Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain 9781501332197, 9781501332227, 9781501332210

Citation preview

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

ii

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain Rebecca Wade

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Rebecca Wade, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Louis Haghe, The Transept of the Crystal Palace, 1851 © Victoria and Albert Museum, London All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3219-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3221-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-3220-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Dedicated to the memory of Ben Read (1945–2016)

vi

Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements 1 Introduction Wandering Italians

ix xiii xv 1 1

The fortunes of Brucciani’s formatori 14

2

3

4

5

Object Lessons

21

The context of the Schools of Design

22

Brucciani and the educational market

24

The contested classical in industrial education

26

Plaster casts as teaching objects

31

The Leeds School of Design: A case study

35

Exhibitions Great and Small

43

Brucciani’s Apollo Belvedere at the Great Exhibition of 1851

44

Brucciani’s Greek Slave and the International Exhibition of 1862

48

Brucciani beyond London

54

The Galleria delle Belle Arti

56

Exhibiting plasters in parks and gardens

60

Plaster casts and production of ceremonial space

65

Decorating the Alexandra Palace (twice)

69

Death Masks and Dance Halls

75

Posthumous plaster heads and hands

76

The places of plaster and the spaces of rational recreation

93

Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

103

The British Museum

103

The South Kensington Museum

105

The National Portrait Gallery

114

viii Contents The Natural History Museum

116

Plasters in ‘provincial’ museums: Leeds Art Gallery

124

Australasia 126

6

North America

129

Casting Aside

133

The death of Domenico Brucciani

133

D. Brucciani and Company Limited

135

The first rescue mission

138

The second rescue mission

140

The Department for the Sale of Casts

146

Conclusion 154

Notes Bibliography Index

157 188 196

List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 John Thomas Smith, ‘Unknown man selling toys’, 1815 Figure 1.2 Benjamin Robert Haydon, ‘Punch or May Day’, 1829 Figure 1.3 James Collinson, ‘Italian image-boys at a roadside alehouse’, 1849 Figure 1.4 James Collinson, ‘Image boy’, c. 1849 Figure 1.5 William Daniels, ‘Self-portrait with casts: The image seller’, c. 1850 Figure 1.6 Julian Leverotti, ‘The late D. Brucciani’, 1881, Graphic (19 November 1910), 806 Figure 1.7 Lorenzo Giuntini, Portrait bust of Dr Alfred Percival Maudslay, 1885 Figure 2.1 ‘School of design’, Illustrated London News (27 May 1843), 375 Figure 2.2 ‘The school of design’, Punch (5 July 1845), 21 Figure 2.3 ‘The school of design’, Punch (5 July 1845), 21 Figure 2.4 ‘Statues’, from D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Catalogue of Casts for Schools (London, 1914), 8 Figure 2.5 Richard Redfern, Venus de Milo, 1860 Figure 2.6 ‘The antique room’, from The Leeds Institute of Science, Art, and Literature: Historical Sketch, 1824–1900 (Leeds, 1901), 8 Figure 3.1 Louis Haghe, ‘Refreshment department of the Great International Exhibition of 1851, Hyde Park’, c. 1851 Figure 3.2 Detail of ‘Grand panorama (concluded) of the Great Exhibition. – No. IX. – South and north portions of the transept’, Illustrated London News Supplement (6 March 1852), 205 Figure 3.3 ‘Statues’, from D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Catalogue of Casts for Schools (London, 1914), 10 Figure 3.4 ‘Fruit, leaves, vegetables, &c., from nature’, from D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Catalogue of Casts for Schools (London, 1914), 42 Figure 3.5 ‘Cremorne-gardens. The orchestra’, Illustrated London News (28 June 1851), 619

3 4 8 9 10 16 17 23 29 30 32 33 41 45

46 47

49 60

x List of Illustrations

Figure 3.6 Figure 3.7 Figure 3.8 Figure 3.9 Figure 3.10

Figure 3.11 Figure 3.12 Figure 3.13 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 4.5 Figure 4.6 Figure 4.7 Figure 4.8 Figure 4.9 Figure 4.10 Figure 4.11 Figure 4.12 Figure 5.1

‘Cremorne gardens. – The maypole dance’, Illustrated London News (14 August 1858), 149 61 ‘The winter gardens and aquarium at Blackpool, Lancashire’, Illustrated London News (20 July 1878), 66 63 ‘Entrance to Winter Gardens, Blackpool’, 1909 64 ‘The royal procession at the grand arch, London Bridge’, Illustrated London News (21 March 1863), 300–1 65 ‘The procession in Oxford-Circus’ and ‘The procession at the foot of Regent-Street’, Illustrated London News (21 March 1874), 373 67 J. R. Brown and F. George Williams, ‘The Shakspeare [sic] fountain, Leicester Square’, Builder (4 July 1874), 567 68 ‘Opening of the Alexandra Palace’, Illustrated London News (31 May 1873), 518 70 ‘The central hall, Alexandra Palace’, Illustrated London News (17 April 1875), 368 71 D. Brucciani, Death mask of Edmund Kean, 1833 77 Phrenological head of Daniel Good after execution, undated 78 ‘Execution of Daniel Good’, Illustrated London News (21 May 1842), 32 79 D. Brucciani, Death mask of Ben Caunt, 1861 82 D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Death mask and right hand of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1908 83 Ernest Edwards, William Makepeace Thackeray, c. 1863 85 D. Brucciani, Death mask of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1863 86 D. Brucciani, Death mask of Napoleon III, 1873 87 Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, ‘Napoléon III (1808–73), Emperor of the French’, 1873 89 ‘Three famous death masks’, Graphic (19 November 1910), 807 89 D. Brucciani and Co., Death mask of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1882 90 Frederic James Shields, ‘The dead Rossetti’, 1882 92 Isabel Agnes Cowper, ‘Cast of Portico de la Gloria; archivolt of central doorway, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella in Spain’, 1868 110

List of Illustrations

Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5 Figure 5.6 Figure 5.7 Figure 5.8

Figure 5.9 Figure 5.10

Figure 5.11 Figure 5.12 Figure 5.13 Figure 5.14 Figure 5.15 Figure 5.16 Figure 5.17 Figure 5.18 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2

Elkington & Co., cast by Domenico Brucciani, after Pietro Torrigiano, ‘King Henry VII’, 1869 Elkington & Co., cast by Domenico Brucciani, after Pietro Torrigiano, ‘Elizabeth of York’, 1870 Elkington & Co., cast by Domenico Brucciani, after unknown artist, ‘Robert, Duke of Normandy’, 1877 Arthur Weston, ‘Rough paper outline from which the “shells” are made’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 461 Arthur Weston, ‘Posing figure – The support for right arm will be noticed’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 463 Arthur Weston, ‘Moulding upper portion of back and neck’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 465 Arthur Weston, ‘Taking mould of back and shoulders – The slightest movement of arm would disturb “deltoid” and “latissimus dorsi” muscles’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 464 Arthur Weston, ‘Here is the mould of back just taken off ’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 464 Arthur Weston, ‘Making ready to take face – Hair, neck, and moustache covered with cloths’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 466 Arthur Weston, ‘A very trying ten minutes’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 466 Arthur Weston, ‘A sigh relief – The mask is finished’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 467 Arthur Weston, ‘The cast, which you should go to South Kensington to see’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 468 W. & T. Gaines, ‘Leeds City Art Gallery’, 1904 ‘Central Court, City Art Gallery, Leeds’, 1911 D. Brucciani, Apollo Belvedere, before 1878 D. Brucciani, Diana à la Biche, before 1878 Detroit Publishing Company, ‘Statuary hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York’, 1907 254–258 Goswell Road, from D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Catalogue of Casts for Schools (London, 1914), 52 ‘A view of the workroom at Brucciani’s’, Graphic (19 November 1910), 807

xi

115 115 117 120 120 121

121 122

122 123 123 124 125 126 127 128 131 136 137

xii List of Illustrations

Figure 6.3

Figure 6.4

‘Statues and anatomical castings in the drying-room at Brucciani’s’, Graphic (19 November 1910), 807 ‘The cast-making workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum’, c. 1940s

138 154

Preface The name Domenico Brucciani began to emerge during my doctoral research into the teaching collections formed for mid-nineteenth century art and design education in Britain. It was a name that, once noticed, became visible across an extraordinary range of contexts. Beginning with the schools of art, temporary exhibitions and museum collections in which you would expect to find the plaster casts that were his stock-in-trade, it soon became clear that Brucciani’s work transcended these spheres to penetrate such diverse spaces as asylums, domestic gardens, theatres and dance halls. Despite the proliferation of references, the details remained frustratingly thin and were often relegated to a footnote or cursory paragraph in the secondary literature. The reasons for this paucity of material may have been due, at least in part, to the absence of an archive in the sense of a neat, discrete set of materials in a single place. But of course that is not to say that there is no archive at all; quite the opposite. Writing more almost forty years ago, Hayden White’s argument that ‘the historical record is both too full and too sparse’ remains all too relevant in a time that has seen the mass digitization of nineteenth-century books, periodicals, reports and catalogues.1 In addition to making extensive use of these sources, this book brings together primary research drawn from the archives of the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Archives, the National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Glasgow School of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts to reveal the significance of Brucciani’s practice across the fields of British sculpture, design reform, art education, classical archaeology and the developing culture of public exhibitions and museum collections. Born in 1815 in Barga, near Lucca, Brucciani grew up in a region of Italy that dominated the manufacture of plaster moulds and casts. He arrived in London in around 1829 to work for the plaster figure maker Luigi ‘Lewis’ Brucciani before taking over the business in the 1840s. Based in Covent Garden near the West End of London, D. Brucciani and Co. supplied the emerging national network of Government Schools of Design with teaching collections of antique statuary and architectural ornament, while building a public reputation by exhibiting at the Great Exhibition of Works of Art of All Nations in 1851 and the 1862 International Exhibition and many other international and regional

xiv Preface

temporary exhibitions. Brucciani was the principal manufacturer and supplier of plaster casts of classical and contemporary sculpture for the art galleries and museums that emerged in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a significant role in the establishment of cast collections in North America, Australasia and India. So important was the business that when it faced financial hardship during the First World War, a group of the most eminent British artists, architects and museum professionals successfully lobbied for it to be taken on by the Board of Education. The operation was transferred to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1921, where it continued for another thirty years. In parallel with these prestigious public displays, the book reveals Brucciani’s production of objects and spaces that fell outside the respectable spheres of education and museum collections – death masks, phrenological busts, decorative schemes for dance halls and wax models of contemporary criminals and celebrities – to extend the understanding of the breadth of nineteenthcentury material culture. In collaboration with the Parian ware manufacturers Copeland, electrotype manufacturers Elkington and the artist-inventor Benjamin Cheverton with his machine for miniaturizing sculpture, Brucciani operated at the very centre of a network dedicated to the material translation of sculpture and this publication makes a case for the creative and intellectual agency embedded in these authored objects.

