter, less detailed guide, Crystal Palace, with twenty-four Illustrations (1867), ignored the chronological sequence altogether in its tour. It traced a route in the order approached from the South Coast Railway station.60 Nicky Levell’s analysis of the Sydenham Palace (2000) argues that it sidelined Assyria and offered a Eurocentric chronology of world art.61 The displays certainly gave rise to comment that the glories of the ‘East’ (represented by the Nineveh Court) lay entirely in the past; ‘The East has sunk into its dotage; its ruined cities are mere mines of 57   See Jenkins (1995): 12.   Phillips (1854): 163. 59   Phillips (1854): 38–9.   Phillips (1854): 39. 60   McDermott (1854): 32; ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper (25 March 1854): 103; Crystal Palace (1867): 8. 61   Levell (2000): 30. 56 58



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curiosities . . . in the East lingers now only the sadness of a perpetual sunset’.62 The demise of Egyptian and Assyrian power might cause reflection on the ‘vicissitudes of empires and the instability of greatness’, but these ancient civilizations were deemed too alien and distant to provide specific didactic examples.63 There was no continuity, as was (sometimes) claimed with Greece and Rome. Yet this Eurocentric view of ancient civilizations was not the only narrative present. In his Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court, Owen Jones positions Greece in the context of the rest of world art at the Palace. Once seen alongside painted sculpture from other time periods and locations such as Egypt and Assyria (exemplified by Figure 5.1), Jones held that the Greek use of colour would seem quite natural.64 This is entirely in keeping with Jones’s universalizing approach to design; Mark Crinson singles out Jones’s endeavours as an example where Tony Bennett ‘is wrong . . . to argue that oriental cultures were always allotted an intermediary and inferior position in evolution’.65 This is not to deny the ‘explicitly imperialist agenda’ of Jones’s work, but to suggest the complexity of his engagements with various pasts and presents.66 The British Museum definitively separated the Elgin Marbles from non-Western art by presenting them as pure, uncoloured, and (at least in theory) as the culmination of the ‘chain of art’. The architect of the Greek Court at Sydenham sought to reintegrate them with the art of Egypt and Assyria. The decision to paint the Parthenon frieze—out of all the other reliefs present in the Palace—­demonstrates that the explicitly progress-laden meanings ascribed to the Elgin Marbles by the British Museum were not the only ones present in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Greek art was certainly valued at the Palace, but it was one of many ancient civilizations on display, and not necessarily the conclusion of a prescribed journey through the history of art. 62  ‘The Assyrian Court at the Sydenham Palace’, Reynolds’s Miscellany (6 May 1854): 232. 63   Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (1855): 29. 64   Jones (1854a): 5. The press, critical of the painted frieze, was particularly appalled by the idea that Greek sculpture was in any way similar to Egyptian, e.g. ‘The Crystal Palace – Frieze of the Parthenon’, Morning Post (1 March 1854), V&A1, I, 87. 65   Crinson (1996): 68–9; see also Moser (2012). On the universalizing imperialism of the casting projects at Sydenham and South Kensington, see Flour (2008): 236–8. 66   Sloboda (2008): 225. Sloboda provides a convincing analysis of the intricate relations between Jones’s imperialist rhetoric and a universalizing cosmopolitanism in The Grammar of Ornament.

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Matters were far more complicated than the Palace simply marginalizing non-Western civilizations or presenting a progressive chronology. The Morning Chronicle praised the superiority of Greek sculpture over that of all nations. But it also speculated, after the 1855 arrival of a ‘Hindoo-Greek’ sculpture as to whether ‘the glories of Greece, were but the faint reflex of a splendour which existed in India ages ere Alexander led his unconquerable hosts to the shores of the Indus’.67 To a certain extent, however, the chronological arrangement of ancient civilizations was irrelevant. Even if visitors did not catch on to the (sporadically chronological) progress of civilizations that was presented there, the Palace bound the artistic accomplishments of the past more closely with the present by situating the Fine Arts Courts in the midst of British produce, and under the glass roof of a definitively nineteenth-century edifice. Throughout the official guidebook, the courts are discussed in relation to their surroundings; an entire chapter is devoted to the hot-water piping system. Guidebooks and press comment heralded the Palace itself as the culmination of the architectural achievements displayed in the Fine Arts Courts.68 The Morning Chronicle, for example, asserted that: Having hastily glanced at the earliest developments of ancient art, and the massive structures of Egypt, Greece, Rome, Assyria and Persepolis, the visitor emerges into the very latest, the present, period of art. His eye glances down the long nave of the building . . . and if English blood flowed in his veins he will see with pride a building of purely English architecture, which is well worthy of containing the choicest specimens of art and science, but which cannot stoop to a comparison with other styles, simply because they possess no features in common with this colossal edifice of glass and iron.69

The article continues to reiterate the Palace’s supreme superiority over all past architecture, rendering comparison impossible, even unnecessary. Some (but not all) presentations of the Palace, then, stamped nineteenth-century British identity on the architectural and art history of the world.70 67   ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham. The Proposed Indian Court’, Morning Chronicle (22 May 1855). 68   Phillips (1854): 38–9; Wigan (1856). 69   ‘The Crystal Palace, Sydenham’, Morning Chronicle (16 February 1854). 70   Praise for the Palace architecture was not universal; see Ruskin (1903b): 419.

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FROM PL AST E R TO F L E SH: S C UL P T U RE , B ODI E S, AND R AC IAL T HOUG HT Looking back down the nave at all the Palace courts, Alphonse Esquiros identified a pan-European (and not exclusively British) story combining racial and artistic progress: In this grand ideal spectacle we see race succeed to race, and communities dividing off from one another with their various types, all approaching perfection the farther they are removed from their infant state . . . [man] wrenches from nature the secrets of her laws, and the materials which she has hidden away in the grudging bosom of the earth, and from them he evolves the rudiments of the useful arts. Not content with operating on the future of his destinies, one might almost venture to say that he has re-made himself. Compare the Hottentot woman with the Venus of Milo, and you will find it difficult to doubt that beauty has not made progress in the development and modification of races.71

Here I examine the ideas behind Esquiros’s comparison of a plaster cast of a living ‘Hottentot’ woman in the Natural History Department, with a plaster cast of the sculpture at the centre of the Greek Court. In the 1860s, the Venus de Milo was dated to the fifth-century bce, while ‘Hottentot’ women were very much living, and, notoriously (after the case of Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’), exhibited in London.72 Esquiros imposes a narrative of progress on race, presenting living peoples as surviving remnants from earlier episodes in human development. A sculpture believed to be 2,400 years old represents what he believes to be a better developed, more modern, humanity than an actual living inhabitant of Southern Africa. Europeans were not represented in the Natural History Department, and it seems that for some commentators, the sculpture in the Greek Court was an adequate stand-in.73 The distinction between Greek sculpture as a form of representation, and as a realistic model of an actual ancient body is blurred here, a long-standing discourse to which I will return. Esquiros’s emphasis on man’s agency and creativity to ‘re-make’ ­himself is of particular interest. Creative man conjures a racially superior woman in marble, who then takes on life as a representation of modern European superiority; literally ‘re-making’ oneself through culture. The unique environment of the Crystal Palace, where ‘savage’ 72   Esquiros (1867): 254.   Qureshi (2004).   See also The Crystal Palace (1854): 38.

71 73

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was displayed alongside the highlights of civilization facilitated and encouraged such comparisons, contributing significantly to midnineteenth-century understandings of race. Acknowledging and analysing past conceptions of race is all the more important if race is understood as socially and historically constituted, an ideological mode of organizing the world, rather than a universal essence.74 And if race is understood to be socially constructed, Esquiros’s claim that man re-makes himself seems ironically appropriate. Ivan Hannaford attributes a key position to Greece and Rome in the development of nineteenth-century debate on race, particularly after the writings and lectures of the Prussian ancient historian Barthold Niebuhr in the 1810s and 1820s, which identified conflicts over ‘race’ and ‘blood’ as fundamental to Roman history.75 Classical sculpture tends not to feature in scholarship concerned with the relationship between classics and racial thought, and while classicists are increasingly interested in the life of the ancient Greek body in modern culture, the connections with racial thought have barely been acknowledged.76 My research here builds upon and intersects with Debbie Challis’s important 2010 article on the ancient Greeks in Victorian racial theory, focusing on a venue where classical sculpture and models of extraEuropeans could be viewed simultaneously.

Greek Sculpture and the Body In 2006, London Underground hosted a British Museum advertising campaign featuring an image of the Discobolos, and bearing the slogan ‘Ever fancied abs that look like they’re carved out of stone? Try some training tips from ancient Greece, the culture which gave us the original six-pack’. Critics deemed this a cynical attempt to convince twenty-first century viewers of the collections’ ‘relevance’, and derided the museum for latching on to ‘whatever is flying around in popular culture’.77 The idea that the ancient Greeks bodily resembled their statuary, and that the enviable physiques of their sculpture were a product of an athletic lifestyle specific to antiquity, however, boasts a pedigree reaching back to the very origins of modern writing on ancient sculpture. 75   Hannaford (1996).   Hannaford (1996): 235–40.   Classical sculpture is not mentioned in McCloskey (2012). Race does not figure in Squire (2011). 77   J. Appleton, ‘Had a Rough Night?’, Spectator (25 March 2006). 74 76

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After Winckelmann, the formative relationship between Greek society and Greek sculpture became a commonplace. Winckelmann eschewed art that imitated nature as mere ‘mimesis’, and argued that the best artists idealized the men and women that were their models. However, he partly attributed the achievements of Greek sculptors to the fact that they inhabited a society that prized beauty. Nudity and athletic practice were a common aspect of daily life, and the populace was not, he asserted, blighted with scars from smallpox or venereal disease.78 The enthusiastic uptake of Winckelmann’s explanations in nineteenth-century discussions of classical sculpture perpetuated this connection between sculpture and ancient Greek bodies, spanning lectures on sculpture at the Royal Academy, archaeological textbooks, guidebooks to the Crystal Palace, and comments like those from Esquiros.79 The arrival of the more ‘naturalistic’ Elgin Marbles only furthered the association.80 However, Greek bodies were not just important to scholars seeking to explain the stylistic development of sculpture. David Bindman (2002) has shown how important the concepts of beauty expounded in aesthetic theory were in understanding human difference in the eighteenth century. As an acknowledged standard of beauty, Greek sculpture had a significant role to play in these hierarchies. In Britain, the muscular physique of Greek sculpture took on greater importance in the late 1840s with the beginnings of anatomical ethnology, which focused on biological difference between races. There is, however, considerable variety in the way that Greek sculpture was employed, reflecting the diversity of mid-century ethnology, which was far from exclusively physical.81 For some ethnologists, sculpture accurately represented the ancient Greeks. They measured skull sizes from surviving marble heads and used their large proportions and cranial shapes to explain the achievements of fifth-century Athens.82 Facial angles of classical statuary were used to represent the European ‘type’ in contrast with ‘Negroes’.83 Some asserted the commonalities between modern Greeks and the ancient statues.84 All used Greek sculpture as representative of the differences between Western Europeans and other peoples.85   Winckelmann (1765): 4–10.   Flaxman (1829): 85–6; Raoul-Rochette (1854): 130; McDermott (1854): 44. 80 81   Leoussi (2001): 470–1.   See Stocking (1987): 56–99. 82 83   J. B. D. (1868): 175.   Nott and Gliddon (1854): 458. 85 84   See Challis (2010); Leoussi (1998): 3–24.   Prichard (1848): 200. 78 79

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Some nineteenth-century philologists claimed that fifth-century Athenians were either themselves descended from northern Europeans, or dispersed to northern Europe in the centuries that followed. Such assertions marginalized not only modern Greeks, but also, as Martin Bernal controversially argued in his 1987 Black Athena, negated the influence of Egypt and Phoenicia on Greek culture (and thus Western civilization at large). Although Bernal’s focus was primarily on philological studies, his chief nineteenth-century culprit, Karl ­Ottfried Müller, also constructed a history of Greek sculpture entirely devoid of outside influences. Sculpture played a significant role in his writing and thought.86 One 1868 article in the Anthropological Review proudly remarked that these pre-eminent sculptures demonstrating the superior brain capacity of the Greeks now ‘adorn our museums’.87 Northern European connections with the ancient Greek heritage were, however, more definitively articulated than through mere possession of antiquities. Indeed, the Elgin Marbles barely featured in British ethnological texts concerned with Greek sculpture. Despite these sculptures’ ‘naturalistic’ appearance and associations with fifth-century Athens, ethnological writing almost exclusively discusses and uses as illustrations the Apollo Belvedere, Medici Venus, and Cnidian Venus.88 This could partially be attributed to practicalities, as the fragmentary state would have made precise measurements of facial features rather difficult. But the British increasingly staked other, more intimate connections on Phidias and fifth-century Greece. Robert Knox, the disgraced Edinburgh anatomist, so-called ‘founder of British racism’, and author of The Races of Men (1850) was preoccupied with ancient Greek sculpture: ‘In the antique Greek figure alone resides perfection; all nations and all races must yield the palm to Greece.’89 Knox argued that the ancient Greeks were partly descended from the Saxons.90 The English were also Saxon/Scandinavian, and so had common ancestry with the celebrated inhabitants of fifth-century Athens. The comparative physiques of contemporary ‘Saxons’ and Greek sculpture were readily apparent: ‘the streets of London abound with persons having this identical facial angle [as the ancient Greeks]; 86   Müller (1847); Bernal (1991): 308–16. For contextualization of Müller’s writings and a sympathetic but rigorous critique of Bernal, see Marchand (1996): 43–8. See also Blok (1994). 87 88   J. B. D. (1868): 172.   Knox (1862): 367–8; J. B. D. (1868): 172. 89 90   Knox (1852): 172.   Knox (1862): 46–7.