Acknowledgements During the course of my research, I have been fortunate to learn from the curators, conservators and archivists responsible for the collections in which the plaster casts and archival materials associated with Domenico Brucciani are held. I am grateful to Susanne Turner and Yannis Galanakis at the Museum of Classical Archaeology; Holly Trusted, Victor Borges, Johanna Puisto, Charlotte Hubbard and Victoria Oakley at the Victoria and Albert Museum; Stephanie Alder and Michael Neilson at the British Museum; Mark Pomeroy at the Royal Academy of Arts; Peter Trowles at Glasgow School of Art and Bryony Millan at the National Portrait Gallery. My work on Brucciani has benefited enormously from conversations with fellow art historians, curators, sculptors, conservators and collectors, and I would like to especially thank Adriano Aymonino, Charles Avery, Malcolm Baker, Esther Chadwick, Ann Compton, Penelope Curtis, Laura Davies, Martina Droth, Jason Edwards, Andrea Felice, Meredith Gamer, Mark Hallett, Alana Jelinek, Lizzie Johnson, Lisa Le Feuvre, Tomas Macsotay, Peter Malone, Eckart Marchand, Timothy Martin, Alexander Massouras, Kate Nichols, Alexandra Parigoris, Martin Postle, Brigid von Preussen, Florian Roithmayr, Jacob Simon, Naomi Slipp, Timothy Stevens, Greg Sullivan, Sarah Victoria Turner, Philip Ward-Jackson, Mark Westgarth, Gabriel Williams, David Wilson, Keith Wilson, Sarah Wise and Toby Ziegler for the many and various ways in which they have contributed. I am tremendously thankful to my colleagues at the Henry Moore Institute and Leeds Museums and Galleries for their support and to the Henry Moore Foundation for the two-year postdoctoral research fellowship which enabled much of the research and early stages of writing. The completion of this book was made possible through a postdoctoral fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Margaret Michniewicz, Katherine De Chant and Erin Duffy at Bloomsbury Academic have been tirelessly helpful at every stage and I extend my appreciation to them and their colleagues. I am grateful to my friends Ebony Andrews, Danielle Child and Ruth Viqueira and to my family for their enduring encouragement. Above all, I give thanks to my wife Anne-Louise, for joining me on so many adventures in pursuit of plaster.

xvi

1

Introduction

Wandering Italians Domenico Brucciani travelled from the commune of Barga, near Lucca, to London and joined the plaster figure business of his uncle Lewis Brucciani (anglicized from Antonio Luigi) at 5 Little Russell Street in Covent Garden in around 1829. Unlike the men and boys who made the same journey throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, Domenico Brucciani remained in London for the rest of his life. Brucciani and his eponymous business came to dominate the manufacture and supply of plaster casts by the middle of the nineteenth century and would last – albeit in various incarnations – for another century still. Travelling in small groups from the Tuscan province of Lucca, Italian figurinai walked across the Alps to Savoy, then on to Geneva, across the Jura Mountains to Fontainebleau, through Paris, Amiens and Calais to Britain, making and selling small plaster figures along the way. Nominated the ‘wandering Italians’ by the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1833, the figure of the itinerant ‘image seller’ became a compelling subject for nineteenth-century painters and writers on account of their ‘dark expressive countenances, and picturesque appearance’.1 These young Italian boys who sold cheap plaster reproductions were aligned in the popular press with hawkers and street entertainers, although the Penny Magazine conceded that ‘those among them who are venders of images, by selling for a few pence the plaster busts of great men and casts from ancient works of art, may pretend to the dignity of traders, and even have the merit of improving and propagating a taste for the fine arts’,2 although others argued that there was nothing to be learnt from these cheap reductions made from worn moulds with inferior materials that completely misrepresented the source object.

2

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

The ‘wandering Italians’ were seasonal economic migrants who sought to leave behind agricultural conditions which made even basic subsistence difficult to maintain, a situation exacerbated by the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath and most acute in the northern mountainous regions around Lucca, Parma and Como.3 Although there was a belief that Britain – as the final destination of a campaign – would hold the greatest potential for profit, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the aim was not to settle there but to make enough money to return to Italy, purchase a small plot of land and build a house. The Penny Magazine described the way in which those who were successful in this respect served to motivate the next generation to seek their fortune abroad: The returned wanderers become the oracles of their neighbourhood. They can talk of foreign countries, and cities, and habits of life, and relate all the adventures they encountered on their travels. The fame and the magnificence of London, and much that is glorious and good in us as a nation, as far as it could impress the limited, uncultivated faculties of such persons, have been thus sounded from one end to the other of the mountains in the Duchy of Parma.4

Lucio Sponza described the organizational hierarchy of a typical campaign: ‘The master was normally the “moulder” (formatore); one apprentice was the “cleaner” (sbavatore), who polished the images as they came off the mould; another apprentice was the “painter” (colorista), who coloured them. The other apprentices and vendors did the perambulating side of the business.’5 Sponza noted that Italians were not generally met with the same level of opposition as other economic migrants in Britain, because their trades were distinct and the price of their labour was not in competition with the British workforce.6 The figurinai were associated with poverty and petty criminality, although the Penny Magazine took the view that ‘if they are to be held as vagrants, they must be considered as the most inoffensive and amusing of vagrants’.7 Towards the end of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth, image sellers became a popular subject for caricaturists and illustrators of contemporary urban life. John Thomas Smith’s published series Etchings of Remarkable Beggars, Itinerant Traders and Other Persons of Notoriety in London and Its Environs (1815–16) included two portraits of younger Italian image boys, contrasting their appearance as swarthy street urchins with the classical and historical figures for sale on their boards (Figure 1.1). But whatever nobility these reduced reproductions may have otherwise conferred, for Smith and his contemporaries

Introduction  3

Figure 1.1  John Thomas Smith, ‘Unknown man selling toys’, 1815. Etching on paper. 188 × 110 mm. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

the image boy was synonymous with the seller other unfortunate people who populated urban streets as depicted in his series of prints: of toy windmills, the patient of Bethlem Hospital and the vendor of pickled cucumbers. Regency and early Victorian painters also took up the subject of the image seller, often employing the subject as a cipher for the relationship between the fine arts and the general public. Benjamin Robert Haydon’s (1786–1846) major work Punch or May Day (1829) depicted reductions of the Ilissos and Apollo Belvedere almost in the centre of a composition dense with contemporary London life on the Marylebone Road (Figure 1.2). As part of Haydon’s autobiographical notes edited by Tom Taylor, the image seller in this picture is described as ‘neglected for the more potent attractions of Punch’.8 Haydon was a passionate advocate for the purchase of the Elgin Marbles and he strongly

4

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 1.2  Benjamin Robert Haydon, ‘Punch or May Day’, 1829. Oil on canvas. 1505 × 1851 mm. © Tate, London 2017.

believed in the benefits of their widespread reproduction and circulation. In a diary entry in 1811, he recorded his desire to see plaster casts of the Elgin Marbles distributed to strategic locations in England, Ireland and Scotland: Let the government purchase them; let molds be executed and casts be made from [them], let a set at the expense of government be sent down to Bath, Liverpool, Leeds, Dublin, & Edinburgh; this is the only way to circulate them through the Country, to impregnate the minds of the rising Students with such notions of beauty & form as will make them revolt instantly at defect as at the commission of a heinous crime.9

By the time he had completed Punch or May Day in 1829, Haydon had seen one of his objectives realized – the government had purchased the marbles in 1816 but they would not be widely disseminated as plaster reproductions for teaching collections until the 1840s. It is tempting therefore to suggest that it is the image seller with whom Haydon identifies in this work – holding the ideals of antique sculpture aloft while comprehensively ignored by a public who would rather by entertained by the bawdy spectacle of a Punch and Judy show.

Introduction  5

In 1830, the writer Horace Smith (1779–1849) published a comic sketch of an Italian image boy named Nasoni in his book The Midsummer Medley.10 It begins: ‘Yonder black-eyed, sun-burnt urchin is too diminutive to be Atlas carrying the heavens on his shoulders’, instead casting the boy as the youngest son of Atlas holding diminutive versions of the immortals of Mount Olympus on his head.11 Smith described the plaster casts as ‘the most delightful of all inventions, the printing of sculpture, which, diffusing and perpetuating the glorious works of Phideas and Praxiteles, enables us to place celestials upon our shelves, to set up a gallery, and keep a Mount Olympus of our own, at the expense of a few shillings’.12 He went on to position the image boy as ‘the last relic of Paganism’, responsible for maintaining and diffusing the cultural memory of ‘the glorious poets and sculptors of antiquity’.13 The sight of the image boy and his wares sent the narrator into a wistful and imaginative daydream of a Greece populated by nymphs and fauns, broken suddenly by the boy’s change of direction, which led him ‘along a ditch-flanked foot-path near Kennington, a brick-kiln on my right, and two fish-women at a little distance, stunning me with their vociferous cries of “Mackarel! Mackarel!”’.14 The broken reverie articulated the compelling disjuncture between the rarefied classical world atop the boy’s head and the often squalid urban streets at his feet. Some found this contrast irreconcilable, and just as contemporary neoclassical sculpture was the subject of scrutiny over the decency of the depiction of nudity, so the wandering Italians occasionally found that their wares offended the sensibilities of those who observed them on the streets. An incident of this kind occurred in 1843, when James Travis, a modeller of Gresse Street, near Oxford Street, ‘was charged with wilfully breaking a cast of a naked female, three feet in height, and value ten shillings, the property of Antonio Caproni, of 97, Gray’sInn-lane, an itinerant vendor of images’. The Morning Post recounted the rest of the proceedings: Mr. Travis praised the skill of the artist and the proportions of the figure, but declared it was indecent to look upon. Caproni was exposing it in Fleet-street, and was followed by a crowd of boys. Caproni produced another copy, and Sir Peter [Laurie, the sitting alderman at the Guildhall], after carefully inspecting it, said it was unfit for exhibition in the streets. If Caproni persisted in doing so he would be liable to be committed to Bridewell for a month. He dismissed the case, and added that no magistrate could grant him compensation for its destruction.15

6

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Having attempted to recover the cost of the broken figure as a victim of deliberate vandalism, Caproni was instead recast as a purveyor of indecent material and therefore deserving of the loss he had suffered. Not only would he not be compensated, but if the figure was displayed on the street again, Caproni was liable to be imprisoned. No further details were published on the nature of the figure, so it is difficult to assess the extent to which the judgement was fair. The question of the decency of the casts sold by figurinai was long-standing. In 1827, the Examiner reprinted a short verse titled ‘The Lord Mayor and the Italian image vendor’: Says the Lord Mayor, ‘Giannone, You’re a sad Macaroni, A subject of Boney, Describ’d as the Beast by St John: From indecency screen us – Go, shut up that Venus; She hasn’t a rag to put on! Pray, buy her a veil, To cover her tail – The heathenish wench may be pretty; But unless she thinks best To have herself drest, Hang me if she comes in the City.’16

Although charges of petty criminality and indecency were levelled at wandering Italians, an assessment of nineteenth-century newspaper reports shows that they were more often the victims of crime than perpetrators. In 1831, the case of the ‘Italian Boy’ was a sensation in the periodical press as it became clear that murderous resurrectionists were at work in London. The corpse of a teenage boy was brought to the medical school at King’s College for dissection, but the anatomists became suspicious about the condition of the body; unlike the usual quarry of the resurrectionists, it bore no signs of burial. The four men who had delivered the corpse – John Bishop, James May, Michael Shields and Thomas Williams – were quickly arrested.17 The murdered boy could not be identified and as Sarah Wise has discovered, a number of Italians from the Covent Garden area visited the body in the hope of recognizing him, including the stuccatore Francis Bernasconi (1762–1841). There was speculation that he was an image boy, or a street entertainer who exhibited animals, and the periodical press ran with these rumours and constructed the character of a destitute but essentially virtuous émigré’.18