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and it is in England and in other countries inhabited by the Saxon or Scandinavian races that women resembling the Niobe, and men the Hercules and Mars, are chiefly to be found.’91 For all his influence on later nineteenth-century scientific racism, it is important to remember that Knox was a controversial figure in the 1850s, and that his arguments were one of a number of intense midcentury debates about English ethnicity.92 Similar passages staking British claim to physical descent from the Greeks can, however, be found in Frederic Leighton’s addresses to the Royal Academy in the 1880s, and Athena Leoussi has thoroughly documented how these claims were translated into academic painting from the 1870s onwards.93 The Crystal Palace provides an opportunity to scrutinize the precursors of such claims for Greek sculpture at mid-century, in a venue associated with national pride, and designed for mass participation. The Palace guidebooks reiterated familiar statements about the formative relationship between athletic practice and ancient Greek sculpture. Scharf ’s guide to the Greek Court attributed the different styles of Greek sculpture to different modes of athletic training.94 Routledge’s Guide devoted twelve pages to the Greek Court; nearly two of these are spent on the importance of wrestling in Hellas, noting that ‘Many of the finest works of Grecian sculpture are devoted to the delineation of muscular forms’.95 Ancient Greek people were firmly identified with the sculptures in the Greek Court. However, for all contemporary ethnology’s claims that the British were descended from the ancient Greeks, there was no attempt to relate the plaster Greek bodies to the nineteenth-century British visitors that milled about them. In contrast with the dominant trend in ethnology, the Ten Chief Courts described the very lowliest of contemporary Greek people as descendants of the ancients: ‘Even today, among the beggars and hill robbers of Epirus or Macedon, are seen faces worthy of Helen of Argos’.96 It also offered an explanation for the inadequacies of contemporary British sculpture. Ancient Greek sculptors had physically healthy, robust, beautiful people to draw upon for their subject matter.   Knox (1862): 403. On Knox’s scrutiny of the London population, see Sera-Shriar (2011). 92   Richards (1989). 93   Leighton (1896): 89; Leoussi (1998). For further examples, see Challis (2010): 114. 94 95   Scharf (1854a): 52.   McDermott (1854): 44–5. 96   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 65. On nineteenth-century British women identifying Greek women with classical statuary, see Mahn (2008). 91

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Contemporary British subjects were less inspiring, ‘shivering models of low birth, unrefined in expression, coarse and vulgar by nature and by habit, depraved by suffering, emaciated by poverty, with forms marred by vice and infamy’.97 Later in the century, Charles Kingsley’s writings on health and sanitation similarly contrast the impoverished physiques of contemporary Britons with the bodies of ancient Greek sculpture in the British Museum, which he regarded as ‘a perpetual sermon to rich and poor’.98 This continued to be a plea in social reforming discourse. In 1884, for example, the Manchester philanthropist Thomas Horsfall called for casts of Greek sculpture to be set up in every school, ‘in order that every child may know what the bodies of men and women should be like’.99 In the last few pages of his 1873 ‘Nausicaa in London; or, the Lower Education of Women’, which praises the healthy outdoors life of ancient Greek women, however, Kingsley shifts from the ancient Greeks to praise the physique of a marriage of Saxon and Celt. It is too much to expect a modern Londoner to emulate the Greeks precisely. Instead, they should aspire to become ‘more like an average Highland lassie . . . unspoilt Nausicaa of the North; descendant of the dark tender-hearted Celtic girl, and the fair deep-hearted Scandinavian Viking’.100 Kingsley was writing after a period of intense debate over the identity of the English, as Saxons, Celts, or a mixture.101 The Palace opened in the midst of this. If guidebooks and commentators connected contemporary British people with any of the classical statuary in the Palace, it was with Celtic ‘barbarians’ represented in Roman works. The official catalogue goes into considerable detail on the costume of a barbarian on a Trajanic relief, who sports a metal torque around his neck: ‘This ornament, peculiar to so many Celtic nations, is frequently found in both our country and in Ireland . . . The statue of the Dying Gladiator is distinguished by a similar ornament: it appears to have been a sign of rank’.102 These ‘barbarians’ are presented in the catalogue as noble masculine patriots. The catalogue refers to the Dying Gladiator (now usually known as the Dying Gaul, visible in Figure 0.5) ‘expiring in the arena, thinking of his home and country, as described by Lord Byron’.103 Although Byron’s gladiator hailed from 98   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 65.   Kingsley (1902): 107. 100   Kingsley (1902): 122–3.   Horsfall (1882): 581. 101 102   Young (2008): 71–139.   Scharf (1854a): 79–80. 103   Scharf (1854c): 56–7. 97 99

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the banks of the Danube, his evocative appearance in Canto IV of the British poet’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage lent the sculpture a particular connection with Britain. It was regularly used as an imaginative stimulus for narratives of ancient Britons (and Christians) defying their Roman masters.104 The distinctive jewellery sported by these sculpted barbarians offers a physical connection with the soil of Britain, where it ‘is frequently found’. ‘A sign of rank’, it also asserts an elevated social status. Some of those arguing for the Celtic identity of the English viewed the Celts as descendants of the Greeks; praise for the Dying Gladiator could also be adopted into a narrative arguing for the Greek identity of the British.105 When the Palace opened in 1854, these assertions of national connection to antiquity at the Palace would, however, only have been manifest to those carefully scrutinizing the guidebook. They were not obviously apparent to the visitor wandering through the courts. Matters looked different at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1899, the ‘father’ of British physical culture, Eugen Sandow, opened one of his Schools of Physical Culture for men, women, and children under the north water tower of the Crystal Palace.106 Debate about the apparent deterioration of the ‘national physique’ intensified after a large number of military recruits were rejected from serving during the 1899–1902 Boer War, and physical culturists in Britain presented the reformation of the body through exercise as a patriotic and imperial duty.107 One key source for this new national body was classical sculpture.108 Sandow identified the Greeks as his inspiration, and presented his Edwardian exercise programmes as a continuum with the gymnasia of antiquity. Surviving Greek sculpture, he explained in one of his many guides to health and strength, was effectively portraiture of Olympian athletes, examples that ‘it is to be hoped every man, woman and child will make their best endeavour to emulate’.109 Sandow regularly posed as Farnese Hercules or the Dying Gaul; he was photographed in these poses, and these images widely disseminated in postcards and within his publications. Each edition of Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture (1897–1907) opened with a photograph of a classical (or classicizing) sculpture. Classical sculpture was both 105   Vance (1997): 209. See also Edwards (2003).   Young (2008): 159–60.   Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture, 5 (1900): 116. 107 108   Zweiniger-Bargielowska (2010): 62–104.   Hatt (1999): 244; Wyke (1999). 109   Sandow (1905): 3. 104

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reforming Britons, and reformed by physical culturists, mediated through new technologies of mass print dissemination as part of an emergent consumer culture.110 Back at Sydenham, men or women fresh from Sandow’s gymnasium might peruse statuary in the Greek and Roman Courts as a source of bodily inspiration, perhaps seeing the sculpting of their own bodies as part of an imperial destiny, all filtered through a familiarity with sculpture born of Sandow’s various publications. The connections between the bodies of the ancient Greeks, and the British visitors that surrounded them, were newly explicit.

Sculpted Bodies in the Natural History Department A short step away from the Pompeian Court stood the Natural History Department, directed by ethnologist Robert Gordon Latham. Sadiah Qureshi has recently shown the importance of this department in communicating ethnological knowledge to the public.111 The Anthropological Review labelled the figures ‘inaccurate’, but like the other critics, praised the fact that the department brought ‘the aspect of the many races of man’ before the ‘popular mind’.112 Scrutinizing the appearance and bodily comportment of fellow visitors was a popular activity at the Palace, as explored in Chapter 1. The plaster bodies on display in the Natural History department offered another opportunity to identify and define the civilized comportment of nineteenth-century Britons. This was a common assertion across satires in Punch (Figure 6.3) and Latham’s own scholarly writings. In his introductory handbook to the department, Latham suggested that visitors might compare themselves to the ethnological models on display: ‘The extent to which they differ from each other is manifest. Still more do they differ from such groups of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and other Europeans as may collect around them.’113 Illustrations and press comment suggest Latham’s assumption that visitors to the Palace were exclusively European was far from accurate (see Figure 1.1). But his assertion of European unity in comparison with the ethnological models is itself noteworthy, since a great deal of 111   Qureshi (2011): 193–221.   Budd (1997): 42–9, 55–7, 62–3.   ‘Anthropological News’, Anthropological Review, 5/17 (1867): 241–2. 113   Latham and Forbes (1854): 5. On the resident black population of London and exhibitions of people, see Qureshi (2004): 239–41. 110

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Figure 6.3  ‘Crystal Palace – Some Varieties of the Human Race’, illustration set in the Palace tea rooms from Punch Almanack for 1855 (not paginated). Author’s collection.

nineteenth-century writing on race was concerned with differences within European society.114 The Crystal Palace enabled visitors to physically perform a common trope in industrial and design related discourse, the contrast between ‘savage’ life and industrial progress.115 They could walk from   Malik (1996): 81–4.

114

  Bizup (2003): 84–114.