Introduction  7

A less macabre and more representative incident occurred in the summer of 1836, when The Times reported that two drunk soldiers from the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards came close to causing a riot on the City Road, when one of them ‘seized a plaster image from the head-board of an Italian image vendor’ and smashed it on the ground. Having been followed by the Italian, demanding payment for the damage, ‘in a short time a mob of 200 persons collected’ and the police were summoned to restore order and temporarily detain the soldiers.19 The combination of the youth of most image sellers, their status as foreign nationals and the fragility of their stock made them targets for spontaneous destruction. The company they kept could also be a source of trouble. In Sheffield in 1877, Bernardo Bernardi had the not inconsiderable sum of £3 stolen from him after he ‘became drunk and fell into the hands of a number of loose women’. Eliza Launt was accused of stealing the money and although it was ‘not clearly proved’ that she was guilty of the theft, Launt was imprisoned for 28 days with hard labour regardless, because ‘her character was very bad’ and the suspicion of her guilt was judged sufficient grounds for punishment.20 The following year – 1878 – John Fryer of Worcester was fined 17s. 6d. for the assault of the Italian image seller Giovanni Alberti of Birmingham.21 No further details of the case were reported in the press, but it is worth mentioning because it demonstrates that violence against figurinai extended beyond the metropolis just as their trade extended across the country. Figurinai were occasionally the perpetrators of violence too; in 1881, an Italian image vendor was tried at Clerkenwell Police Court for ‘disfiguring a man for life by biting off a piece of his nose’.22 This extreme act of bodily mutilation was apparently motivated by the destruction of the Italian’s plaster figures ‘by some lads’, with the prosecutor having claimed only to have been passing at the time.23 Unlike most of the skirmishes involving figurinai, the case was reported in the local newspapers in Birmingham, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Yeovil and Southampton over the following days, no doubt a result of the particularly gruesome injury sustained by the prosecutor.24 The subject of the Italian image boy was adopted by members of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood. James Collinson (1825–81) depicted Italian image boys at least twice during his time as a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His Italian Image Boys at a Roadside Ale House (also known as Italian Image Makers at a Roadside Ale House) (1849) is a sympathetic rural scene in which the patrons of the ale house appear interested in the wares set down on the floor and attentive to the boy standing on the chair, who is perhaps in the process of selling the figure on the table in the very centre of the composition (Figure 1.3). It is

8

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

possible that his portrait of an image boy holding a cast of the bust of Clytie – the original of which had been acquired by the British Museum in 1805 – could even be the same boy, this time cropped close and offering his wares door to door (Figure 1.4). The greasy, torn jacket and grubby left hand are in stark contrast with the clean purity of the white plaster. The boy’s appearance is not threatening and the portion of his face that is not in shadow is almost glowing with health, but the impression of the figure is still closer to vagrancy than respectability. Sponza articulated the three reasons why Italians were broadly considered ‘immoral’ by the standards of Victorian Britain: First, because they were practising a disguised form of begging and would thus fall into the typology that classed criminals, prostitutes and beggars under the same category of Evil … . Second, it was immoral as well as cruel to ‘rent’ children in order to make capital out of the compassion and sympathy they aroused, and to treat them brutally. Third, the conditions in which the Italian poor lived could only reinforce the opinion that they were of ‘disorderly’ character.25

The Liverpool-born painter William Daniels (1813–80) went further than Haydon in his identification with the image seller, taking on the role himself

Figure 1.3  James Collinson, ‘Italian image-boys at a roadside alehouse’, 1849. Oil on panel. 790 × 1090 mm. Courtesy private collection care of Peter Nahum at The Leicester Galleries.

Introduction  9

Figure 1.4 James Collinson, ‘Image boy’, c. 1849. Oil on board. 290 × 250 mm. Courtesy Crowther/Oblak Collection.

in his striking Self-portrait with Casts: The Image Seller (c. 1850) (Figure 1.5). Daniels adopted the pose we have seen in earlier illustrations: a carefully balanced pallet of casts secured with one hand. The wares for sale also reflect the diverse stock of reproductions of antique and historical busts, religious figures and decorative animals with some accuracy. Daniels’ dark complexion and humble clothing complete the romantic image of a wandering Italian. At this mid-century point image boys remained a literary trope. In 1852 the Leisure Hour – a Sabbatarian periodical published by the Religious Tract Society – printed a short fictional story about a physician, Dr L., and his patient Frank Weston, a young gentleman of independent means diagnosed with ennui.26 The doctor invited Weston to accompany him on his rounds and they travelled on foot to a ‘very dirty and low part of the city, near the river side’ to visit his patients: a sickly girl with an alcoholic mother; a railway labourer with a broken leg sliding into poverty.27 Their last call took them down ‘a narrow dirty court’ populated with filthy, almost feral children. The two men climbed their way up to a shared attic room to visit an Italian image boy on his death bed. The boy spoke little English and it is now that the doctor’s plan becomes clear as the reader learns that Weston had spent two years in Florence. The doctor asked

10

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 1.5  William Daniels, ‘Self-portrait with casts: The image seller’, c. 1850. Oil on canvas. 433 × 433 mm. Courtesy private collection.

Weston to instruct and befriend the boy in order that both their souls might be saved, the lesson being that privilege comes with duties and responsibilities to those less fortunate. Having seen that he had been idle, Weston visited the Italian boy: ‘It was a scene fit for a painter’s eye. The dying dark-eyed foreigner on his lowly pallet bed; the humble room; the board of images on the floor, and the sunburnt hat and well-worn wallet hanging on a rusty nail at his head.’28 Weston translated the words of a missionary also in attendance and read to him from the New Testament. The boy requested that the story of the dying thief be read to him – ‘a narrative well suited to the condition and comprehension of the Italian’ – and on the fourth telling, The dark eye opened and flashed intelligently, a smile illuminated his pale lips, as raising himself on his elbow, he faintly uttered the works of the dying thief, in his own beautiful and expensive language: ‘Signore, recordati di me’, (‘Lord, remember me’) and immediately the silver cord was loosed, and the Italian image-boy sank lifeless on Frank Weston’s arm.29

Weston was transformed into an ‘active, cheerful, buoyant Christian man’ by this encounter. For the lesson to be communicated to the reader, the reader had to

Introduction  11

understand the Italian image boy as a low and pitiable archetype, dark in both appearance and morality. Towards the last quarter of the nineteenth century itinerant image boys became a less common sight on British streets as they returned to Italy, established or entered permanent workshops or emigrated to North America. An article published in the Telegraph in 1874 noted that the seasonal migration from Italy to Britain by groups of men and boys had been generally superseded by the settlement of whole families in London, especially around the overcrowded lodging houses of Holborn. In his analysis of the particular draw of Holborn for the growing Italian population of London, Sponza noted that the area offered inexpensive accommodation, easy access to the West End and the City and existing suppliers and facilities for both artisans and itinerant trades.30 The reporter surmised: ‘Our foreign friends seem to have reconsidered the entire question from an economic as well as a domestic point of view, and to have arrived at the conclusion that in the long run it would be cheaper and decidedly more comfortable to induce their spouses to embark with the children, and while the nest of the future was in process of feathering to be content with a home in foggy England.’31 Despite the decline in wandering, the figurinai remained a potent subject for artists and writers. As Lionel Lambourne identified, Thomas Hardy included an image boy in his last novel, Jude the Obscure, first published as a book in 1895.32 One of the central characters, Sue Bridehead, met an Italian image seller in the Wessex countryside and their encounter was described as follows: She beheld a foreigner with black hair and a sallow face, sitting on the grass beside a large square board, whereon were fixed, as closely as they could stand, a number of plaster statuettes, some of them bronzed, which he was re-arranging before proceeding with them on his way. They were in the main reduced copies of ancient marbles, and comprised divinities of a very different character from those the girl was accustomed to see portrayed, among them being a Venus of standard pattern, a Diana, and, of the other sex, Apollo, Bacchus, and Mars. Though the figures were many yards away from her, the southwest sun brought them out so brilliantly against the green herbage that she could discern their contours with luminous directness. … They awoke in her an oddly foreign and contrasting set of ideas by comparison. The man rose, and, seeing her, politely took off his cap, and cried, ‘I i-i-mages!’ in an accent that agreed with his appearance.33

The Italian displayed to her some of the smaller casts he had for sale, but Sue rejected them in favour of the two largest: a Venus and an Apollo. He asked for 10s. for the pair, which she could not afford. She offered him ‘considerably less’ and was rewarded with the two figures, which she ‘clasped … as treasures’.34 But

12

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

soon after the image seller had departed, Sue began to regret her purchase: ‘They seemed so very large now … and so very naked’.35 The residue of the plaster coated her clothes and she wrapped the figures in dock leaves to cover their nudity and protect her from their dust. She took the back streets home to conceal her ‘heathen load’ and once she was back in her bedroom, ‘wrapped them in large sheets of brown paper, and stood them on the floor in a corner’.36 When confronted about the nature of this package by the pious mistress of the house, she pretended they were figures of St Peter and St Mary Magdalene. Alone in her room later that night, she unpacked the figures and displayed them on a chest of drawers with candles lit to illuminate them. Their presence disturbed her sleep, ‘and every time she opened her eyes there was enough diffused light to show her the white plaster figures … in odd contrast to their environment of text and martyr’.37 The mistress of the house later discovered the figures and destroyed them completely, causing Sue to leave.38 As was also the case for the author Horace Smith in 1830, plaster images were written about as potent objects with the capacity to conjure the ancient world, but whereas for Smith the paganism of the ancient world was ‘exalted and sublimized by the glorious poets and sculptors of antiquity’, for the characters in Jude the Obscure the paganism represented by these reproductions was a dangerous and corrupting force, entirely inconsistent with the practice of Christianity.39 Very little material exists to illuminate the activities of Lewis Brucciani and the early years of Domenico Brucciani’s life in London. A short account in the Morning Post in January 1833 recorded that Brucciani made a death mask of John Lambert, a clerk at a nearby wine merchant, and in 1840 the business was offered for sale as a result of Lewis Brucciani’s declining health.40 A short letter from the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) to the author Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855) dated 6 June 1838 recorded her delight at her father’s gift of a number of busts from Brucciani, including casts of Chaucer and Homer: The doves & my books & I have a little slip of sitting room to ourselves, – & dearest Papa in his abundant kindness surprised me in it with a whole vision of majestic heads from Brucciani’s – busts of poets & philosophers – such as he knew that I would care for – You may think how it startled & affected me to look round & know that he had found time in all his bustle & vexation of house furnishing, to remember so light a thing as my pleasure!41

The sale of busts of poets and philosophers as domestic decoration was not dissimilar to the stock and market associated with the itinerant image sellers,

Introduction  13

perhaps showing where the Bruccianis intersected with this trade. An article published in the Graphic in 1910 – thirty years after Domenico Brucciani had died – suggested that Lewis Brucciani purchased the Covent Garden premises towards the end of the eighteenth century and that the shop had already existed for around a century.42 The wax seal used on their business correspondence in the 1840s suggests that Lewis and Domenico went into partnership, although research by Jacob Simon for his Dictionary of British Bronze Sculpture Founders and Plaster Figure Makers, 1800–1980 suggests that Lewis returned to Italy in around 1844 and died there in 1848, so it is possible that Domenico had taken over the business by the mid-1840s and retained the established name of his uncle for a short time as a demonstration of continuity.43 On 30 October 1841 ‘Dominick’ Brucciani wrote to Sir Robert Peel, one month after Peel had become prime minister of the United Kingdom for the second time. The letter reads as follows: Most Honored Sir, Permit me to apologize for the [illegible] I have taken in thus addressing you, but being anxious to illustrate the greatest politician of the day, I have made Mold, with only one view of your person, to publish the accompanying bust, which I most respectfully request you will condescend to accept; in doing so you infinitely oblige. Your very humble, and most submissive servant, Dominick Brucciani.44

By producing a bust of the prime minister, Brucciani continued the tradition of the figurinai, who offered plaster busts of contemporary statesmen for sale alongside reductions of classical figures, decorative animals and historical worthies. Where Brucciani differed from them was in his attempt to solicit favour and approval from the subject by presenting a bust to Peel. The response to this gift, if one were made, appears not to have survived, but the Brucciani catalogues show that a plaster bust of Peel was offered for sale in three different sizes: 8, 20 or 28 inches.45 Only the most popular subjects were offered in multiple sizes; historical and contemporary figures such as Chaucer, Dr Johnson, Nelson and Queen Victoria achieved the same distinction. (By contrast Prince Albert was only offered in two sizes, with Napoleon available in four different sizes and Wellington having the most, at five.) The bust of Peel by Brucciani found some success; it was displayed at the Glyptotheca of the Royal Colosseum near Regent’s Park, established in 1845 during the Second Peel Ministry (1841–46).46

14

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Brucciani’s letter to Peel is also one of the earliest surviving examples of his handwriting (comparison with later correspondence shows it to be by the same hand) and although the wording might not be sophisticated, that Domenico Brucciani was literate was a crucial point of distinction from Lewis Brucciani, who on his marriage to Lucy Lucasey on 23 August 1823, marked the register with the ‘X’, characteristic of an illiterate signatory.47 It was also one of the few instances in which Domenico partially anglicized his name, which also set him apart from his uncle.48 Brucciani produced busts throughout his career and they were a category of cast that attracted praise. A reporter from the Standard wrote in 1863: From time to time Mr. Brucciani, of 36 and 39, Russell-street, Covent-garden, executes a variety of busts in plaster of Paris which show great judgment and taste, and as they include all popular characters from royalty to professional persons of eminence, a visit to his collection is time well occupied. Those which he produces of life-size are true to the originals, but there is little doubt but the smaller casts and his statuette groups will gain for him the highest commendation. The Queen, her late Royal Consort, Stephenson and Brunel, are busts now well known and appreciated; but among the more recent may be enumerated those of the Prince and Princess of Wales, which are allowed to be in every respect striking likenesses.49

That the reduced reproductions were especially admired indicates that Brucciani had managed to retain the popular elements of the wandering Italian’s trade – affordable ornament for domestic interiors – while dissociating his business from their less reputable associations and poor-quality materials. As detailed in Chapter 3, the combined technologies of the sculpture reducing machine and the development of Parian ware and electrotyping elevated the miniaturized reproduction to the status of an ingenious object, far removed from the trope of the Italian image boy hawking his chalky miscellany on the streets.