115

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‘uncivilised’ Africa to industrialized Britain in seconds, from the Natural History Department where man was displayed ‘in his lowest condition’ into the industrial departments, such as the Sheffield Court, ‘exhibiting the domestic arts in the highest state of culture’. One pamphleteer speculated ‘are those capable of becoming all that these now are?’116 Assertions of the difference between the ‘civilised’ spectator and the ‘savage’ spectacle were a common feature of mid-nineteenthcentury shows and illustrated texts.117 The very notion of displaying humans in a Natural History Department, surrounded by wild animals, definitively separated them from the supposed pinnacle of civilization epitomized in the Fine Arts Courts in the Palace’s north nave. Some visitors certainly infantilized the models, noting that Latham was their ‘foster father’, or, even lower on the scale, ‘the savages are Dr. Latham’s pets’.118 The exhibition of people at the Palace provided a stimulus for some visitors to think about commonalities among humans. Latham’s handbook emphasized human unity, while maintaining the importance of studying differences.119 For others, however, problems arose when the differences between the bodies and mental capacities of models on display were not deemed sufficiently distinct from those of the visitors that scrutinized them. Mid-nineteenth-century critics regularly employed racial terminology to characterize the working classes.120 It is entirely characteristic that parallels were drawn between the less affluent members of the Palace’s new mass audience and the models of ‘savages’ in the Natural History Department. Some commentators feared the consequences of displaying ‘savages’ to the Palace’s new audience. As discussed in Chapter 1, many middle-class commentators were convinced that working-class visitors preferred ‘naturalistic’ visual subject matter. The Natural History Department, with its models of humans in dramatic poses with stuffed animals, was, reportedly, the most popular. Harriet Martineau described a smock-frock-clad labourer actively engaging, even experiencing wonder, at the models in the Natural History Department. However, she observed, ‘the same labourer in the Greek Court is a pitiable spectacle’.121 Further, for some critics, this purported confusion 117   The Crystal Palace (1854): 38–9.   Barringer (1996): 38.   The Crystal Palace (1854): 17, 38. 119   See Qureshi (2011): 199–201; Phillips (1854): 104. 120 121   Lorimer (1978): 92–107.   Martineau (1854): 538. 116 118

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in the presence of fine art, and preference for the gaudy and imitative, closely connected the working man to the savage; recall the question that The Times posed in a review of the Palace (and its visitors): ‘What is this but a reproduction of the same tastes which make savages show a predilection for glass beads, or any other such object which captivates their untutored sight?’122 The ‘realism’ that critics believed rendered the ethnological models most attractive to the mass audience was a source of additional anxiety for critics. Lady Eastlake was particularly vociferous in her condemnation of the Natural History Department, noting that ‘the more successful the imitation, the less it is desirable for the public eye’. She suggests that the models be removed to ‘some unfrequented part of the upper galleries’ so that they could continue to be studied by experts, concluding that ‘the sight of such objects to the lower orders of society is far more likely to brutalise than to instruct’.123 Further, Eastlake asserts that ‘certain arts are fitted for certain classes of subjects’. As such, visual representations of ‘the wild man’ serve only to ‘express their horrors’. A literary description, however, ‘bestows upon the savage all that isolation from other objects which he needs, while the necessary vagueness of language gives the mind the benefit of its own ready ideality’.124 Visual representations of extra-Europeans simply cannot figure forth ‘ideality’. It is no coincidence that ‘ideality’ was the definitive attribute of sculpture, and particularly associated with classical works. The subject matter of the ethnological models rendered them implausible aesthetic subjects. Beauty was rarely considered a definitive attribute of ‘savages’—and the Crystal Palace was the place in London to come into contact with ‘ugly’ visual representations of extra-Europeans (Figure 6.4).125 Eastlake was so horrified by the models at the Palace that she struggled to even categorize ‘what can only be designated as stuffed natives’.126 This is typical of writing on the plaster contents of the Natural History Department; their status as sculpture is consistently denied. Conversely, the French sculptor Charles Cordier’s ‘ethnographic sculpture’ was increasingly popular in the mid-nineteenth-century, and Queen Victoria herself a keen patron.127 But Cordier’s work was similarly deemed difficult to categorize, and his sculptures of African people were shuttled back and forth 123   The Times, 5 Sept 1854, V&A1, I, 144.   Eastlake (1855): 346. 125   Eastlake (1855): 347.   Upward (1896): 756. 126 127   Eastlake (1855): 345.   Marsden (2010): 156. 122 124

Figure 6.4  Ernest Goodwin, ‘No one knows how ugly the heathen is until he has been to the Crystal Palace’, illustrated in Allen Upward, ‘The Horrors of London: the Crystal Palace’, Idler: an Illustrated Monthly Magazine, 9/5 (1896): 756. The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford (Per.2705 d.238, Vol. 9, No.5, p. 756). The image’s humour rests upon its inversion of the common trope of the ‘ugly heathen’ mentioned in its caption. Here the ethnological model appears posed as a classical sculpture, upright and muscled, while the spectators (with the exception of a wealthy woman) are hunched and caricatured; the Palace’s audience are once again the butt of the joke, but a joke which depends on racist assumptions that ‘heathens’ could never in reality be beautiful.



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Figure 6.5  Models of San people in the ‘Old World’ section of the Natural History Department (c.1863). Signs for the tearoom are visible behind the foliage. © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

between the Salon and the Natural History Museum in Paris throughout the nineteenth century.128 Guidebooks and press boasted that many of the ‘models’ were composed of casts taken from living people; the two smallest figures in Figure 6.5 are body casts of Flora and Martinus, San children brought to London and exhibited as ‘Earthmen’ in the 1850s.129 A short walk away was the Greek Court, thronging with other plaster casts, also claimed as representations of real bodies and regularly invoked in contemporary ethnological debate. Where classical sculpture was concerned, however, the dangers of realism were not manifest—at least in mainstream art-historical debate. The scandals over polychromy and nudity at the Crystal Palace, however, demonstrate that the reality, rather than the ideality of classical sculpture was a cause for concern for some in mid-Victorian Britain.   Nelson (2006).

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  Qureshi (2011): 127–8; 197.

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The Natural History Department added an extra dimension to these anxieties about paint and undress in the classical courts. Both are explicitly connected with ideas about ‘savagery’, and fed into broader fears about the impact of the Palace displays on an uneducated audience. Seen in the context of the brightly painted ‘fancifully clothed dolls’ in the ethnological department, it is scarcely surprising that the painted Parthenon frieze was so derided.130 A satirical piece from the Idler in the 1890s comments that ‘the directors have two kinds of statues in stock – plain and coloured’.131 Greek sculpture and ethnological models are referred to here in the same breath, the symbolic connection between ‘coloured’ statuary and ‘coloured’ skin emphasized.132 Charmaine Nelson has demonstrated the raced and gendered implications of white marble, a ‘privileged racial signifier’, as a material for sculpture in the mid-nineteenth century.133 Its opposite, painted sculpture, was not only associated with popular culture, but also definitively associated with ‘primitive’, non-Western, and underdeveloped or declining art. The outrage of Jones’s painted Parthenon frieze moved sculptor Richard Westmacott Jr and archaeologist Hodder Michael Westropp to denounce painted sculpture as ‘barbarous’, ‘practised in the worst period of art’ in ‘Assyria, India, and Mexico’.134 Extra-European people were painted at the Palace, just as these ‘primitives’ painted sculpture themselves. The Greeks could never have painted their sculpture (according to Westmacott Jr and Westropp), and the sculpture that represented them at Sydenham   Morning Chronicle (12 June 1854), V&A1, I, 122.   Upward (1896): 756. Based on an 1867 article in the Anthropological Review (note 109) the ethnological figures are usually held to have been destroyed in the fire of 30 December 1866 that burnt down the Assyrian Court, the colossal Abu Simbel figures, and the Tropical Department. However, the Anthropological Review seems to have confused the Tropical Department (botany and living animals) with the Natural History Department, where the ethnological figures were exhibited. The fire took place in the far north section of the Palace; the Natural History Courts were located in the far south, and there is no evidence that they were moved to the north wing in the 1860s. These figures are testified to well into the 1890s. Shenton (1879): 58–65, offers a detailed discussion of the ethnological figures. This is not simply an erroneous reprint, since it relates the figures to recent political events, namely the Zulu wars of 1879. Crystal Palace (1893) discusses the destruction of the Assyrian Court in 1866 (8), but also features the Natural History Department and its figures in its tour of the Palace (14–15). For contemporary accounts of the fire see ‘Disastrous Fire at the Crystal Palace’, Daily News (31 December 1866). 132 133   Hatt (2001): 42–3.   Nelson (2007): 57–72. 134   Westmacott Jr (1855): 44; Westropp (1854): iv. On Westmacott’s connections to Robert Knox, see Challis (2010): 107. 130 131

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ought to be similarly unpainted and untainted with any possible connections to the non-Western. The nudity of the ethnological models was also cause for concern. In response to ecclesiastical protestations, they too were ‘scrupulously draped’—although not entirely covered, as is visible in photographic evidence (Figure 6.5). The Daily News asserted that these ‘grotesque and incongruous garments’ were far from universally appreciated, or even deemed necessary.135 William Peters, the pamphleteer who had been so outraged by the nude Greek sculpture on exhibit, included a section on the ethnological models in his 1854 pamphlet The Statue Question. Again, the concerns were for the working classes and women. Peters describes a gentleman at the Palace with a ‘proper sense of decency’ shielding a female companion from the unclothed bodies of Indians.136 His comments illustrate the gendered distinction implicit across classical and Natural History exhibits; for the main source of anxiety was the display of the unclothed male, not female; the unclothed female body was well established by the 1850s as a suitable object for (male) scrutiny. In an aside, Peters noted that anyone who had spent time in India would be immune to the sight of naked ‘savages’. The Crystal Palace: An Essay suggested that the Natural History Department exhibit models of peoples who had been converted to Christianity for comparison, ‘clothed and in their right mind’.137 The Palace guidebooks similarly asserted that a state of undress was quite natural among the peoples presented there—and a marker of a lack of civilization. The same guidebooks, however, championed ancient Greek nudity as a symbol of civilization, as it demonstrated a capacity to separate the sensual from nobler aesthetic ideals.138 Visual satires such as Figures 6.3 and 6.4 depend partly for their ‘humour’ on the comparison between the heavily draped European Palace visitors and the wild and partially clad ‘savages’. Philippa Levine has argued that nineteenth-century anxieties about the naked human form were intimately related to colonialism’s obsession with the link between savagery and nudity. She too brings together the undraped forms of Greek sculpture with those of native peoples, arguing that nude classical statuary epitomized civilization   ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Daily News (9 June 1854), V&A1, I, 108.   Peters (1854): 12. 137   The Crystal Palace (1854): 39. Levine (2008): 191, discusses this phrase, which appears in Mark 5:15 and Luke 8:35. 138   McDermott (1854): 174; Phillips (1854): 53. 135 136

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for Victorians, while the bodies of native peoples connoted its absence.139 The debates around nudity examined in Chapter 5, however, suggest that classical statuary did not universally signify civilization.140 It was (broadly speaking) only those with an artistic education who perceived classical sculpture to be inherently ‘nude’ rather than ‘naked’. The ‘nude’ Greek sculpture and ‘naked’ savages divide thus requires further qualification. A venue such as the Crystal Palace catering to a mass audience throws such issues into relief. Those who were worried about unclothed ‘savages’ were similarly anxious about the lack of clothes on the supposed epitome of Western civilization— Greek sculpture. The Crystal Palace: An Essay asserted that any nude sculpture instantly conjured ‘savage life’. It dubbed the Palace’s aspirations to school people into viewing nudes ‘an attempt to educate into barbarism’.141 For those visitors who perceived the Greek sculpture as naked humans, the unclothed ‘savages’ were not necessarily categorically different.

TH E ROMA N E MPI R E AT T HE C RYSTA L PA L AC E Many of us have seen the scattered fragments of Nero’s golden palace on the Palatine Hill, and the vast ruins which still speak so magnificently of the grandeur of imperial Rome. But what were all these palaces, and how were they constructed? They were raised by the spoils of captive nations, and the forced labour of myriads of slaves, to gratify the caprice or vanity of some solitary despot. To our age has been reserved the privilege of raising a palace to the people.142

Samuel Laing’s opening speech, excerpted above, epitomizes conceptions of Rome at Sydenham. In a manner characteristic of midnineteenth-century British discussions of the Roman Empire, slavery, decadence, brutality, and imperial despotism feature heavily in both displays and visitor accounts. It is never exactly clear what ‘Roman imperialism’ refers to in Palace sources from the 1850s; whether they   Levine (2008), ‘States of Undress’: 189–90.   Barkan (1995) offers further discussion of the complex and constitutive relationship between Greek and ‘savage’ nudity in the later nineteenth century. 141   The Crystal Palace (1854): 48. 142   Laing’s opening speech, cited in Wynter (1853): 609. 139 140

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imply Empire as opposed to the earlier Republic, or empire as the system of governing extraneous territories. In fact, imperialism is mainly used as a synonym for luxury and greed, and its negative connotations almost unanimously discussed in reference to that celebrated pantomime villain, the Emperor Nero.143 The emphasis on the negative aspects of Roman imperial rule performed several didactic functions. It reassured the British that they were different from the Romans and that a similar fate was not inherent for all small territories that governed colonies. At the same time, it served as a parable cautioning against such excesses. The displays stimulated comment on the similarities between the negative aspects of ancient Roman and contemporary European governments.144 This section of Laing’s speech was widely quoted and paraphrased in articles on the Palace, reinforcing the association between these commonplaces about Roman imperialism, the Sydenham venture, and its displays.145 The discussions of Rome that stemmed from the Crystal Palace were not limited to appraisals of the Roman and Pompeian Courts, as ­Laing’s speech testifies. The Roman Empire and the conduct of its rulers and citizenry emerged as a point of comparison with the entire Crystal Palace enterprise. At Sydenham, modern-day entrepreneurs had taken it upon themselves to build a palace for the people, and to furnish the masses with rational recreation. Guidebooks, press comment, and speeches explicitly contrasted this with both the self-serving, lavish, and slave-exploiting architectural undertakings of tyrannical emperors, and the bloodthirsty gladiatorial combat with which they sated ‘the debased taste of the people during the declining days of the Roman empire’.146 Such comments did not tarry with the human cost of the Sydenham venture; on 15 August 1853 a construction accident killed ten labourers and severely injured twenty others.147

Decline and Fall The emphasis on debasement and decadence at Rome fits more generally with the widespread nineteenth-century understanding of the   See further Elsner and Masters (1994).   Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (1855): 54. 145   Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (1855): 2–3; Knight (1858–60): xiii. 146   McDermott (1854): 57. See also ICPG: 202; Wigan (1856): 135. 147   ‘Frightful Accident at the Crystal Palace’, The Times (16 August 1853). 143 144

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history of empires as being cyclical, of continual rise and fall. The Roman example was definitively associated with such a sequence, especially after Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–87).148 Such an association sat awkwardly with the image of limitless progression that dominated much mid-nineteenth-century thought on the relationship between past and present, particularly in political thought.149 Laing’s speech concludes with an acknowledgment of a ‘beneficent and overruling Providence which is guiding our great British race along the path of peaceful progress’.150 It demonstrates how a larger narrative of linear progress might overrule the cyclical lessons of empire. At Sydenham, the cyclical life history of empires was all part of the spectacle; it was not a challenge to narratives of progress, but a means by which nineteenth-century visitors might be jolted into realizing their distance from the past. They occupied a reassuringly different era, where the happenings of previous centuries were presented as forms of entertainment. The Ten Chief Courts was unabashed in its observations on the Greek and Roman Courts: Two empires have passed away merely to furnish us with objects of wonder and delight! Men have toiled, and thought, and bled, and fought, and wept, and suffered, to fill the show-place of England with these reproductions of their art – passed away as the antediluvian monsters before man. Just as the stones of our pavements are full of the shells of dead creatures, so is the present built upon the past.151

On first glance, the passage appears to be a pedagogic reminder to visitors that the ‘objects of wonder and delight’ were in fact the products of (none too pleasant) human labour. However, the concluding emphasis on the present being built upon the past undermines any such interpretation. It acknowledges what has been, and then encompasses it. The Greek and Roman Courts might initially suggest anxieties about the fall of empires. But they were now comfortingly of the past, fossilized, and as unthreatening as the brick and concrete ‘antediluvian monsters’ lurking far away from the main exhibits, on the geological islands near the Palace train station. These former empires 148   Vance (1997): 233. On the relationship between decadence and decline, see Morley (2004). 149   Bell (2007): 208–9; Collini et al. (1983): 15–20; 185–205. 150   Samuel Laing’s opening speech. Cited in Wynter (1853): 609. 151   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 55.

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were, at the same time, the building blocks of contemporary society; different, but related. This passage, like the reconstructions in the Palace more generally, suggests an allegiance to what John Burrow conceptualizes as a ‘sedimental’ means of understanding historical time. Burrow traces a general shift by the 1850s to the past portrayed as reassuringly slow and harmonious. Recent geological discoveries suggested that the past was composed of layers, the development of societies gradual rather than explosive. Prior to this, both history writing and popular entertainments like the panorama had been preoccupied with volcanic eruptions and apocalyptic destruction. Burrow notes the difficulty of representing this new, more balanced past: ‘without heroes, almost without events, a history essentially of largely anonymous agents and unintended consequences.’152 The Crystal Palace, a distinctly ­nineteenth-century building, presented a past not of ruins and cataclysmic change, but one of gradual artistic evolution. Pompeii was represented as a ‘complete and perfect’ whole, a domestic setting, not a ruin.153 Vesuvius certainly appears in the guidebooks, but the main focus is on daily life, not catastrophe. The ‘sedimental’ approach at Sydenham demonstrates how the cyclical ‘decline and fall’ of empires might be safely subsumed in a more stable past.

Roman Britons/British Romans The relationship between Britain and the Roman Empire was complicated by the fact that Britain had been a Roman colony. How was nineteenth-century Britain to come to terms with its previous status as a possession? Ought the Romans to be construed as bringing peace, technological progress, and ultimately Christianity to Britain? Or as a coercive force against which plucky native Britons demonstrated gallant resistance? Both choices carried implications and potential challenges to contemporary British activities in the colonies. Could ancient Britons be compared to other colonized peoples? And if the Romans were oppressive, how did the British see themselves in their new dominant role?154   Burrow (2000): 218.   ‘Letter to the Editor’, Morning Post (20 July 1854), V&A1, I, 135. 154   Hingley (2000); Bradley (2010b). On the continuing difficulties of representing Roman Britain in British museums see Beard and Henderson (1999). 152 153

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These questions were largely sidestepped when the Crystal Palace opened. Ever evocative, the Ten Chief Courts’ description of the Roman Court lapsed into historical ruminations about the Roman presence in Britain, ‘Under our heaths and moors, lie turfed over their paved ways, rutted with the war chariot and the baggage-wagon’.155 With this one exception, however, Roman Britain simply did not feature, either in the Palace or in responses to it, a curious omission given the resurgence of interest in Romano-British archaeology at the time.156 Roman Britain did not appear at Sydenham until the 1911 Festival of Empire. A twenty-four feet high reproduction of the Roman Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath (Figure 6.6) was set up facing the Palace—although even this was a contribution made by the city of Bath, not at the request of the Festival organizers.157 The reported highlight of the festival—certainly for the 15,000 Londoners who participated in it—was the Pageant of London, a lavish three-day all-singing all-dancing theatrical production that was performed in the Palace grounds from May to September.158 This illustrated the history of the Imperial City from ‘primitive’ Celtic scenes to the full apotheosis of empire in contemporary Britain, a grand finale with a ‘Gathering of Overseas Dominions around the Mother Country’. The second scene of the pageant was concerned with Roman Britain. The end of scene one, ‘Primitive London’, depicted Julius Caesar’s arrival, but with no criticism and meagre signs of resistance. The Romans’ arrival is instead an opportunity to demonstrate Roman military prowess and unstoppable determination (‘It marches inexorably’) in contrast with the disorganization of the primitive Britons.159 The complexities of engaging with ancient British resistance to Roman imperialism were thus largely avoided, providing a more straightforward narrative appropriate for a pageant. Caractacus and Boudicea, figures symbolizing British resistance to Rome were, for all the difficulties involved in celebrating defiance of imperialism, immensely popular in late Victorian and Edwardian   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 50.   Freeman (2007): 73–91. For case studies of Victorian archaeology in Caerleon, Cirencester, Colchester, and Chester, see Hoselitz (2007). 157   ‘News in Brief – Bath and the Festival of Empire’, The Times (13 March 1911). The Temple was returned to Sydney Gardens in Bath in 1914, where it remains today. See ILN (24 January 1914): 152. 158 159   Ryan (1999).   Lomas (1911): 3. 155 156



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Figure 6.6  Photograph of the reconstruction of the Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, situated opposite the Crystal Palace during the Festival of Empire, with participants in the pageant of London’s Roman Scenes. ‘Frankish’ and ‘Saxon’ captives stand in the front row, left of centre. Photograph from Official Photographic View Book: Festival of Empire and Pageant of London, 1911 (London, 1911), Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

culture.160 The main scene of the pageant, however, centred on a lesser known subject; ‘The Triumph of Carausius’. Carausius was commander of the Roman navy around the British Isles, who in 287 ce   Hingley (2000): 72–85; Smiles (1994): 148–64.

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declared himself Emperor of Britain and Northern Gaul. Carausius’ seizure was transformed at the Pageant of London into Britain’s ‘first naval victory’. According to the souvenir guide to the pageant, on his death ‘the British empire of the seas ceased’—although only temporarily, of course.161 ‘Romano-British citizens’, clad in Roman dress, built triumphal arches and decked the temple of Diana with wreaths in their emperor’s honour. They were notably different from their ‘primitive’ British counterparts in the previous scene. Carausius paraded before them captive chiefs of ‘Frankish’ and ‘Saxon’ tribes, sporting ‘rude armour of hides’.162 Figure 6.6, a souvenir photograph taken before the reconstructed Bath Temple, proudly commemorates the experience of the pageant participants, as well as illustrating the physical difference between Romano-British dress and the ‘rude’ animal skins sported by uncivilized tribes people.163 The message was clear; ancient Britons became civilized Romans, and enjoyed their new status. Their leaders were beneficent. And Britain’s naval prowess stemmed from this early date. The engagement with Roman Britain in the Pageant of London suggested a continuity and longevity of British imperial spirit, counteracting the anxieties held by contemporary statesmen regarding Britain’s imperial future.164 It is another matter as to whether the audience and the men and women from Penge who enacted this section of the pageant were particularly swayed by national pride as they danced about Crystal Palace Park in togas. The diary of one female participant from Kensington, astutely analysed by Deborah Sugg Ryan, demonstrates far more interest in dashing men on motorcycles than the explicitly imperial message that the pageant was intended to convey.165 The Festival of Empire had—as its name suggests—none of the quandaries about identifying British foreign undertakings with the concept of imperialism that were evident at mid-nineteenth century. One official pamphlet from 1911 asserted that ‘The Gospel of Empire will be the dominant note at the Festival to open at the Crystal Palace’.166 The shifts in imperial self-presentation and new-found desire 161   Lomas (1911): 1, 4. On the relationship between the Navy, British national identity and modern mass entertainment, see Rüger (2007). 162   Lomas (1911): 6. 163   On changing visual representations of ancient Britons in the nineteenth century, see Smiles (1994): 129–64. 164 165   Reisz (2010).   Ryan (1999): 128–31. 166   Festival of Empire (1911): 7.

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to engage with Roman Britain in 1854 and 1911 were closely connected. Richard Hingley has shown how Romano-British archaeology developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the context of—and contributing towards—a more overt British imperialism. Significantly, the figure associated with the professionalization of Roman archaeology in Britain, the Camden Professor of Ancient History Francis Haverfield, was on the 1911 Pageant of London’s historical committee.167 Haverfield argued that Britain had been culturally ‘Romanised’, and suggested that contemporary British imperialists could draw useful lessons from this process.168 His theories reached an audience beyond the lecture hall in the Roman London episode of the Crystal Palace pageant. When the Palace opened in 1854, however, Roman Britain was not physically present. Contemporary comments on the relationship between Britain and its former ruler were, however, sometimes articulated in relation to the Roman displays. In its concluding remarks on the Pompeian Court, the Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor noted that ‘Little did any of its inhabitants foresee that savage Britain would one day commemorate the existence of their city, and their domestic habits, within a few miles of the banks of the Thames’.169 Any former humiliation at Roman hands was now past. Roman civilization was in ruins, while contemporary Britain’s ability to physically re-create the ancient world in a definitively modern venue encompasses, and implicitly trumps, the achievements of ancient Rome. This irony is reinforced by the notion that such an undertaking was beyond even the imagination of the ancients. There is no self-reflection, or fear that the same fate might befall Britain in the future. It is a far cry from Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous vision of a future London in ruins (1840) ‘when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St.  Pauls’.170 The technological excitement of the Crystal Palace seems to have inspired many commentators to a remarkable selfconfidence. ­Britain’s transformation from colony to colonial master was presented as irreversible.   Lomas (1911): 161.   Hingley (2000): 111–29, 53–6; Freeman (2007): 1–42. 169   Sydenham Crystal Palace Expositor (1855): 5. 170   Cited in Skilton (2007): 116. See also Edwards (1999b): 80. 167 168