The fortunes of Brucciani’s formatori In understanding the ways in which Domenico Brucciani transcended the identity of the itinerant Italian image seller and began to recover his authorship and agency, it is important to recognize that the formatori who worked for Brucciani are most often obscured by his name. Anonymized or erased by the same mechanisms that continue to operate to preserve the singularity of the

Introduction  15

artist, their lives and labour are difficult to locate and recover. They emerge sporadically in the historical record, generally through the periodical press, and usually for reasons of either misdemeanour or achievement. Others become visible after Domenico Brucciani’s death in 1880, having struck out on their own to trade independently. Until 17 March 1857, Brucciani operated in partnership with Giovanni ‘John’ Graziani and traded from premises at 1 Leather Lane.50 Unlike Brucciani’s workshop and showroom in Covent Garden, Leather Lane was in the heart of the Italian enclave in Holborn. As Jacob Simon and Peter Malone have shown, this address was occupied by cast makers from the 1830s onwards, from Vincent Merchitti (or Marchetti) by 1837 to Daniele Landi between 1880 and 1902.51 The whole area remained synonymous with the plaster trade and not just in the capital: In 1887 a local reader of the Blackburn Standard was advised that if he was not satisfied with the plaster cast collection at Blackburn School of Art and sought his own, he could purchase ‘plaster casts, as drawing models, from any of the educational apparatus sellers, from Brucciani, Russell-street, Covent Garden, or from any of the Italian image shops in Leather-lane and Gray’s Innlane. But you had much better apply for their use locally, as their removal and carriage is no joke.’52 In addition to Brucciani’s formal partnership with Graziani, more casual arrangements appear to have been in place for at least some of Brucciani’s employees. In the summer of 1861 a nineteen-year-old Italian journeyman modeller named Leopold Baldacci was employed by Brucciani to receive and arrange statuary at the Royal Academy, then still accommodated in the same building as the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. His name and profession would most likely have been lost had he not become briefly infamous for having stolen a case of five cameos and two miniature brooches from the Academy, which belonged to the sculptor and medallist Thomas Fowke and were valued at the considerable sum of £80. He was also accused of having stolen seven oil paintings and a case of silver impressions from rifle medal dies, but was only charged and convicted of the theft of the cameos, having confessed to the crime and led detectives from Scotland Yard to the pawnbrokers he had used.53 The Baldacci case illustrates the continued presence of a young itinerant Italian workforce in the plaster trade, even as permanent workshops and showrooms became the dominant form of manufacture and sale. By 1861 Domenico Brucciani had a public profile and a firmly established business, approaching the height of his success. Baldacci’s conviction for theft threatened to tarnish a

16

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

hard-won reputation and restore the connection between Italians in the plaster trade and criminality. The periodical press did not report the sentence given to Baldacci, only that it was delayed to provide detectives with more time to solicit information from him, and Brucciani does not seem to have commented publicly on the case. The census for 1861 recorded that Brucciani employed twenty-five men and five boys, but it is not clear on what terms they were employed at this point in the history of the business. It is possible that Brucciani employed journeymen like Baldacci to build capacity during a time of expansion, to fulfil their institutional obligations to bodies like the Royal Academy, the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum. It was through the Royal Academy that perhaps the most successful Brucciani alumni can be traced. The sculptor Julian Leverotti (1844–1916) paid tribute to Brucciani, his long-standing employer, with a posthumous marble bust exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1881 and the Royal Albert Hall in 1882 (Figure 1.6).54 Reproduced in a small, cropped photograph in the Graphic in 1910, the bust is as classical as the sculptures they reproduced. With simple drapery around the shoulders, tightly curled hair, strong beard and serious countenance, the bust represented Brucciani as a heroic figure worthy of being memorialized in this most prestigious and permanent of ways.55 Born in Marylebone to a father who was also a sculptor, the 1871 census recorded that Leverotti lived with his wife,

Figure 1.6 Julian Leverotti, ‘The late D. Brucciani’, 1881, Graphic (19 November 1910), 806. Collection of the author.

Introduction  17

young daughter and brother-in-law in Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, close to the Italian enclave in Holborn. A comparable level of professional success was achieved by another second generation émigré formatore, Andrew Lawrence ‘Lorenzo’ Giuntini (c. 1845– 1920). Giuntini worked for Brucciani for an unspecified time after he moved to London in around 1871.56 Like Leverotti he exhibited at the Royal Academy; his Portrait of a Gentleman was displayed in 1874.57 Giuntini remains, however, most strongly associated with archaeological fieldwork. He joined the explorer and archaeologist Alfred Maudslay (1850–1931) on expeditions to South America in 1883 and 1885, which resulted in the production of a substantial collection of plaster casts of Mayan antiquities. In 1885 Giuntini memorialized Maudslay in the form of a plaster portrait bust, now in the collection of the British Museum (Figure 1.7).58 A sensitive and accomplished sculpture, it is another demonstration of the largely hidden skills of the formatori who passed through Brucciani’s workshop. Giuntini’s work for Brucciani may also have contributed to his productive relationships with the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

Figure 1.7 Lorenzo Giuntini, Portrait bust of Dr Alfred Percival Maudslay, 1885. Painted plaster. 880 × 565 mm. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

18

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

In 1891–92 Giuntini journeyed to Persepolis in Iran, on an expedition led by Herbert Weld-Blundell.59 Five years earlier, Cecil Harcourt-Smith (1859– 1944), then curator at the British Museum, had made the same journey and recommended that casts be made to augment the Museum’s collections. To protect the fragile antiquities and allow for more straightforward transport back to Britain, Giuntini made paper squeezes instead of plaster piece moulds, later using them as the matrix for plaster casts displayed at the South Kensington Museum (who went on to employ Giuntini intermittently) and later the British Museum.60 Although the number of ‘wandering Italians’ diminished towards the end of the century and the phenomena fell out of the popular and artistic consciousness, a salutary case reminds us that Italians involved in the plaster trade remained vulnerable. Antonio Bertolini of 1 Coldbath Square, Clerkenwell, aged seventynine, applied to the Society of Friends of Foreigners in Distress in 1883 for a pension. His circumstances were described as follows: He worked as a figure maker for the late Mr. Brucciani and others, until old age compelled him to give it up. He has since worked for himself, and sold his figures in the streets, earning about 6s. per week, but he is now too old for that, and is subject to fits of epilepsy. His wife has been dead for many years. Of his children, three daughters are married, and he lives with one of them, paying 4s. a week to her for his keep. His son, aged thirty-one, a journeyman tailor, is unmarried and assists his father a little. The other children do as much as they can for their father, but they are all poor; and all the charitable aid the poor old man receives is 2s. per week from the Italian Society and an allowance of 2s. per week from this Society.

The application – his second – was unsuccessful, although he continued to receive 2s. per week.61 The Italian Society referred to was the Italian Benevolent Society, to which Domenico Brucciani offered some support – the Standard reported that he was one of 160 who attended a dinner in aid of the Society at the Albion Tavern, Aldersgate Street, on 3 February 1869.62 In a letter to the Standard in 1892 Luigi Finili was at pains to correct the assertion that he worked as a street modeller: With reference to the case of ‘Mills v. Finili’ which was tried before the Lord Chief Justice yesterday, it was erroneously stated that I was a street modeller when the late Sir Edgar Boehm first took me into his employ. Being slightly deaf, I did not hear that statement, and now wish to contradict it. When I first

Introduction  19 did business with Mr. Boehm, I was chief moulder in the firm of Mr. Brucciani, of Russell-street, Covent-garden, and a shop-keeper in Hatton-wall, Holborn.63

Earlier in the same year, Finili was the subject of an article in the Pall Mall Gazette on the subject of the production of death masks, as detailed in Chapter 4. The journalist described Finili as ‘an elderly man, with a face of a Southern type, surrounded by hair and a beard almost perfectly white’, demonstrating that even into the 1890s the foreign appearance of formatori was still worthy of comment. Towards the end of the article, the journalist asked if Finili knew the sculptor Sir Edgar Boehm, to which Finili replied: ‘I should say I did. He was my first customer in London, and I worked for him for twenty-seven years.’64 It is not clear how long Finili worked for Brucciani, but it is notable that Finili described having three jobs at once: working with Boehm in an unspecified capacity, as ‘chief moulder’ for Brucciani and as a shopkeeper in Holborn. It is possible that Finili actively chose to pursue this way of working, or it could indicate that being ‘chief moulder’ for Brucciani did not offer sufficient remuneration on its own. Records of pay and conditions do not survive from this period; it is only once the business became a limited company in the twentieth century that wages were detailed.65 A number of factors operated concurrently to enable Domenico Brucciani to build a modest existing business into a virtual monopoly. That he began his career in London with premises and a stock of moulds already set him apart from the itinerant image sellers, but it was the establishment of a national system of art and design education and the related emergence of temporary exhibitions and public museums that resulted in an unprecedented demand for plaster casts, on which Brucciani was in a unique position to capitalize. Sponza succinctly articulated the entrenched opposition in the public perception of Italy and Italians in Britain: ‘On one side of the coin was “Italy”, the country of beauty and culture; on the other side were “the Italians”, an ingenious but corrupt, untrustworthy and licentious race.’66 Brucciani’s challenge was to align himself and his business with the former and remain at a distance from the latter.

20

2

Object Lessons

The idea that objects could impart knowledge was crucial to the proliferation of collections of plaster casts in nineteenth-century Britain. The theory and practice of the ‘object lesson’ can be traced through the work of the Swiss educationalist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), who was influenced by European Enlightenment philosophies, particularly Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and his treatise Emile, or on Education published in 1762. His child-centred, experiential approach, articulated in numerous publications, including How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801), in turn informed the pedagogy of the British siblings Charles Mayo (1792–1846) and Elizabeth Mayo (1793–1865), who extended and popularized object-based teaching in nineteenth-century Britain, North America and India. Elizabeth Mayo published Lessons on Objects in 1830 while teaching at Cheam School in Surrey with her mother and brother, followed by Lessons on Shells in 1832. Her methods were widely adopted and circulated by publications such as John Frost’s Lessons on Common Things, an edited and illustrated version of Lessons on Objects for the North American market. The use of boxed object lessons was advocated by Elizabeth Mayo, who published a list of makers and suppliers in Lessons on Objects. The boxes contained a material encyclopaedia of natural and processed specimens native to Britain and gathered from across the British Empire, both precious and quotidian. Selected to accompany the curriculum set out in Lessons on Objects, the contents of the box were intended to provide tangible, concrete experiences of the material world that would lead to the development of abstract thought and critical enquiry. Observation and sensory perception were crucial to this mode of learning, with students encouraged to look, touch and smell the objects and to describe their encounter through the catechisms suggested by Mayo. Objects have, of course, been used as exemplars through which to train artists for centuries, formalized through the establishment of prestigious academies of

22

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

art across Europe. What is distinct about the British context in the nineteenth century is that the logic of the object lesson was adopted by a group of design reformers who sought to bring visual education to a mass audience through schools, exhibitions and museum collections. The resulting national network of Government Schools of Design established in Britain from 1837 placed objects at the centre of a systematic and standardized curriculum, sending plaster casts of antique statuary and architectural ornament to schools across the country. The curriculum of the Schools of Design was engineered to extract the accumulated knowledge of the maker through mimesis: drawing in chalk, charcoal or graphite and modelling in clay or wax, as forms of what Anthony Burton has described as ‘controlled and scrupulous observation’.1 Domenico Brucciani was ideally situated to supply these teaching collections and the business would be inextricably bound to what would become known as the South Kensington System into the twentieth century.

The context of the Schools of Design The formation of the first Government School of Design at Somerset House in 1837 is generally attributed to the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures led by William Ewart, which published reports in 1835 and 1836 (Figure 2.1).2 As sprawling documents representing a large and inconsistent body of interests and positions, the reports and accompanying minutes of evidence by no means represent a consensus on ‘the best means of extending a knowledge of the Arts and Principles of Design among the People (especially the Manufacturing Population) of the Country’. A point of general agreement among the diverse voices called to give evidence was the advantage of the plaster cast as a means of circulating good taste and correct principles across a broad constituency. Curators, educators, artists, manufacturers and designers attested to the success of exposure to exemplary objects through education, exhibitions and museum collections. The influence of Italian formatore was noted by James Morrison, head of ‘a large commercial house in the city’; when asked whether he was aware that formatore were ‘without any exception, foreigners?’ he answered, ‘I have understood that foreigners are generally employed in casting figures. …  I believe that were are very much indebted to Italians for the diffusion of a taste for art among the middle and lower classes.’3 Robert Butt of the bronze and porcelain department of Howell & James of Regent Street, London, articulated another



Object Lessons

23

Figure 2.1  ‘School of design’, Illustrated London News (27 May 1843), 375. Wood engraving. Collection of the author.

common call that ‘every school ought to have its museum’, formed of plaster casts of antique statuary, ornamental objects, gems and coins, to be open to the public when not in use by students.4 The report of 1836 consolidated the view that plaster casts should form a crucial part of a new system of art and design education, and that these teaching collections should operate as public museums where they did not already exist.5 It became clear that the formation of a standardized collection of casts for distribution across the country would be no small undertaking, and although it was agreed that the operation should be centralized, opinions differed as to whether the production of casts should be a government concern as it generally was on the continent. Suspicions concerning the extent of government interference can be read across the range of witnesses called to give evidence, as prior to the formation of the Government Schools of Design there was no state-supported elementary education of any kind in Britain. With no structures or expertise in place to begin such an ambitious scheme to manufacture and distribute plaster casts on an almost industrial scale, it is unsurprising that the government looked to a private business to meet the demand. No primary

24

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

evidence survives to document the earliest arrangements made with Brucciani for this purpose, although standardized lists of objects and prices emerge in the 1840s as schools of designs proliferated across the country. The details of these arrangements are discussed with reference to the case study of the formation of the Leeds School of Design at the end of the present chapter.

Brucciani and the educational market Domenico Brucciani supplied schools of art and their antecedents with teaching collections of plaster casts from the establishment of the first Government School of Design in 1837. By 1852, Brucciani was employed in a short-lived teaching role at the School of Ornamental Art at Marlborough House, a new incarnation of the Government School of Design in its second home. To counter the accusation that the Government Schools of Design had failed to train prospective industrial designers in anything other than drawing copies of antique statuary and historical motifs, Henry Cole established vocational ‘Special Classes’ to teach the decoration of woven fabrics, ornamental treatment of metals, pottery, furniture, porcelain painting, wood engraving, lithography, artistic anatomy and architecture.6 Although advanced students were admitted to these classes at reduced rates if they had passed through the required stages of the National Course of Instruction, they remained prohibitively expensive both to run and to attend and were effectively discontinued by 1855.7 Brucciani’s class, ‘Practising the Various Processes of Casting and Moulding’, was available only to male students. The purpose of the class was ‘to teach the Students of the Modelling Classes of the Department [of Practical Art] the processes of making Waste Moulds; Piece Moulds; Elastic Moulds; and the uses of Plaster of Paris, of Wax, and of Gelatine’.8 Although the invitation to teach was in some respects an indication of increasing status, as ‘superintendent of moulding, casting, &c’. Brucciani was only paid £ 11 13s. 4d. in 1852: three times less than the next lowest paid teachers of the Special Classes. Teachers of lithography, wood engraving and porcelain painting were paid £ 33 6s. 8d., in stark contrast to the superintendents of artistic anatomy and architecture, who were paid £ 195 16s. 8d. and £ 112 10s. respectively.9 In addition to the embedded hierarchy of disciplines, it appears that gender was also a significant factor in the differentiated salaries: Lithography and wood engraving were reserved for female students only, and generally taught by female teachers, and porcelain painting was conducted in



Object Lessons

25

separate classes for male and female students. That Brucciani was paid so much less than his female colleagues to teach a male class suggests his burgeoning status was perhaps tempered by his nationality. The earliest extant catalogue for the Brucciani business under Domenico – undated but published before 1860 – addressed ‘the Nobility, Gentry, Artists, Architects, and the Public’ and thanked them for ‘the very liberal encouragement he has hitherto received’.10 Brucciani continued to cultivate this mixed market for plaster casts over the course of his career. The various iterations of the business that continued after his death in 1880, however, were aligned almost exclusively with the educational market. Issued by D. Brucciani and Co. in 1889, the Catalogue of Casts for Schools, Approved by the Science and Art Department dispensed with the casts that were not part of the curriculum and omitted the notices advertising casts in different materials and finishes included in previous catalogues, instead offering a 15 per cent discount to schools (the cost of packing was also set at 15 per cent, so schools effectively had their casts packed free of charge).11 After the business became a limited company – discussed in detail in Chapter 6 – the first comprehensively illustrated catalogue was published. The Catalogue of Casts for Schools which the Board of Education Considers Suitable for Schools and Classes Receiving Grants from It was issued in 1906 and was reissued in broadly the same form for the rest of the life of the business. Although the content was similar to the 1889 catalogue, the advertisement that ‘D. Brucciani & Co., Limited, will be pleased to submit Estimates for Finishing the Casts in any treatment or colour, and for Reproducing any of the objects in real Bronze or Marble’ retuned to the back cover.12 The case of Caproni v Alberti (1891) revealed some of the details of the relationship between Brucciani and the Department of Science and Art from its establishment under Henry Cole in 1853. In the wake of Caproni v Alberti, the solicitors acting on behalf of Caproni (who traded under the name D. Brucciani & Co. after Domenico Brucciani’s death in 1880) attempted to clarify whether the Department of Science and Art had ever formally appointed Brucciani as their formatore, or merely approved the firm as manufacturers and suppliers of plaster casts for the schools of art administered by the Department. The solicitors, Fielder and Sumner, recounted the following narrative in an attempt to prove a de facto association: It has been ascertained that in the year 1853 or 1854, after the School of Design (the antecedent of the Science and Art Department) was removed from Somerset House to Marlborough House, Mr D. Brucciani, a Mr Caproni,

26

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain a Mr Sacchi, and a Mr Ambrosi, were each requested by the Department to make a Mould of a Relief called, The Dancing Girl with Wreath, to be sent in competition for the appointment of Modeller and Caster to the School of Design. Mr D. Brucciani sent in his Cast and Mould, which after examination were selected by the Department in preference to the Casts submitted for competition by the other parties named, and Mr Brucciani received the appointment of supplying his Casts and Models to the School. From that time down to 1892 when, as to England and Scotland the Department ceased to make Grants to the Schools of Art towards the purchase of Casts, and down to the present time as far as regards Ireland, Messrs. D. Brucciani have continuously supplied their Casts and Models through the Department to the different Science and Art Schools and Classes throughout the United Kingdom, the order from such Schools being first submitted to the Department and then forwarded on by the Department to Messrs. Brucciani & Co. to supply the Casts required. Since the year 1857 after the Department had been removed from Marlborough House to Kensington, the Department has from time to time continuously by its officials attended at the Gallery of Messrs. D. Brucciani & Co. and inspected the respective Casts which from time to time have been moulded and made for the different Art Classes, and such official has approved of such respective Casts and sealed them with the seal of the Department before they have been so supplied through the Department, and it has been the practice of Messrs. D. Brucciani & Co. during all the above period, not to sell any of such Casts to the general public but only to the different Science and Art Schools and Classes through the Department. …  We submit that from the circumstances above set forth, it may fairly be assumed that Messrs. D. Brucciani & Co. were duly appointed by the Department.13

Despite the points raised by this account, the question of whether Brucciani held an appointment at, or merely a long-standing association with, the Department of Science and Art appears not to have been resolved.

The contested classical in industrial education Plaster casts of figurative sculpture came to represent a utilitarian circumvention of the more contentious calls for life, drawing to form part of the curriculum of the Schools of Design.14 As part of his evidence to the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures on 3 March 1836, Henry Sass (1787–1844), a former student



Object Lessons

27

of the Royal Academy who had established his own School of Drawing in 1813, articulated the rationale that would be adopted by the Schools of Design: We learn the anatomy of the human body perfectly from the surface of Greek statues; and although the study of anatomy at the present time is necessarily from dissection and from the study of the skeleton, yet I have found, if persons become too skilful in anatomy before they know the beautiful surface of the figure, that they are apt to express a knowledge to the destruction of beauty, and therefore I hold it to be good that they should study the anatomy on the surface, as they thereby become acquainted with the fine exterior of the form.15

Inert classical plaster casts were reconfigured as archetypes of a particular conception of cultivated taste and technical precision, subtly differentiated from the way in which they were conceptualized by the Academy as agents of the ideal. Bell aligned this distinction to the wider proliferation of historicist and antiquarian interests, suggesting that neo-classicism was, in fact, not a recrudescence of the Academic Idea, but part of a general tendency towards archaeology, a great turning back to the past which had already produced an interest in Gothic architecture and which was to provide one of the main currents of aesthetic thought in the nineteenth century.16

In contrast, Paul Wood argued that the reconceptualization of the past during the nineteenth century resulted in ‘an etiolated classicism that had dried out into a husk and was increasingly incapable of addressing the effects of modernity’.17 The reverence for antiquity as the source of universal principles for the practice of art and design was not accepted without question by contemporaries either. It was the opinion of the Scottish decorative artist David Ramsay Hay (1798– 1866) that the study of botanical specimens was the only course of instruction appropriate to the study and application of ornamental design. As part of his evidence to the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures on 15 June 1836, Hay made the following statement: I consider it a mistaken idea that ornamental designers will be produced by setting young men to copy statues or pieces of sculptural ornament, however good they may be. …  I consider servile copying of the works of others very injurious to the ornamental designer, as it retards originality of conception.18

Instead Hay called for ‘instruction in drawing and colouring which is applicable to manufactures and the useful arts generally, and which is not likely to mislead young men by giving them a distaste for the humbler professions and inducing

28

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

them to attempt to become artists’.19 Hay had established a successful business with prestigious commissions from both public and private clients and as such, his interests extended to the training of his future employees and their acceptance of ‘humbler’ social and economic positions.20 After limited drawing from the figure had been introduced to the Government School of Design under William Dyce in 1838, further restrictions were imposed by Charles Heath Wilson, who had been installed as the director of the Schools of Design in 1843. The Report of the Council of the School of Design for the year 1843 to 1844 reinforced the strict conditions attached to the study of the figure: It is requisite that casts from objects in which figures are combined with ornament [original emphasis] should be placed in the figure room, as well as casts from ancient statues. The practical application of all that is taught in these classes should be shown, as much as possible, by the examples on the walls, which should not present merely the appearance of a class room for the Figure attached to an academy of Fine Arts.21