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Domesticating Pompeii The Palace did offer one domestic and anglicized vision of the ancient world, in the Pompeian Court. By far the most popular of the Palace’s reconstructions, it was sandwiched between the Sheffield and Natural History Departments, at the opposite end of the Palace from the opulent faux marble baths of the Roman Court. Since the Christian father Tertullian’s Apology (c.197 ce), the destruction of Pompeii has regularly been presented as a punishment for Pompeian excess.171 This narrative is certainly present in the Palace guides, with their descriptions of the luxurious habits of the ‘profuse Pompeians’.172 But it is not as dominant as one might anticipate in the light of the guidebooks’ outright condemnation of Rome. Shelley Hales suggests that the Pompeian Court’s immersive environment provided an alternative vision of antiquity from the more traditional, sculpture-dominated displays in the Greek and Roman Courts. Visitors were encouraged to identify with the provincial and peripheral aspects of Roman life, rather than the metropolitan locus of imperial power.173 Routledge’s Guide explicitly dubbed Pompeii colonial, suggesting the court’s location at the other end of the Palace was to emphasize its role as ‘a province or colony of Rome’.174 On one level, the Pompeian Court stood in for the absent Roman Britain. Responses to Pompeii had long associated its ruins with ideas about day-to-day life in antiquity, especially after Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii. At the Crystal Palace, however, it was specifically related to contemporary British life and the rising cult of middle-class domesticity. Guidebooks and press comment cosily elided the Pompeian Court with contemporary British locations and behaviour. The court, a ‘representation of a middle-class Italian domicile of the first century of the Christian era’ was also described as a ‘sea-coast cottage’, while the cities on the Bay of Naples were compared to various British holiday resorts, ‘the Bath and Brighton of that era’, ‘the Dawlish or Worthing of Italy’.175 Ostensibly mysterious, exotic Roman religious trends—the worship of Egyptian deities Serapis and Isis—were transformed into ‘the fashionable Puseyism of the day’.176 Pompeii, a town associated 172   Discussed further in Hales (2006): 109–10.   Adams (1861): 64. 174   Hales (2006): 112–3.   McDermott (1854): 55. 175   Knight (1858–60): xxxiv; ‘The Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Mechanics’ Magazine, 60 (1854): 486–7; Scharf (1854b): 6; Ten Chief Courts (1854): 40. 176   Ten Chief Courts (1854): 46. 171 173

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with Roman leisure, became at the Crystal Palace a place associated with British time away from work. The practical lessons it might communicate were strikingly different from the didactic elaborations on decadence and brutality that characterize descriptions of the Roman Court.

C ONC LU SION Britain’s relationship with the Roman Empire at the Palace was far more complex than its connection to the Athenian example. Roman engineering and architecture were praised, but decadence and downfall were never completely out of sight. Pompeii, restored, rather than in ruins, offered a slightly different focus, its lavishness kept to a minimum and used as a potential source of inspiration for British domesticity. Greece, in contrast, was almost exclusively identified with beauty and art, rather than politics. Although the development of Greek art was explained as a result of the political and social conditions peculiar to fifth-century Athens, Greek democracy is only obliquely mentioned, and its system of colonies appears in just one guidebook.177 The conventional narrative of a shift away from Athenian colonization as the dominant model for understanding British governance abroad in the 1850s is thus testified to at the Crystal Palace. However, there was no corresponding turn towards embracing Rome as a template. The Palace emphatically celebrated modern Britain, and its reconstructions undoubtedly stimulated an interest in comparing historical time periods. However, with the exception of the Pompeian Court, the Roman Empire was presented in contrast to contemporary British life, more of a warning than a glorious historical precedent. Further, the British colonies were barely present in the opening years of the Palace, and Latham’s guide makes only the briefest of mentions that some of the people represented by the ethnological models in the Natural History Department inhabited British colonies and dependencies.178 The shift towards a positive identification with imperialism, and a celebration of the Roman colonization of Britain in the 1911 Festival of Empire, corresponds to a shift more generally within British culture in the early twentieth century.   McDermott (1854): 43.

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  Latham and Forbes (1854): 7, 20, 25, 75.

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Part III: An Unattainable Model?

Nor was there any sustained attempt to ally the British with the ancient Greeks. The Palace identified Greek sculpture with Greek bodies, and displayed them in the same venue as statues of extra-European bodies. Yet it made no claim—as some contemporary ethnologists and cultural commentators did—that the British were biologically descended from the Greeks. The emphasis was instead on a common European genetic heritage with ancient Greek people. Depending on the viewer, the nude could unify the Greeks with the models of ‘natives’, or definitively separate them. The debates surrounding the Palace displays suggest that in 1850s London, the refined classical body, as exhibited in Greek sculpture, was defined through both its connections (for some) and (for most) contrasts with the ‘savage’ body. ‘Race’ in the mid-1850s had a diffuse range of meanings, and I certainly do not wish to argue for some simplistic cohesion in the displays at the Palace. But it is important to acknowledge the significant role that classical sculpture played in formulating racial thinking in the nineteenth century. For all the national pride invested in it, at its opening the Palace was also perceived as internationalist, and seen as a means of fostering peace between nations. Phillips’s Guide presented the Fine Arts Courts as evidence of international museum cooperation. The national rivalry associated with the competition for and exhibition of sculpture as national possessions in the British Museum or Louvre had no place at the privately-owned Palace, stocked with plaster reproductions. Workmen from all over the continent were involved in setting it up, showing ‘how easily those, who have been at one time enemies on the field of battle, may become fast friends in the Palace of Peace’.179 Auerbach argues that the inclusion of ancient empires in the layout of the Palace building ‘implicitly attributed coherence to the British Empire and put it on a level with the great ancient empires’.180 A detailed examination of guidebooks and commentary reveals that the presentation of ancient empires, the relationship between Britain and these ancient civilizations, and the implications of the physical layout of the building, was anything but coherent. The past was no simple template, with clearly prescribed pointers for the present. 179   Phillips (1854): 19. See also Mast (1856). On plaster casts and internationalism, see Flour (2008): 226; Swenson (2008). 180   Auerbach (1999): 210.

Conclusion The Crystal Palace burnt to the ground in 1936. Recent critics have argued that its spirit lives on in another grandiose edifice combining extravagant aspirations with an odd jumble of exhibits—the Millennium Dome.1 The similarities have persisted since the Dome’s ‘Millennium Experience’ exhibit closed in December 2000. The building reopened to the public in June 2007 as the O2 arena, offering commercial touring exhibitions. From November 2007 to August 2008, it housed ‘Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs’, displaying over 130 artefacts from Pharaonic Egypt. Commentators’ responses to this blockbuster show of genuine artefacts bear remarkable similarities to nineteenth-century criticisms of Sydenham’s plaster assemblages. William Rossetti’s anxieties about the way that the Crystal Palace presented antiquity ‘smelling of paint and putty’ were voiced afresh by Rachel Cooke in a review article in The Observer. The exhibition set out reconstructed environments in a manner comparable to the Palace, and was accompanied by music, the first thing that Cooke comments upon: Used to the reverential quiet of the British Museum, it takes me a while to get used to this – ditto the carpets and fake pillars which, though they’re obviously designed to crank up the atmosphere (the carpets are meant to look like sand), have the opposite effect, making it harder than ever to believe that the objects I’m looking at are 3,000 years old . . . I stand in front of the coffinette for the viscera of Tutankhamun. It is made of gold, obsidian, rock crystal and glass but, for me, it might as well have been thrown together last week using model enamel and a few toilet rolls. The spirit of the theme park – queues, noise, spooky music – is upon me and, however hard I concentrate, I just can’t shake it off . . . outside, there is a   Clayton (2007).

1

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mall, with branches of Starbucks and Pizza Express, and it feels like the last place in the world you’d expect to see gilded coffins, ivory ointment jars and bejewelled headdresses, some of which date from 1555bc.2

For the art-educated journalist, the rarefied environment of the British Museum is the correct space to encounter antiquities. Inauthenticity proliferates at the Dome, from the falsity of the ‘sand’-invoking carpets to the emphatically commercial drive of the exhibit. For Cooke, the exhibition’s attempts to provide something different from a museum experience compromise the age of the objects on show, making them appear inauthentic. Antiquity, it seems, for proper appreciation, needs to be hermetically sealed from certain aspects of contemporary life. The environment in which sculpture and artefacts are displayed is clearly important. This contemporary comparison reintroduces the main concerns of Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: what did display in the Crystal Palace do to the status of classical sculpture? And how did classical sculpture affect the vast, popular undertaking of the Sydenham Palace? Thoroughly naturalized into contemporary life, the museum has become the standard against which other presentations of antiquities are judged. Cooke’s review suggests the triumph of the museum over other means of exhibiting antiquity. The marble halls of museums are, after all, no more the natural habitat for 3,000-year-old artefacts than is the Millennium Dome. Yet they have become the only conceivable place for an appropriate display of the past. Such an approach partly explains why the presentations of the past at the Sydenham Crystal Palace have been so marginal in historical writing. Although art historians now question the narrative of a straightforward museum evolution from disorderly seventeenth-century Kunstkammer to organized nineteenth-century public institution, locations such as the Crystal Palace remain absent from the story of sculpture and artefacts on display.3 As was the case with displays in the Crystal Palace, the 2008 Tut exhibition was identified with a specifically mass audience, new to the world of art and antiquities; according to Cooke, 40 per cent of visitors to the same show in Los Angeles had never been to a museum before. These two exhibits blending entertainment and education gave rise to similar concerns about a lack of authenticity. The title of Cooke’s   Cooke (2007).

2

  Preziosi (1996).

3

Conclusion



245

review ‘How they Turned Tut to Tat’ plays into a familiar connection between mass audiences, commodification, and disposability. I have argued that such an association between inauthenticity and attempts to engage wider audiences with antiquity has a long pedigree. Not only is it a well-established trope; it is often an ill-deserved one, effacing the scholarly significance of such undertakings. Sydenham’s polychromy scandal, for example, revived the debate over painted sculpture in archaeological and artistic circles, involving this mass entertainment venue in the academy. The ‘popular’ presentations of the past at Sydenham drew on both art historical and philosophical precedent, and contributed to further debate. At the Crystal Palace, the characters populating intellectual and cultural history (Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Benjamin Disraeli, Winckelmann, Plato) might have rubbed shoulders with the less revered populace of social history. The transient nature of such exhibitions does not negate their importance in forming popular perceptions of the ancient world. The museum might have triumphed, but alternative locations displaying the past proliferated in the midnineteenth century. In 1913, a letter to The Times claimed that ‘to us middle Victorians, the Crystal Palace was a sort of university of art, history, science, music, and horticulture; and we owe it as much as we do to any public institution in the country’.4 The Palace directorate would have been delighted that its illustrated encyclopaedia had, for this letter writer at least, vied with universities and public institutions. But the specifically ‘middle Victorian’ identification with the Palace raises questions about the appeal of the combination of education and entertainment across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Chapter 3, I showed how the Palace attempted to evolve alongside new technologies, opening its own cinema in 1920, while Chapter 6 demonstrates the Palace’s new involvement with more Edwardian imperial pageantry and display. However, its classical courts were peculiarly 1850s; although Greek sculpture took on new, commemorative national roles in the 1920s, its 1850s position as apogee of beauty was increasingly replaced by sculpture from other periods. The chief focus of Buckland’s 1920s guide to the Palace is the Renaissance Court: ‘one of the most beautiful and most interesting retreats in the Crystal Palace. Here the lover of the various forms in which art appeals to   The Times (8 July 1913): 9.