It is clear that the objects of the teaching collection, as supplied by Brucciani, were a source of anxiety because they were so strongly associated with academic instruction in painting and sculpture. The regime imposed by Wilson earned him the title of ‘The Pompeiian Dictator’ for his insistence on the exclusive study of Roman and Renaissance ornament.22 As a result of these increasing impediments to the study of the figure, a group of senior students at Somerset House began a revolt in 1845 that came to be known as ‘The Rebellion of Forty-Five’, supported by the master of the Figure School, John Rogers Herbert (1810–90).23 Although Wilson and Herbert occupied opposing territories in this skirmish, they were both products of an academic art education. Wilson had studied in Italy under his father – the painter Andrew Wilson – before taking up a position as an art master at the Trustees’ Academy in Edinburgh.24 Herbert had trained at the Royal Academy Schools and was elected an academician in 1846.25 In addition to the internal criticism from students and colleagues at the School of Design, Wilson’s methods and preferences were the subject of particularly scathing commentaries in Punch.26 One of the many satirical pieces lamented the way in which an aspiring painter was stripped of his creative potential (Figure 2.2): Being an encourager of the fine arts, I employed a young friend of mine, who seemed full of promise as a promissory note, to decorate my house in fresco, and I gave him the subject of the siege of Troy; for I know that enthusiastic youth delights in aiming so high that it shoots very often out of sight altogether. I did



Object Lessons

29

Figure 2.2  ‘The school of design’, Punch (5 July 1845), 21. Wood engraving. Collection of the author. not interfere during the progress of the fresco, and the result was, that my wall was adorned with the following spirited battle-piece. You will perceive that the conception is fine, though the treatment is awkward.27

The narrative continued with the young artist sent to the School of Design for two years, after which he presented his benefactor with a still life drawing to illustrate his progress. The student’s patron concluded: ‘I can’t say I admire the sort of thing he has been taught to do so much as the style of the thing he did when he followed the natural bent of his own genius’ (Figure 2.3). He expressed his distaste for the antiquarian fragment favoured by Wilson as ‘men with their legs, feet, and arms broken short off, or Egyptian hieroglyphics of men capering about on Etruscan Vases’.28 The result of this internal and external criticism was not a reassessment of the place of the figure in the curriculum of the Schools of Design, but an entrenchment of Wilson’s position. Plaster casts of antique statuary were removed from the Figure Room and dispersed around the school as inert decorative objects. Drawing from life was restricted to a draped model or lay figure: a wooden or textile articulated mannequin used as a proxy for the

30

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 2.3  ‘The school of design’, Punch (5 July 1845), 21. Wood engraving. Collection of the author.

living human body.29 Despite these distancing mechanisms, the Council of the School of Design reported that ‘instruction in drawing the human figure [original emphasis] forms a most important part of the course of education in the School’.30 An article written in the Athenæ um noted the grievances of the students: One special wrong will show the state of affairs. …  ‘We were desired’, says one of these public-spirited youths, ‘to come prepared to draw from the Lay Figure set by Mr. Wilson; but so universal was the feeling of the uselessness of the study, that only two persons did draw from it.’ Could ignorant oppression go farther? What right had the Director, in this free country, to desire young men of an age capable of thinking and acting for themselves to draw from the Lay Figure? Of course, a tyrannical Council could not see the force of such arguments.31

The conflict escalated and Wilson ordered the gas to be turned off during the evening painting class taught by Herbert. In response, thirty-three senior students wrote to the Board of Trade and accused Wilson of being incompetent. The students were suspended until an apology was received, and Herbert was replaced by John Callcott Horsley after the Council of the School of Design ruled in favour of Wilson.32 The fact that a minor internal dispute became



Object Lessons

31

the subject of vigorous public discussion in pamphlets, periodicals and the Houses of Parliament provides an indication of the level of cultural, political and economic investment in the separation of artisanal instruction from artistic training.33 The determination to construct and reinforce this differentiation was arguably a response to the permeable boundary between the Royal Academy of Arts and the Government School of Design. Bell proposed that ‘a substantial minority must have treated the School as a preparatory class for the Academy. In fact, we know that there was a tendency for students to drift from the one establishment to the other’.34 The construction of a differentiated curriculum for the Schools of Design was ultimately undermined by the academicians whose influence extended to the formation of a teaching collection only tangentially related to the task at hand.

Plaster casts as teaching objects The intention behind the copying of plaster casts of antique statuary and architectural ornament was, according to Macdonald, that ‘the pupils would commit to memory a multiplicity of historic motifs, so that they could combine them anew and spawn mongrel designs’.35 The ways in which the knowledge thought to be embedded in these objects could be accessed were not precisely articulated. Macdonald characterized the belief in their capacity to instruct as close to a form of osmosis: ‘Mysticism was prevalent with regards to casts, and many believed that if these copies of antiquity were perused for hours the secrets of High Art might be revealed.’36 There were some attempts to differentiate the knowledge that could be extracted from different plaster casts, as the external examiners for the schools of design reported in 1852: It is …  desirable that male forms, and those of the severe character, such as the Discobolus, the Dancing Faun, or the Fighting Gladiator, should first be studied, as imparting more information to the student than female forms or male statues of a more voluptuous character, such the Antinous or the Apollino, which are better attempted when beauty is to be studied after a certain amount of knowledge of form and proportion has been obtained.37

It is not clear to what extent this advice was followed, nor how prevalent this gendered distinction between ‘information’ and ‘beauty’ might have been (Figures 2.4 and 2.5). The rationale appears to have been derived from the academic principle of the ideal associated with Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses,

32

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 2.4  ‘Statues’, from D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Catalogue of Casts for Schools (London, 1914), 8. Private collection. Photograph courtesy Andrea Felice.

conflated with the pseudo-empiricism of the design reform movement. In this system of thought, the vessel that stored and transmitted these mechanical and aesthetic lessons appears to have been considered as a neutral object without contingency or mediation. The analysis of the merits and deficiencies of a given object formed part of a wider positivist project which sought to reveal the universal principles of design. These principles were communicated through travelling lecture series, public exhibitions and publications such as Ralph Nicholson Wornum’s Analysis of Ornament and Owen Jones’ Grammar of Ornament, both published in 1856. The former was an introductory textbook approved by the Department of



Object Lessons

33

Figure 2.5  Richard Redfern, Venus de Milo, 1860. Pencil on paper. 500 × 235 mm. Collection of the author.

Science and Art and distributed as a prize to students for an exemplary piece of work submitted for examination. The latter, a costly folio edition of 120 plates, was issued to the libraries of schools of design as a reward for exceptional performance.38 The first publication issued from within the system was The Drawing Book of the Government School of Design by William Dyce.39 It was a series of seven publications intended for use by the Schools of Design and a broader public, with the first plates printed in 1842 and 1843.40 Christopher Frayling recounted the failure of the project: ‘Dyce’s book, which the Council had confidently expected to sell well at 3s. 6d. for each part, had been a commercial disaster. The Council had agreed with the publishers, Chapman and Hall, to pay for the drawings, their engraving on wood and a proportion of the publishers’ loss.’41 Although the Drawing Book was neither completed nor considered to have been commercially successful, it did illustrate the priorities

34

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

and methodology of the Government School of Design, as Rafael Cardoso Denis has argued: ‘Dyce’s manual offered a radical departure from previous methods of drawing instruction, not only in the way its exercises were organised but also in the complex theoretical discussion of the nature of design and ornament which constitutes much of its introduction.’42 Richard Carline has traced the positivist impulse behind the curriculum: ‘Dyce was seeking to give art teaching a more scholarly and scientific basis than it had enjoyed hitherto. It was based on his own analysis of form and colour, but whether this purely theoretical approach was ever likely to bring out the artistic potentialities of his students is very doubtful.’43 Few would argue, however, that it had ever been the intention of the Schools of Design to cultivate ‘artistic potentiality’, as the ‘Rebellion of Forty-Five’ had shown. In 1848, Wornum was appointed Lecturer on the History, Principles and Practice of Ornamental Art, during which time he gave lectures across the country. He was subsequently appointed Librarian and Keeper of Casts in 1852, and in this capacity he compiled an illustrated Catalogue of Ornamental Casts of the Renaissance Styles, through which it is possible to trace some of the plaster casts distributed to the branch schools of design. For instance, the archive of the Leeds School of Design listed ‘two pieces from door of St. John’ in its collection.44 Through the Wornum’s catalogue and the inventory of stock supplied by Brucciani, it has been possible to identify these objects as fragments cast from the architrave of the Baptistry Doors in Florence by Lorenzo Ghiberti. It is significant that these plaster casts were not reproductions of the sculptural reliefs most readily associated with the doors, but the peripheral ornament. Wornum suggested that these particular casts should be used as an object lesson in the treatment of natural forms, which would otherwise be unacceptable without having been conventionalized: Lorenzo Ghiberti has introduced natural imitations in his celebrated gates of the Baptistry of San Giovanni at Florence; but they are strictly accessory to a general plan, and symmetrically arranged; being neither negligently nor naturally disposed. They are bound in bunches or groups of various shapes and sizes, disposed in harmony with the main compartments of the gates, of which they are ornaments. And this is, perhaps, the utmost extent to which decorations of this class can be judiciously applied.45

In an address to the students and subscribers of the Sheffield School of Design in 1846, Young Mitchell (1811–65) made direct reference to these plaster casts and the qualities invested in them:



Object Lessons

35

The gates of the Baptistery, at Florence, by Ghiberti, are so full of every high requisite of art, that an ample and intelligent study of these alone might make an artist, and casts of a portion of them, I am happy to find the School possess – would we had them entire! To these, and similar great works, do I then draw your attention, as the fountain head of all that is excellent and admirable in what is called decorative art. Let us copy them – not as mere copyists – but as men striving to work in the spirit which produced them, and let us no longer condescend to be the servile imitators of modern French and German art.46

The desire expressed for the whole is revealing, pointing towards local deviation from – and ambitions above – the limitations imposed by the Council of the School of Design. Despite attempts to standardize the lessons attributed to each cast, once the objects were in circulation and active use, they were subject to distinct historical, cultural and economic conditions that determined their reception and interpretation.