4

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Conclusion

one’s sense of beauty will be able to spend several hours with keen enjoyment.’5 Greece and Rome may have begun to recede from view at the Palace by the 1920s. However, they made their mark in indelible ink on the pages of mid-nineteenth-century periodicals, speeches on archaeological knowledge, and essays on morality. The excited and voluble responses to its display practices—especially the controversies of its painted Parthenon frieze, and unclothed statuary—suggest that the Palace stimulated considerable discussion over both how classical sculpture might be displayed, and its broader potential for public reform. Examining sculpture outside of the museum can alert us to concerns beyond chronology and sculptural style that were implicated in the display of Greek and Roman statuary. The aspirations for sculpture at the Palace included the improvement of national taste, manufacture, morality, the national healthy body, as well as teaching styles of art. The wider significance of classical sculpture emerges once its presentation to a new mass audience is analysed. Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace demonstrates that the sculpture and architecture of classical antiquity were definitively present in mid-nineteenth-century British culture beyond the university, stately home, and museum. Historians have emphasized the importance of popular participation in the construction of a new, broadly visual, historical consciousness in nineteenth-century Britain. This new historical consciousness was, however, reserved for the English past, especially Tudor history. The model against which this new and vital past is contrasted is that of classical scholarship, textbound, and reserved for the elite.6 Here I have shown the ways in which classical culture was also available to mass audiences in the nineteenth century, in many cases at the same venues, such as the panorama, which are identified as locations for the visual historical consciousness of the English national past. This is not to deny the elite associations of classical learning, but to emphasize that in the nineteenth century it was indeed part of other cultural experiences. Engagement with the classical world is not necessarily prestigious nor is it embarked upon exclusively by elites. Classical references do not automatically have to support either dominant or subordinate cultures. They can, and have

  Buckland (n. d. [c.1924]): 18.   Mandler (1997): 26; Melman (2006): 22; Mitchell (2000): 5.

5 6

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247

been, used by many different sections of society, with varying degrees of success.7 Four of the fourteen Fine Arts Courts at Sydenham were devoted to classical civilizations. Each chapter demonstrates an aspect of the significance of the classical courts, and the variety of meanings ascribed to them. It is, however, rather difficult to assert what impact display at the Palace had on the specific status of classical sculpture, for its position was remarkably flexible. Frank Turner argues that Greek sculpture was admired for its universal beauty and timeless qualities, providing an alternative to ‘the harshness, materialism, and sham of modern life’.8 This is indeed the case in the writings of sculptors and early classical archaeologists that he consults. Sculpture’s timeless beauty was certainly commented on at Sydenham; this enabled Owen Jones and Matthew Digby Wyatt to offer nude Greek forms as a means of elevating public morality. Yet at the same time, Jones and Wyatt presented Greek sculpture as a practical object, distinctly occupying the present time, not separate and refined, but used as an example to improve the design of Victorian tea urns. The classical courts were a key constituent of a building designed to celebrate industrialized Britain. More broadly, the example of the Crystal Palace compounds the need to understand Victorian uses of antiquity as serious engagements with the past, rather than a mere surface to be scratched away, revealing a larger historical theme. The idea that the past is always used with an ulterior motive (almost always to reinforce the machinations of power) is not a particularly helpful entry point into Victorian historical consciousness. It tends to assume that power-enforcing messages of those ‘using’ the past are seamlessly communicated and taken up by visitors, readers, or viewers. There was much more to the Crystal Palace, for example, than solely conveying messages about British national prowess. Further, such an assumption belittles the complexity of nineteenthcentury engagements with these ancient civilizations, and ignores the particular reasoning behind selecting Greece or Rome in the first place. It attributes a remarkably consistent meaning to Greek and Roman culture, as well as homogenizing nineteenth-century Britain. In the instance of imperial history, for example, Greece and Rome were indeed often used as models. But there was an alternative tradition,   e.g. Prettejohn (1999c); Goff (2005): 12, 21.

7

  Turner (1981): 36.

8

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248

which actively repudiated them.9 Historical analogies have to be relevant in order to work as analogies. Classical culture is more than an inert substance with no specific qualities of its own, to be moulded by any later generation. The Crystal Palace, with its garishly painted Parthenon frieze, the moral lessons (positive or not) of its nude sculpture, a Pompeian house which might operate as an encouragement for British interior design, and a Roman Court suggesting (among other things) imperial decline, presents an assemblage of contrasting approaches to the classical past. The displays at Sydenham caused many to lament the superiority of Greek and Roman sculpture, and to speculate whether contemporary Britain could ever rise to such accomplishments. But the Crystal Palace was a matter of contemporary British industrial pride, and there was much more to it than men and women of the 1850s genuflecting to fifth-century Athens or Augustan Rome. The complex interactions between the qualities of Greek and Roman culture (such as the wall paintings of the Palace’s Pompeian Court) and later responses to it (the preference for understanding the villa court through the pages of Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii) both reflected and confounded expectations of what the ancient world might be, or become. Classical culture is more fully understood by examining the variety of responses to its material presence over time, mediating between its aesthetic qualities and particular historical evaluations and interpretations. The display of Greek and Roman sculpture at the Crystal Palace reveals that classical sculpture could be associated with moral beauty as well as design reform, archaeological precision, the realm of the mind, or be part of an entertaining day out. I conclude with a final glance at the deceptive image of the ruined Pompeian house with which I began (Figure 0.1). This Victorian ruin both revered and re-engineered antiquity. It was proudly lined with Minton tiles from Stoke-on-Trent, but restored with painstaking archaeological accuracy. Its story is a parable of reception. For it is thanks to the responses of the tourists, artists, historians, and philosophers who visited, painted, and wrote about the cities on the slopes of Vesuvius, that it appears at its most recognizably ‘Pompeian’—not when accurately restored, but when in ruins.

  Bell (2007): 207–29.

9

Appendices

APPENDIX 1

Ground Plan of the Crystal Palace Ground Plan of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, from Phillips (1854). Image courtesy of Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

APPENDIX 2

Plan of the Greek Court Plan of the Greek Court, from McDermott (1854): 56. Image courtesy of Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

APPENDIX 3

Plan of the Roman Court Plan of the Roman Court, from McDermott (1854): 68. Image courtesy of Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

APPENDIX 4

Plan of the Pompeian Court Plan of the Pompeian Court, from McDermott (1854): 172. Image courtesy of Bromley Local Studies and Archives.

APPENDIX 5

List of Greek and Roman Sculpture Exhibited at Sydenham This list is a combination of Phillips (1854): 49–50, 54–5, and the more detailed catalogues in the individual guides to the Greek and Roman Courts; Scharf (1854a): 50–113; Scharf (1854c): 31–86. I have primarily supplied information about the location of originals from which these were cast (as it was in the 1850s, note that Scharf does not supply this information for all items) to give readers a sense of the wide range of European collections from which sculpture at Sydenham derived, and to provide some indication of the identity of individual pieces. I have used nineteenth-century names for works, and any descriptions are Scharf ’s. It will be most profitably used alongside the detailed catalogue in Haskell and Penny (1981).

Greek Court

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Venus Victrix, (Aphrodite), called Venus of Milo, Louvre. Venus Victrix, found in the Amphitheatre at Capua, Naples. Dione, found at Ostia, British Museum. Quoit-Thrower (Discobolos) in action. Vatican. The Warrior of Agasias, Louvre, formerly Borghese collection. Juno—Farnese. Naples. Naiad, formerly in collection of Cardinal Fesch, now Louvre. Apollo. Bronze, found in Pompeii. Naples. Mercury, bronze from Naples, found at Herculaneum, 1758. Faun reposing. From Vatican. Formerly in Palazzo Ruspoli. Colossal Female Figure. Ariadne from Dresden, formerly Chigi collection. 12. Faun reposing, Capitoline, formerly Villa d’Este. 13. Scythian (grinder). Sharpening his knife to flay Marsyas (Arrotino), Florence. 14. Danaid, Vatican. 15. Vacant. 16. Laocoon and his Sons, Vatican. 17. Farnese Minerva, Naples. 18. Minerva, formerly Palazzo Giustiniani at Rome, now Vatican. 19. Sleeping Faun, commonly known as the Barberini Faun, Munich. 20. Youth, bronze, also known as L’Idole, Florence.

Appendix 5

256

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.



33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.



58. 59.



60. 61.

Jason, Munich, discovered at Hadrian’s Villa. Diana of Gabii, from the Louvre, formerly Borghese. Ludovisi Mars Genius of Death, Louvre. Jason, Louvre. Apollo Lycius, called, at Florence, the Apollino. Ariadne (sleeping), formerly called Cleopatra, Vatican. Minerva, Villa Albani, found in Hadrian’s Villa. Minerva, Dresden. Somnus, from Vienna, Imperial Museum. Clio, Berlin. Frieze in alto-relievo, from east portico of Temple of Theseus, Athens. Endymion, alto-relief, from the Capitoline. Bas-relief, Villa Albani, Rome. Two Greek Combatants and a Horse. Perseus and Andromeda—alto-relief, Capitoline. Polyhymnia, found at Herculaneum. Dresden. Minerva with spear, owl at her feet, Florence. Canephorae, Villa Albani. Canephorae, Villa Albani. Minerva, Dresden. Flora, Capitoline. Hygieia, Vatican. Small statue of female. Euterpe, Berlin. Vesta, formerly Giustiniani Palace, Rome. Euterpe, previously Borghese. Borghese Flora, Louvre. Minerva, with the sloping Aegis. Dresden. A muse—or one of family of Niobe. Berlin. Polyhymnia, Berlin. Thalia, Berlin. A Bronze Figure, from Aegina. Torso of an Amazon Minerva. Dresden. Small female figure holding a globe. The east frieze of the Theseum. Portion of the frieze from Temple of Wingless Victory (Nike Apteros), Athens. Battle of the Amazons, bas-relief from Vienna. Bas-relief of Female Figure Mounting a Chariot, discovered at Athens. Minerva in act of hurling a lance, found at Herculaneum. Puteal, Capitoline.

Appendix 5 List of Sculpture at Sydenham



62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

257

Torso of a Faun, Florence. Aesculapius and Telesphorus, Louvre. Pomona, Florence. Philosopher, Munich. Torso of a Youthful Male Figure. A seated Hercules, commonly known as the Belvedere Torso, Vatican. Torso of a female figure, collection of Baron Humboldt at Tegel, Berlin. 69. Horse’s head, bronze, Florence. 70. Polyhymnia, Naples. 71. Horse’s head. 72. Torso and Legs of a Delicately Formed Female. 73. Marsyas—torso from Berlin. 74. Horse’s Head, found at Herculaneum in 1739. Naples. 75. Diana, Naples. Etruscan, with traces of paint. 76. Antinous and his Genius with Small Statue of Elpis, Madrid. 77. Ganymedes and Eagle, Vatican. 78. Cupid and Psyche, Capitoline. 79. Thalia, Louvre. 80. Augustus, clothed in the Toga, Louvre, formerly Vatican. 81. Apollo. 82. Ceres. Portrait of a Roman Girl. Vatican. 83. Bacchus Crowned with Ivy. 84. Victory, bronze, Berlin. 85. Penelope and Telemachus. Roman portraits, Villa Ludovisi. Commonly called Orestes and Electra. 86. Half-draped female statue. 87. Thetis, Dresden. 88. Ganymedes, Berlin. 89. Bacchus (modern?). 90. Aesculapius, Berlin. 91. Hunter, Naples. 92. Julian the Apostate, Paris, in possession of Count Lariboisière. 93. Architectural scrollwork from Villa Medici, Rome. 94. Architectural scrollwork from Villa Medici, Rome. 95. Architectural ornament. 96. Portion of a frieze, from Forum of Trajan, formerly Villa Aldobrandini. 97. Spain, colossal head, Louvre, formerly Borghese. 98. Portion of a frieze, from Forum of Trajan, formerly Villa Aldobrandini. 99. Architectural Ornament of a Griffin, Louvre. 100. Bold Architectural Ornaments. 101. Architectural scrollwork.

258

Appendix 5

102. Architectural scrollwork. 103. Architectural Fragment. 104. Architectural Fret. 105. Architectural Portions of a Cornice. 106. Architectural Fragments. 107. Architectural Fragments. 108. Architectural Fragments. 109. Architectural Fragments. 110. Architectural Fragments. 111. Large Lion’s Head. 112. Capital. 113. Architectural Fragments. 114. Architectural Fragments. 115. Architectural Fragments. 116. Architectural Fragments. 117. Lucilla, Berlin. 118. The front of a large sarcophagus, Camposanto, Pisa. 119. A.B. Bas-relief, three portions of Trajan’s Column. 120. Vacant 121. Vacant 122. Victory, inscribing on a shield. 123. Vacant 124. From a terracotta. Griffin. 125. Bas-relief, battle between Romans and Barbarians, Capitoline. 126. Bas-relief, Giants and Titans. Sarcophagus, Vatican. 127. Roman Sacrifice, portion of a bas-relief, Florence. 128. Terracottas, Feats of Hercules, Berlin. 129. Pudicitia, found at Herculaneum, Dresden. 129A. Bas-relief, battles of Greeks and Amazons, Genoa. Similar to marbles of Halicarnassus. 130. Colossal Ceres, Berlin. 130A. Bas-relief of Late Workmanship, Athens. 131. Bas-relief—the three fates, Berlin. 132. Musicians. 133. The Muses—bas-relief, Louvre. 134. Bas-relief. Victory, Apollo, Diana, Latona. Louvre. 135. Bas-relief—chorus of five females, Louvre, formerly Borghese. 136. Bas-relief—three dancing females. Florence. 137. Bas-relief—three females decorating a candelabrum. Louvre, formerly Borghese. 138. Alto-relievo of White Marble. 139. Bas-relief. 140. Bas-relief. The seasons and marriages of Peleus and Thetis, Villa Albani.

Appendix 5 List of Sculpture at Sydenham



141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156.



157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174.



175. 176. 177. 178.



178B.

259

Three Cities Personified, bas-relief. Louvre, previously Borghese. Colossal Vestal, Dresden. Bas-relief—Antinous, Villa Albani, found at Hadrian’s Villa. Retrograde Sepulchral Inscription. Small bas-relief from Athens. Veiled female, youth with horse. Athenian bas-relief. The Dioscuri, bas-relief from Athens. Portion of a Funereal Vase. Cippus or Greek stele from Louvre. Upper part of Doric Column of the Parthenon. Full size. Bas-relief—Faun and Nymph, found at Herculaneum. Naples. Athenian bas-relief. A very fine fragment, Athens. Alto-relievo from Athens. Pluto, with Modius on his head, reclining on a couch. Fragment of frieze of the Parthenon. Two male heads and horns of an ox. Fragment of a Horse’s Head. Small bas-relief. Bas-relief from Athens. Juno and Minerva. Low relief. A cavalcade. One horseman followed by four. An inscribed stele. A farewell scene. Bas-relief, A seated male divinity. The lower portion of a stele. Colossal Juno, Berlin. Bas-relief, Florence. A small Athenian bas-relief representing a parting scene. Bas-relief, male figure on a couch. A low relief. The genuineness of which may well be doubted. Caryatidae, Pozzuoli. Bas-relief, Orpheus, Eurydice, and Mercury, Naples. Ulysses and his Dog, sepulchral stele, Naples. An inscribed farewell scene, Athens. An interesting little alto-relievo, Athens. Naked man anointing himself. Bas-relief—female seated and male fully draped, late style. Fragment of Seated Female. Fragment. Two draped females. and 178A. Alto-relievo, figures of Victory, from the Acropolis of Athens. Winged Victory adjusting her sandal, from Temple of Wingless Victory, Acropolis.

260

Appendix 5 The Elgin Marbles

North frieze, painted section, British Museum. East frieze, British Museum. 179. A portion of the west frieze of the Parthenon. 180. Fragment of the frieze of the Parthenon in the Vatican. 181. Portion of an interesting little female figure. 182. Fragment of one of the South Metopes of the Parthenon—hind part of a centaur. 183. Vacant. 184. Vacant. Statues from the eastern pediment of the Parthenon, British Museum. 185. Theseus. 185A. Ceres and Proserpine. 185C. Horse’s Head. 186B. The Fates. 187. Niobe and Daughters, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. 187A. Niobid—daughter. 187B. Niobid—daughter. 187C. Niobid and Paedagogue. 187D. Niobid—daughter. 187E. Niobid—son. 187F. Niobid—daughter. 187G. Niobid—daughter. 187H. Niobid—son. 187I. Niobid—son. 187K. Niobid—kneeling son looking up. 187L. Niobid—son lying on the ground. 188. Colossal Torso, Naples. 189. The Ilioneus restored. 190. Venus. Dresden, copy of Medici Venus. 191. Cupid, bending his bow, Venice. 192. The Son of Niobe, Florence. 193. Farnese Torso of a Youth, Naples. 194. Amazon, Dresden. 195. Priest of Bacchus, Munich. 196. Melpomene, Louvre. 197. Ilioneus, Munich. 198. Medici Venus, Florence. 199. Psyche, Naples. 200. Owl upon a Square Plinth. 201. Iris, Hecate, or Lucifera, Villa Albani. 202. Pan, Pittaki’s Collection, Athens.



Appendix 5 List of Sculpture at Sydenham

261

203. Cupid, Vatican. 204. Model of the Temple of Neptune at Paestum. 205. Square Altar of the Capitol, Capitoline, Rome. 206. Sosibius Vase, Louvre. 207. Funereal Vase, Munich. 208. Sacrificial Altar, Munich. 209. Candelabrum or Tripod, Dresden. 210. Altar, Louvre. 211. A Tripod, Glyptothek, Munich. 212. Victory, standing on a ball, Berlin. 213. Cinerarium of Lucilius, Capitoline, Rome. 214. Vacant. 215. Euripides, Louvre. 216. Candelabrum, Louvre. 217. Head of Magnus Decentius.

Roman Court

218. Model of the Forum of Rome, showing Capitoline Hill, Forum, Coliseum, Arch of Constantine, Palatine Hill. 221. Faun, Dresden. 222. Statue of Drusus, Naples, from Pompeii. 223. Young Faun, Madrid. 224. Draped Venus and Cupid, Louvre, formerly Château de Richelieu. 225. Young Hercules, Louvre. 226. Venus of the Capitol. 227. Ganymedes, found at Ostia 1805. Vatican. 228. Venus Genitrix, Louvre, previously in Versailles Gardens. 229. Julia, Daughter of Augustus, Louvre. 230. Portrait of a Musician—Female Performer on the Lyre, Louvre. 231. Small Female Figure, attired like a Victory. 232. Youth invoking the Gods—Supplicant, Berlin. 233. Marine Venus and Cupid, Louvre. 234. Camillus, bronze from Capitol, Rome. 235. Large Female Figure—called Mnemosyne, Berlin. 236. Venus, with a frontlet on head, and armlet, Florence. 237. Venus Victrix—Venus of Arles, Louvre. 238. Venus Callipygos, Naples. 239. Urania, Louvre, formerly at Versailles. 240. Bacchus, Berlin. 241. Richelieu Bacchus, Louvre. 242. Faun? Modern, said to come from Naples. 243. Venus and Cupid, Louvre, previously in Villa Borghese.

Appendix 5

262

244. 245. 246. 247. 248. 249. 250. 251. 252. 253. 254. 255. 256. 257. 258. 259. 260. 261. 262. 263. 264. 265. 266. 267. 268.



269. 270. 271. 272.



273. 274. 275.

Female Reading a Scroll, seated on a square stool, Berlin. Venus, Louvre; compare 248. Cupid and Psyche, Florence. Boy extracting thorn from his foot, Capitoline, Rome. Venus, Crouching, Vatican. Ceres, a small standing figure, veiled. Anchirrhöe, collection of Baron von Humboldt, Tegel, Berlin. Nymph extracting a thorn, ‘much restored’, Florence. Belvedere Apollo, Vatican. Young Faun, playing the pipe, Louvre, previously Villa Borghese. Cupid as the reposing Hercules, Louvre, via Borghese Villa. Hercules and Omphale, Naples, previously Farnese. Young Faun, playing the pipe, Vatican. Faun, carrying a wineskin, Villa Albani. Apollo Sauroctonos, Louvre. Faun and Young Pan, Louvre, formerly Borghese Villa. Young Faun, playing the pipe, Louvre, formerly Borghese. Diana the Huntress, Louvre, previously at Versailles. Boy and Goose, Louvre. Boy and Bird, ‘numerous repetitions of this group are known’. Boy with Mask, Capitoline. Urania, Vatican. Penelope restored as a Ceres, Berlin. Ganymedes, with a bird and eagle, Florence. Girl, playing at Osselets or Astragals, Berlin, formerly Polignac collection. Boy and Goose, Capitol (compare 262). Eumachia, found 1820 at Pompeii. Pudicitia, Louvre. Portrait Statue of a Roman Lady, bronze from Glyptothek, Munich. Livia Drusilla, the wife of Augustus. Found at Pompeii, 1821. Vase, Naples. Candelabrum, Louvre.

Nave Extreme north end: Aegina Marbles (no catalogue number). Statues in the nave arranged in front of the Greek and Roman Courts.

276. Colossal Torlonia Hercules. 277. Dog, from Florence.

Appendix 5 List of Sculpture at Sydenham



278. 279. 280. 281. 282. 283. 284.

263

Colossal Cupid as Hercules, Capitoline. Bacchus, Louvre. Antinous from Capitoline, found in Hadrian’s Villa. Agrippina the Elder, Naples. Adonis, Vatican. Bacchus, Berlin. Faun of the Capitol, with Goat, Pedum, and Cista. Capitoline, discovered in Hadrian’s Villa. 285. Mercury, from Florence. 286. Trajan, sitting, holding a globe. 287. Mercury of the Vatican. 288. Antinous as Mercury, Naples. 289. Meleager of Berlin, with Dog and Spear. 290. Menander, Vatican. 291. Posidippus, Vatican. 292. Boar. 293. Meleager of the Vatican. 294. Quoit-Player (Discobolos), in repose. Vatican. 295. Faun snapping his fingers, Naples, found at Herculaneum 1754. 296. Adonis. 297. Polyhymnia, Louvre. 298. Apollo Sauroctonos, Vatican. 299. Athlete, or Boxer, collection of Arolsen. 300. The Clapping Faun, Florence. 301. Apollo Sauroctonos, Louvre, formerly Borghese Collection. 302. Amazon, heroic size, Vatican. 303. Faun, Paris. 304. Wrestlers, Florence. 305. Young Faun, carrying the infant Bacchus on his shoulders. Naples. 306. Silenus, carrying the infant Bacchus, Louvre, formerly Villa Borghese. 307. Posidonius, Louvre, formerly Borghese Collection. 308. Demosthenes, Louvre, formerly Vatican. 309. Gladiator, wounded and prostrate, ‘Dying Gladiator’, Capitoline. 310. Achilles, heroic statue, Louvre, previously Borghese Collection. 311. Bacchus, Naples. 312. Germanicus, Louvre. 313. Adonis, or Apollo of Capua. Naples. 314. Antinous as a good genius, Berlin. 315. Discobolos ‘much distorted’. 316. Mercury, Vatican. Formerly known as Antinous of the Vatican. 317. Hercules reposing—Farnese Hercules, Naples. 318. and 319. Dioscuri. The Colossi of Monte Cavallo.

264

Appendix 5 320. Monument of Lysicrates, Athens. 321. Demosthenes, standing, Vatican. 322. Sophocles, standing, Lateran Museum. 323. Vacant. 324. Phocion, Vatican. 325. Vacant. 326. Aristides, or Aeschines, Naples, found in Herculaneum. 327. Philosopher, known as Zeno, Capitol. 328. Minerva, colossal bust, Munich, formerly Albani Collection. 329. Melpomene, found at Hadrian’s Villa, Vatican. 330. Young Jupiter, Naples. 331. Lucius Verus. 332. Plotina. 333. Lucius Verus. 334. Julia Domna Pia. 335. Juno Ludovisi. 336. Medusa Head, Cologne. 337. Olympian Jupiter, Vatican. 338. Titus Vespasian, Naples. 339. Jupiter Serapis, with Modius and Rays. Vatican. 340. Marine Deity, Oceanus or Triton, Vatican. 341. Juno, found at Carthage. 342. Pertinax. 343. Trajan. 344. Marcus Aurelius. 345. M. Agrippa. 346. Thalia, Vatican. Found at Hadrian’s Villa. 347. Colossal bust of Antinous, Lateran Museum. 348. Head of the Youthful Bacchus, Leyden. Originally from Asia Minor. 349. Colossal head of Juno Ludovisi. 350. Dirce, tied to a bull—Toro Farnese, Naples. 351. Pallas, colossal statue, Louvre. 352. Borghese Vase, Louvre. 353. Medici Vase, Florence. 354. Vase with Heads, Louvre. 355. Vase with Bacchic Masks, Louvre. 356. Vase, Camposanto, Pisa. 357. Fountain in Form of a tripod, Louvre, found in Hadrian’s Villa. 358. Cupid encircled by a Dolphin, Naples. 359. Amazon, Vatican. 360. Ceres, Vatican. 361. Mercury, sitting bronze figure, Herculaneum.