The Leeds School of Design: A case study The Leeds School of Design was one of the first wave of regional schools established on the model of the Government School of Design. Agreed and organized in 1846 and operational from early 1847, the Leeds School provides a case study to illustrate the ways in which the objects of the system – both material and ideological – were received and contested. Drawing classes had been offered by the Leeds Mechanics’ Institution from its inception in 1824 and prior to the establishment of the Leeds School of Design, the drawing master of the Institution, George Thurnell, taught ‘Mechanical, Architectural, Landscape, and Figure Drawing’ to over fifty pupils in two classes per week at the Hall of the Institution at 12 South Parade.47 Thurnell recorded that the classes were ‘attended by mechanics, engineers, joiners, masons, bricklayers, painters, engravers, wood carvers &c’.48 This demographic precisely represented the intended recipients of art and design education as calculated by the Reports of the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures and subsequently by the Council of the Government School of Design at Somerset House.49 The congruence between the existing instruction in drawing provided by the Mechanics’ Institution and the objectives of Schools of Design constituted the primary argument for a grant to be awarded to the

36

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Institution towards the inauguration of a branch school in Leeds, as the local committee articulated: The committee [of the Leeds Mechanics’ Institution] think that they have been carrying out on a limited scale some of the objects contemplated by the Council of the London School of Design, & as such preparing the way for more completed extended culture. The building which they now possess is not only proper for such a purpose, but one well suited for the reception of a collection of casts of works of art, & from its central situation & its arrangement, every way calculated to exhibit such a collection to the public, which its classes would be making the best application of such a donation by using it.50

This first request was rejected, however, because the Council of the School of Design did not consider it appropriate to subsidize and extend the activities of existing regional voluntary societies, despite their experience in a mode of education that was aligned with their own interests.51 The Report of the Council gave the conditions under which an application would be reconsidered: It would be found much more advisable to establish a School of Design at Leeds, under an independent body of persons, selected by the actual subscribers to such a School, than to place it under the care of an association formed for other and more extensive objects, and having no immediate relation to the Art of Design with reference to manufactures; we have suggested, therefore, that although we could not comply with the application in question, we should be prepared to assist a School of Design in Leeds, if set on foot there under the management of a separate Committee, independently of any other Institution.52

Leeds was also thought to be generally unsuitable for a school of design as the woollen and worsted industries that formed the principal manufactures during this period were not considered to benefit from the application of decoration or design.53 The second application of 1846 by the president of the Institution, Edward Baines Junior, was successful despite having only partially fulfilled the stipulations prescribed by the Council. The establishment of the York School of Design in 1842 through the intervention of William Etty RA, member of the Council of the School of Design and native of York, set a precedent for branch School of Design that negated their primary task.54 As the town had no significant industries to benefit from the supply of skilled designers, the School adopted the position that the art education of the middle classes supported the economy by stimulating the demand for



Object Lessons

37

tasteful commodities, which would later be sanctioned under Henry Cole.55 In addition to the increasing malleability of the system, the Committee of the Leeds Mechanics’ Institution capitalized on their lease of 22 East Parade, an eighteenth-century merchant’s house close to the Hall of the Institution.56 This small but significant separation enabled the Committee to persuade the Council of the School of Design that their intention was to found a semiautonomous school that would benefit from an umbilical connection to the founding institution: We beg to state for your information that we have been enabled to obtain suitable accommodation for a School of Design in a building rented by the Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society and used by them for the purpose of a Day School, but separate from their own Hall. It is in the best part of the town and very nearly central: the rooms have been seen by Mr. Patterson Master of the York School of Design, and pronounced to be suitable. We have raised a fund adequate to make the needful alterations in the building and to provide the requisite furniture and fixtures. We propose to place the School of Design under the superintendence and management of the Committee of the Mechanics’ Institution by which means several important advantages will be secured.57

The fund that had been raised in support of the second application was a subscription of £ 66 from ‘gentlemen anxious to promote the establishment of an efficient School of Design in Leeds’.58 The local subscription was a prerequisite to a successful application for a grant and was used as a measure of public support for the scheme.59 In this instance, the subscription demonstrated the interests of the local political elite, dominated by the donations of William Beckett MP, William Aldam MP and the Mayor of Leeds and Vice President of the Mechanics’ Institution, John Darnton Luccock.60 Although it was only necessary to equal the amount sought, the Leeds bid was reinforced by having requested only £ 30 in aid, combined with an offer to meet the cost of the salary of the art master at £ 100 per annum, which was also funded by a central grant at other branch schools.61 After an initial offer of a £ 50 contribution per annum, the secretary of the Council of the School of Design, Walter Riding Deverell, wrote again on 29 August 1846 with a significantly increased offer: ‘The Council, with the sanction of Her Majesty’s Government has granted £ 80 towards the Salary of the Master for the current year and as announced in my communication of July £ 50 for School Furniture and £ 50 for examples of Art.’62 The first four cases of plaster casts were transported from Brucciani’s

38

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

workshop in London to Leeds in November 1846 and their contents were listed as follows: 1 Bust of Apollo 1 Bust of Niobe 1 Bust of Antinous 11 copies by Machinery of Antique Statues 4 pieces Trajan Frieze 16 hands and feet 2 Anatomical Arm & Leg 2 pieces Roman Arabesque 1 Roman Cornice 2 pieces from door of St. John.63

This standard collection was almost immediately augmented with further examples from the canon of antique sculpture.64 The larger statues bought to supplement the collection were, however, not covered by the grant and appear to have been purchased on the ‘kind advice’ of the director of the Head School at Somerset House: The casts, drawings and other examples which the Council have done us the favor to send us by way of grant, have all arrived safely: and in addition to them, for the sake of opening with a good popular impression, we have ordered and obtained, at our own expense, but with the kind advice of your Director, Mr. C.H. Wilson, full sized casts of the Apollo Belvidere, the Venus de Medici, the Venus of Milo, Germanicus, the Fighting Gladiator, the Discobolus, the bust of Ajax and some smaller ornaments and anatomical parts.65

To these objects were added a skeleton at £ 5 10s. and an unspecified anatomical figure, most probably a copy of L’Ecorché  (1767) by the French sculptor JeanAntoine Houdon (1741–1828), at £ 3 10s.66 The addition of these objects certainly resulted in a stronger teaching collection, but also led the School into debt before teaching had even commenced.67 The President of the Leeds School of Design stated to the Committee that they ‘hoped to raise a sufficient sum by Donations to cover this purchase’.68 By February 1847, the debt had still not been cleared and the significant sum of £ 57 8s. was owed to Brucciani.69 It is possible that the Committee of the Leeds School of Design felt compelled to follow the ‘kind advice’ of Wilson in the purchase of these additional plaster casts, to retain his favour and demonstrate their deference to the Council of Management in London.



Object Lessons

39

In addition to these approved examples, the teaching collection at the Leeds School of Design was extended with local donations. In June 1847, Tom Walter Green, a former maker and seller of prints and books, donated plaster casts taken from Lincoln Cathedral and from the church of West Ardsley in nearby Wakefield.70 Although medieval and gothic objects were not well represented in the standard teaching collection distributed to the regional schools, the lessons they could impart did not substantially deviate from the prescribed programme of study, because they could also be mined for historical motifs to be reconfigured and applied to manufactures.71 The Leeds Mercury recorded the circumstances in which the casts were produced: They are taken in plaster by Mr. Keyworth, sculptor, of Hull. This is the first present to the School of Design since it has been opened, and it is to be hoped it will be followed by other donations of a similar description. These are very valuable to a School of Design, as examples to show what perfection wood carving was carried at that period, and how very far behind-hand we are in that art. Schools of Design are doing much towards bringing it to perfection again.72

Other donations spoke directly to the concerns of the Schools of Design, such as the ‘12 Lithographic Drawings from Raphael’ that were provided by a ‘Rev. Mr. Elwin’ in March 1849.73 The work of Raphael occupied a particularly privileged position at the Schools of Design, ‘as a “canonical” painter whose compositions were also used in ornament, Raphael helped legitimize the applied arts’.74 This perspective was first articulated in this context by Gustav Waagen in his evidence to the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures in 1835: ‘In former times the artists were more workmen, and the workmen were more artists, as in the time of Raphael, and it is very desirable to restore this happy connexion.’75 Objects donated to the Leeds School of Design did not always reinforce the position of the central administration. Thomas Harvey (1812–84) was recorded as ‘having presented a portrait of Mr. Joseph Sturge for the Portfolio of the School of Design’.76 Sturge (1793–1859) was a prominent Quaker and abolitionist based in Birmingham, with associations to the Chartist and Nonconformist movements.77 Harvey was an acquaintance of Sturge and shared his religious and political affiliations.78 That the Leeds School of Design agreed to accept the portrait for their collection perhaps suggests a degree of sympathy for these causes among the members of the Committee. The provisions made for the new School of Design resulted in a reassessment of the drawing classes, which had previously operated as an aggregate of

40

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

technical and academic training. The drawing classes were to continue under George Thurnell as a parallel course of instruction, although the content was reconfigured after the inspector of the Schools of Design, Ambrose Poynter, took an active interest in this arrangement and sought to prevent the infringement of the sphere he represented.79 Poynter’s report to the Sub-Committee of the Leeds School of Design included the following chastisement: ‘No Figure or Landscape Drawing should be taught in Mr. Thurnell’s Class but that those pupils belonging to it who wished to learn those branches of the Art should be allowed to attend the Government School.’80 As the teaching of figure and landscape drawing had been so divisive in this context, it is particularly startling that Poynter had recommended the School of Design as the more appropriate territory for what were firmly fine art practices. Conversely, the prospectus for the drawing class of the Mechanics’ Institution described a curriculum that was particularly close to the founding principles of the School of Design: Thurnell, under whose able and diligent superintendence, they are taught the principles of Drawing Plans; the Theory and use of the Geometrical Scale, together with their application in the construction of Machinery. Radical and Isometrical Perspective, based on the Laws of Vision and Geometric Truth, are also taught. It is the object of the Class to impart such useful knowledge as workmen, in the various branches of Trade and Manufactures, will find of daily application.81

This disparity can be considered characteristic of the structure and implementation of the Schools of Design during their first decade. A further conflation of their activities occurred in 1848 when the drawing classes of the Mechanics’ Institution were transferred to rooms at 22 East Parade alongside the School of Design.82 An inspection three years later reiterated the need for strict delineation, while also undermining the independence of the classes with the recommendation that students of the School of Design would benefit from tuition in the drawing class of the Mechanics’ Institution: Mr. Poynter expressed some surprise at the omission of instruction in Geometrical & Perspective Drawing from the School, & strongly urged upon the Committee the consideration of some plan for admitting the Pupils of the School of Design into Mr. Thurnell’s Class to perceive this very necessary instruction, & confining the studies under Mr. Thurnell to this department of the Art. Mr. Poynter had visited the Institution drawing class & spoke in high terms of Mr. Thurnell as a teacher.83



Object Lessons

41

That the inspector had visited the drawing class of the Mechanics’ Institution and strongly recommended the attendance of the students of the School of Design leads us to question the assertion made by Bell, that ‘the practical experience of these bodies [Mechanics’ Institutions] was disregarded’.84 The inverted relationship between the two systems may have been a result of the way in which art masters were recruited during the period preceding the specialized training of teachers for the Schools of Design.85 Claude Lorraine Nursey (1816–73) was appointed the first art master of the Leeds School, and alongside the majority of his colleagues at the early branch Schools of Design was an alumnus of the Royal Academy Schools.86 His father, Perry Nursey, was a modestly successful painter of landscapes whose friendship with the Academician David Wilkie led to a studio assistantship for his son.87 Shortly after having been installed in Leeds, Nursey articulated his position on the most contested of teaching methods: ‘Every student in the school is required to draw the human figure, it being found by practical experience, that the accurate delineation of beautiful models of the human form, is the most efficient means of educating the hand, and the eye, and of promoting the refinement of taste.’88 However, this academic pedagogy was not met with universal approval and Nursey remained at the Leeds School of Design for less than two years.89

Figure 2.6  ‘The antique room’, from The Leeds Institute of Science, Art, and Literature: Historical Sketch, 1824–1900 (Leeds, 1901), 8. Collection of the author.

42

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

In 1868, what had been renamed the Leeds School of Practical Art was transferred to purpose-built rooms in the new Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society building on Cookridge Street – itself renamed the Leeds Institute of Science, Art and Literature – along with the plaster casts that arrived in Leeds as the founding teaching collection twenty-two years earlier (Figure 2.6). The collection of plaster casts was regularly and proudly exhibited in public alongside student work, loan displays and as part of their periodical conversazione.90 For Leeds, as in other places in Britain, one of the most important motivating factors in the establishment of a school of design was to be the recipient of a collection of plaster casts. So potent was their perceived cultural capital that their capacity to correct defective taste and produce useful knowledge was increasingly directed towards a wider public through exhibitions and museum collections.