Appendix 5 List of Sculpture at Sydenham

265

362. Medici Venus. 363. Athlete. 364. Posidonius. 365. Polyhymnia, Naples. 366. Bronze statue of a youth, Berlin. 367. Faun, Capitol. 368. Antinous and his Genius, Madrid. 369. Dancing Faun, Florence. 370. Sleeping Faun. 371. Bust of Meleager. 372. Bronze Faun, sleeping, found in Herculaneum 1756, Naples. 373. Apollo Sauroctonos, small bronze, Villa Albani. 374. Small sitting figure of Urania. 375. Bronze statue of a youth, Florence. 376. Small figure of Ceres, Vatican. 377. Apollo Lycius, Florence. 378. The dog Molossus, Florence. 379. Wrestlers, or Pancratiastae, Florence. 380. Bronze statue of a boy extracting a thorn, Capitol. 381. Antoninus Pius. 382. Indian Bacchus, bronze bust, Herculaneum discovered 1759, ­initially called Plato. 383. Bust of Laughing Faun, Munich, formerly Villa Albani. 384. Bust of Achilles. 385. Double Hermes, or terminal bust, male heads. 386. Bearded Bacchus. 387. Bacchus, winged and beardless bust, Berlin. 388. Zeus Trophonios, belonging to Prince Talleryrand. 389. Head of Apollo, with hair gathered into a peculiar knot. 390. Jupiter. 391. Double Hermes, or terminal bust, female heads. 392. Head of Apollo. 393. Jupiter Serapis. 394. The Sun—Alexander of the Capitol. 395. Juno. 396. Apollo, Paris. 397. Head of the Laocoon, Brussels. 398. Achilles, Munich, formerly Villa Albani. 399. Aesculapius, bust. 400. Female Bust, from the Arundel Collection, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. 401. Philosopher. 402. Bust of Draped Female.

Appendix 5

266

403. Pluto. 404. Omphale, Louvre, formerly Villa Albani. 405. Bust of Ariadne, or Arethusa. 406. Serapis, or Infernal Jupiter. 407. Paris, bust, Villa Albani. 408. Bust of Minerva Medica. 409. Bust of Pallas. 410. Medusa, Glyptothek, Munich. 411. Bust of Reposing Faun. See no. 12. 412. Head of a Child. 413. Jupiter. 414. Part of a Sepulchral Altar, depicting the Visit of Bacchus to Icarius, Vatican. 415. Omphale. 416. Stag Rearing, Vatican. 417. Roebuck Standing, Vatican. 418. Nymph, Louvre, formerly Borghese Villa. 419. Nymph at Fountain, British Museum. 420. Small Statue of Sitting Hercules. 421. Cato and Porcia, from a Roman Tomb, Vatican. 422. Bronze Plates from Etruscan Chariot, Munich. 423. Aesop Statue, Villa Albani. Not yet arrived

219. Model of the Coliseum at Rome. 220. Model of the Trajan Column at Rome. Adorante Adorante Aeneas Aesculapius Ariadne Bas-relief of a Comic Scene Bas-relief Boy and Goose Bust of Scipio Africanus Centaur Borghese Ceres Crouching Venus Domitian Euterpe Flora Florence Hermaphrodite



Appendix 5 List of Sculpture at Sydenham Hercules Hermaphrodite Hermaphrodite Indian Bacchus Indian Bacchus Indian Bacchus Isis Isis Juno Juno of the Capitol Jupiter Serapis La Providence Menelaus Bust Minerva Bust Muse Nebrid Bacchus Niobe Sarcophagus Paetus and Arria Palaemon Providentia Rome Rome Salpion Vase Sibyl The Triumph of Titus The most celebrated Bernini Hermaphrodite Tiberius Triangular Altar of the Twelve Gods Vase of the Capitol Venus of Cnidos Wounded Amazon Young Hercules

267

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Index Aegina  5, 71, 80 aestheticism  166–7, 199 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence  111–13 anatomical museums  63 antiquarianism  54–6, 88, 122–3 Apollo Belvedere  12, 62–3, 66, 71, 81, 177, 220 Arnold, Matthew  129, 197–8 Arts and Crafts Movement  155–8 Art-Union of London  148–9, 150–1 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford  68 Baartman, Sara  64, 217 Bassae  59, 69, 80, 89 Baudrillard, Jean  91, 120–1 Bell, John  137 Benjamin, Walter  99–100, 108, 129 Bennett, Tony  20–1, 50–1, 200, 212, 215 Bourdieu, Pierre  25–7, 30, 50 British Museum  3, 5, 25, 44, 50, 69–70, 71, 72–3, 80, 84, 86, 139, 147, 182, 185–6, 214–15 Burckhardt, Jacob  136 Byron, George Gordon  58, 222–3 Catholicism  104, 195, 196 Celts 222–3 citizen consumer  142 Classical Reception Studies  3–4, 5, 6, 206–7 Cockerell, Charles  67 Cole, Henry  132 Coliseum  12, 57, 117, 119 Crane, Walter  155, 157 Crary, Jonathan  33, 119–20 Crystal Palace Art-Union 148–52 Ceramic Court  146–8 cinema 114 Crimean Court  209–10 Egyptian Court  113–14, 137, 151, 168, 212–16 Festival of Empire  107, 209–10, 236–8, 241

guidebooks  9–10, 32–3, 38, 51–2, 70, 73, 77, 79, 82–3, 94, 101, 141, 154, 167–70, 171–2, 183, 186, 212–15, 231, 245 Indian Court  208, 216 Natural History Department  30–1, 35, 210, 217–18, 224–32, 241 Nineveh Court  50–1, 137, 152, 213–16 opening hours  22–3 Pageant of Empire  236–9 Tourist Court  118 working-class visitors  22–5, 26–7, 28–30, 35–7, 40, 46–9, 50, 117, 139, 158–9, 175, 180, 187, 226–31 Day, Lewis Frederick  157 Diana the Huntress (Louvre Diana)  12, 62, 81 Disraeli, Benjamin  209 Dresser, Christopher  157–8 Dying Gladiator (Dying Gaul)  66, 151, 222–3 Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth  20, 25, 46, 101, 103–4, 169, 227 Eco, Umberto  91, 120–1 electrotypes  93, 149 Elgin Marbles  62, 66, 74–5, 78, 79–80, 83–4, 104, 191, 196, 204, 215, 219, 220 evangelicals  189–92, 197–8 exhibitionary complex, see Bennett, Tony Fitzwilliam Museum  68–9 Flaxman, John  67, 148, 173, 194, 195 Foucault, Michel  21, 176 Furtwängler, Adolf  78–9, 82 Gibson, John  188 Great Exhibition  7–8, 19, 60, 91, 131, 138, 141, 178, 203–5, 208–9 Greek pottery  147–8

304

Index

Greek sculpture and the Arts and Crafts Movement 155–7 British ethnicity  220–2 design reform  133–6 First World War  210 ideality 173–5 manual labour  135–6 nudity  48, 164–5, 176–7, 178, 182–3, 184–8, 189, 194, 197–8, 231–2 race 217–32 slavery 156 Haverfield, Francis  239 Hawthorne, Nathaniel  95, 98, 101–2, 119, 188 heritage industry  89 homosexuality  184–5, 194 ‘Hottentot Venus’, see Baartman, Sara Imperial War Museum  210–11 Jauss, Hans-Robert  3 Jones, Owen  74–7, 89–90, 111, 125, 132, 134–5, 140–1, 143, 154, 157, 165, 179, 215 Journal of Design and Manufactures 132, 133, 138–9, 140 Kant, Immanuel  166 Kingsley, Charles  193, 222 Knossos 110 Knox, Robert  220–1 Kopienkritik, see Furtwängler, Adolf Lady Lever Art Gallery, Wirral, Cheshire 160 Laocoon  54, 62, 65, 66, 81, 84 Latham, Robert Gordon  224, 226 Leighton, Frederic  67, 111, 221 Lytton, Edward Bulwer  60–2, 98, 113, 122, 240, 248 Martineau, Harriet  20, 29–30, 40, 95, 226 Marx, Karl  109, 201 Melville, Herman  104 Millennium Dome (The O2 Arena) 243–4 Minton (pottery)  93, 149, 248 modernity and antiquity  90, 119–20, 129–30, 145–6

and mass audiences  85 nineteenth-century  6, 91–2 Morris, William  110, 128–9, 155–7 Musée de Cluny, Paris  86 Museum Studies  21, 22, 199–200, 204–5 Nemea 10–11 Nero, Emperor  232–3 Newton, Charles  69, 70–2, 79, 80, 86, 126, 169 Niobe  11, 66, 67, 75, 84, 221 panorama  56–7, 61, 67, 85, 90, 94, 95, 114, 119, 235, 246 Parian ware  149–50 Parthenon  10, 11, 70, 84, 92, 94 Parthenon frieze  62, 74–7, 80, 89–90, 103–4, 110–11, 168, 215, 230 Pausanias  81, 135 Penny Magazine  65–7, 84, 133, 178 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich  37–9 Phidias  13, 76, 111, 186, 195–6, 220 Phillips, Samuel  186, 214, 242 see also Crystal Palace, guidebooks photography  32, 47, 119–20 plaster casts  71–3, 99–106, 108–9 Plato  91, 172–5, 194 Pliny the Elder  42, 81, 122, 135, 173, 186 polychromy archaeology 74–7 Catholicism 104 mass audiences  103–4, 111 morality 187–8 non-Western art  215, 230 race 229–31 Pompeian Court  13–15 authenticity  87–8, 92–3, 97–8, 113, 122, 127–8 domesticity  235, 240–1 Lytton, Edward Bulwer  61 ruins  1–2, 239, 241, 248 travel 116–18 visitors  28, 29, 33, 40, 42 Pompeii  57, 60–1, 64, 110, 115 poses plastiques  63–4, 84 Poynter, Edward John  106, 109, 111 Praxiteles  13, 186, 195 Regent’s Park Colosseum  58–60, 62 Reynolds, Joshua  174, 186, 187 Richards, Thomas  141



Index

Ricketts, Charles  153 Roman Britain  235–40 Roman Empire  232–41 Roman sculpture British ethnicity  222–3 copies 77–85 Rossetti, William  89–90, 95–6, 98, 110, 122–3, 199, 243 ruins  1–2, 57–9, 85, 96, 116–17, 121, 214, 232, 235, 239, 241, 248 Ruskin, John  42–3, 86, 128–9, 139–41, 155, 156, 157, 159, 162, 166, 196 Sabbatarianism  190, 192, 193 Sandow, Eugen  223–4 Scharf, George  9, 70, 71, 77, 79, 80, 94, 171, 179, 213, 221 see also Crystal Palace, guidebooks Schliemann, Heinrich  110 Select Committee on Arts and their Connexion with Manufactures (1835/6)  130–1, 134, 135, 141, 147 Sir John Soane’s Museum  68–9 South Kensington Museum architectural cast courts  99, 105 classical plaster casts  102–3, 159–60

305

Crystal Palace casts  106–7 design reform  131–2, 138, 139 souvenirs  32, 76, 98, 119, 149 stereoviewer  65, 94, 97–8, 114, 119 Stuart, James and Nicholas Revett  60, 74, 78 tableaux vivants, see poses plastiques Thomas Cook Tours  115–16, 118 Venus de Milo  10–11, 71, 101, 185, 213, 217 Victoria and Albert Museum, see South Kensington Museum Victorian sculpture  100, 136–8 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool  159 Wedgwood, Josiah  146, 148 Westmacott jr, Richard  67, 77, 81, 104, 109, 136–7, 180, 188, 198, 230 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim  77–8, 156, 170–2, 173–5, 195, 199, 212–13, 219 Wyatt, Matthew Digby  18, 31–3, 86, 132–3, 137, 139–41, 155 Xanthus  69, 80