3

Exhibitions Great and Small

During the second half of the nineteenth century, plaster casts were displayed across an eclectic range of temporary exhibitions, for equally varied purposes. The casts made by Brucciani were displayed at both the most prestigious international exhibitions and smaller but no less significant regional iterations. The first part of this chapter identifies the contributions Brucciani made to the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851 and its sequel, the International Exhibition of 1862. Although casts by Brucciani had been displayed in public before 1851 – most often as part of temporary exhibitions staged by regional schools of design – the Great Exhibition defined the terms under which plaster casts would be understood by an audience that had never before been so large nor so stratified in its composition. An article published by the illustrated periodical Graphic in 1910 reinforced the importance of these exhibitions in the development of the business: ‘[Brucciani’s] first opportunity was the Great Exhibition of 1851, for which he did most of the plastic work; then followed the Crystal Palace, the 1862 Exhibition, in which they arranged all the sculpture, and modeled [sic] the fountains and great trophy of wax fruit (think of it!).’1 Both exhibitions, along with the second incarnation of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham from 1854, have deservedly received tremendous scholarly attention from at least as many disciplines as were represented in these polytechnic displays, so it will not be the intention of this chapter to attempt a comprehensive historical account of them.2 Instead the objects will be the focus of an analysis that considers the specific conditions under which they were produced, displayed, interpreted and circulated. The second part of this chapter investigates the smaller temporary public exhibitions at which Brucciani casts were displayed, and the ways in which plaster casts of classical and contemporary sculpture were deployed to define and redefine the spaces in which they were sited.

44

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

The sources that inform our understanding of Brucciani’s involvement in temporary exhibitions are dominated by reports, reviews, articles and advertisements in the local and national periodical press, alongside the catalogues issued by the larger exhibitions. It is important to note that these sources should not be thought of as transparent evidence: They are subject to the context and culture in which they were written and crucially, our interpretation of them through the lens of the present.3 As Brucciani’s business records do not survive from this period, it has often not been possible to recover information about the practical arrangements and transactions. It is not clear, for instance, whether Brucciani was paid to lend casts to the Great Exhibition or if he paid to display them as an advertisement for the business. In any case, temporary exhibitions did operate as advertisements for Brucciani, as much to his fellow exhibitors – with whom he would go on to collaborate – as to the thousands of potential consumers.

Brucciani’s Apollo Belvedere at the Great Exhibition of 1851 The objects Brucciani chose to show in public brokered the relationships between the business and its institutional and individual patrons. The most prominent and celebrated work of Brucciani’s early career was a plaster cast of the Apollo Belvedere displayed at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851 (Figure 3.1).4 The cast was described by the newspaper the Standard as ‘an object of some curiosity, inasmuch as there are but few casts in existence taken immediately from the original statue. This cast is made to imitate marble pretty closely and has a very beautiful effect.’5 The cast was invested with value and interest through its proximity to the sculpture from which it derived; it was considered novel and faithful because the mould had been in direct contact with what was still one of the most admired sculptures of the classical canon. If the Apollo was indeed a first cast, its scarcity would only increase as custodians of important collections of sculpture became concerned about the damage caused by the production of piece moulds. The moulding process required the application of a lubricant to the surface of the object, which could result in staining if too much was applied or the loss of surface material if too little was used. The production of after casts from existing moulds was a much simpler and more economical process, but offered diminishing returns as the mould became worn over time and with repeated use. For this reason, the first cast was often preserved for the production of new moulds.



Exhibitions Great and Small

45

Figure 3.1 Louis Haghe, ‘Refreshment department of the Great International Exhibition of 1851, Hyde Park’, c. 1851. Watercolour and bodycolour. 534 × 400 mm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

In addition to its status as a first cast, the Apollo Belvedere was received as an original copy because it was ascribed not to a sculptor whose name had been lost to history, but to Brucciani. Under a system of attribution that continues to identify reproductions as essentially belonging to the artist whose work has been copied, it is notable that Brucciani had been identified so prominently and repeatedly as the author of the object in the catalogues of the Great Exhibition and the coverage in the periodical press. According to the wood engraving of the cast published in the Illustrated London News in 1852, its authorship appears to have been literally inscribed on the pedestal in large capital letters (Figure 3.2). When the Sunday Times published a short notice on Brucciani’s workshop in August 1851, the reporter noted: ‘It must be pretty generally known that the splendid Apollo Belvidere [sic], in the Crystal Place, is the production of Signor Brucciani’s genius.’6 It was not unusual for the Brucciani company to add their

46

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 3.2 Detail of ‘Grand panorama (concluded) of the Great Exhibition. – No. IX. – South and north portions of the transept’, Illustrated London News Supplement (6 March 1852), 205. Wood engraving. Collection of the author.

name discretely to the casts they produced – usually in the form of a small pressed metal plate or an incision directly into the plaster – but these were commercial trademarks and not signatures. The cast was presented as an original Brucciani and the strong association between his name and the object was the same as the relationship between sculptor and sculpture in the sense that the presentation of a singular authorship also erased the contribution of Brucciani’s workshop. Although the Apollo cast was displayed in a radically new setting and viewed by an unprecedented audience at the Great Exhibition, its reception had much in common with an established mode of engagement associated with the collection and display of plaster casts by the aristocracy in the decades preceding the Napoleonic Wars. In her account of the reproduction of sculpture in the second half of the eighteenth century, Viccy Coltman identified a particular ‘cachet of the copy’ that appears to have persisted into the nineteenth century, with reproductions of classical statuary ‘prized for their canonical and novel associations’.7 The boundary between novelty and originality is perhaps what is a stake in this instance, particularly given the account by the Standard having employed the term ‘curious’ to describe the plaster Apollo Belvedere as it was presented at the Great Exhibition. The novel, the original and the curious were not sharply differentiated categories in this context, where reproductions of sculpture were displayed alongside the latest examples of Victorian industry, technology



Exhibitions Great and Small

47

and the material cultures of the British Empire and beyond. The singularity of the Apollo Belvedere cast was confirmed by its surprising classification in the official catalogue and its location in the Crystal Palace. It was not included in the sections dedicated either to British or to Italian manufactures, nor was it displayed as part of the Fine Art or Sculpture Courts. It was situated in the North Transept, close to the refreshment area, in which Schweppes carbonated drinks were served next to iron gates by Coalbrookdale, fully grown trees and tropical plants. The Apollo Belvedere remained a staple cast in the Brucciani catalogue for a century after the Great Exhibition, offered full-size at 7 feet and 9 inches or as a reduced version standing 3 feet tall (Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3  ‘Statues’, from D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Catalogue of Casts for Schools (London, 1914), 10. Private collection. Photograph courtesy Andrea Felice.

48

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Brucciani’s Greek Slave and the International Exhibition of 1862 Unlike the way in which the plaster cast of the Apollo Belvedere resisted classification in the scheme constructed for the Great Exhibition, the casts Brucciani exhibited at the International Exhibition of 1862 were more firmly located in the taxonomic structure of the exhibition. It is particularly important to note that Brucciani exhibited in both the Fine Art and Industrial Departments; ostensibly the same material could quite legitimately be claimed for both spheres, which relied on an opposition between art and industry that did not accurately reflect the status of many of the objects selected for display. ‘Models in Plaster of Natural and other Objects for the Use of Schools of Art’ were exhibited in the British Division under the Eastern Dome as part of Class 29: ‘Educational Works and Appliances’.8 A supplement to the Daily News provided a slightly more detailed description of the contents: ‘Education has its fine art branch, and under this head Mr. Brucciani shows some excellent casts of fruit and foliage from nature, prepared as art-studies for schools. The list comprises apples, blackberries, hops, sunflowers, and lilies.’9 In his handbook to the Industrial Department, Robert Hunt united Brucciani’s contribution to both the spheres of art and industry through their materiality, having suggested that the cumulative achievement of the casts from nature and sculpture ‘fully illustrate the application of plaster of Paris’.10 Brucciani’s casts from natural and botanical specimens continued to attract commendation for their delicacy and demonstration of technical expertise (Figure 3.4). Two years after the International Exhibition of 1862, he opened a large new showroom – which will be discussed in the middle of the present chapter – and the periodical press singled out these casts for special mention. The Era noted that the ‘casts in plaster of the most graceful and beautiful specimens of the vegetable kingdom’ were displayed in a separate space and that they represented ‘perhaps, Mr. Brucciani’s greatest triumphs’.11 The Art-Journal similarly praised the ‘casts from every kind of animal and vegetable nature, down even to a branch of blackberries, certainly one of the most difficult subjects ever placed in the hands of a moulder’.12 Robert Hunt also drew attention to a single object ascribed to Brucciani on display at the International Exhibition in 1862: a fictile marble reproduction of the North American sculptor Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave (1844) displayed in the southern side of the Nave.13 In her essay on sculpture and national identity at the International Exhibition, Alison Yarrington argued that at the Great Exhibition



Exhibitions Great and Small

49

Figure 3.4  ‘Fruit, leaves, vegetables, &c., from nature’, from D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Catalogue of Casts for Schools (London, 1914), 42. Private collection. Photograph courtesy Andrea Felice.

eleven years before ‘the Greek Slave had an ambivalent status as an object: designed by an American but “made” in Florence out of Italian Seravezza marble, largely by an Italian workforce, as were the six full-size replicas that Powers was to circulate to Europe and America’.14 These complexities were only compounded in 1862 by the inclusion of another layer of authorship (Brucciani), process (casting) and material (fictile marble).15 An article in the Morning Chronicle published in March 1852 suggests that the reproduction of the Greek Slave displayed at the 1862 Exhibition was made by Brucciani shortly after the Great Exhibition of 1851: We have had the pleasure of seeing, at Mr. Copeland’s establishment in Bondstreet, a perfect fac-simile [sic] of the celebrated statue of the Greek Slave, cast by M. Brucciani. The figure was constructed from moulds applied to the original

50

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain work, and of course the copy is an actual double of the marble. We could not – from memory, at all events – detect a shade of variation. The composition has rather a waxy appearance in some lights, but in others shows very like marble. The materials are of a novel nature, and are kept a secret my M. Brucciani. It is not, of course, proposed to re-produce the statue upon a large scale in other instances, but we believe it to be the intention of Mr. Copeland to publish a few reduced copies, about 20 inches high, modelled with the utmost care and exactitude. The display of statuettes, formed of diverse compositions, at Mr. Copeland’s, is exceedingly interesting.16

One of the notable points in the article was the fidelity of the cast that had been manufactured from a mould that had material contact with the original sculpture. The author was keen to stress the verisimilitude of the ‘novel’ ersatz marble with its ‘secret’ composition, despite the implication that its ‘waxy appearance’ was not quite convincing. The firm of William Taylor Copeland produced and sold reproductions in Parian ware or ‘Statuary Porcelain’ as refined domestic ornament for a metropolitan middle class. Having established a showroom in New Bond Street in 1848, Copeland occupied more prestigious territory than Brucciani in Covent Garden. The association between Brucciani and Copeland – brokered perhaps by their respective successes at the Great Exhibition – was mutually beneficial: Brucciani displayed his practice to a monied Mayfair market for decorative sculpture and Copeland accessed the stock of moulds and typecasts of antique and contemporary sculpture amassed by Brucciani. In their history of Copeland, Maureen Batkin and Martin Greenwood gave a brief but useful account of how the Greek Slave came to be part of their stock: ‘The original marble, commissioned by Capt. Grant, was first shown in England in 1845 at the rooms of Messrs. Graves in Pall Mall. … Shown at the Great Exhibition, the statue was reduced by B. Cheverton and brought out in Parian, first by Minton and then by various other manufacturers including Copeland.’17 The Greek Slave was situated between at least three forms of reproduction and their respective authors: Brucciani with the plaster cast, Cheverton with the reducing machine and Copeland with Parian. These processes were not autonomous; they formed what Malcolm Baker has described in the context of nineteenth-century museum culture as a ‘reproductive continuum’.18 The relationship between the Brucciani cast of the Greek Slave and the proposed Copeland reductions was confirmed by an article in the periodical John Bull published a day after the Morning Chronicle description: Brucciani has executed an admirably truthful copy of the statue now familiar to every one as the work of the American sculptor, Hiram Powers, and generally



Exhibitions Great and Small

51

acknowledged to be the greatest achievement of American art. The cast, exhibited at Mr. Copeland’s, of New Bond-street, is as large as the original figure, and has an appearance of equally laboured finish, resembling, in its smooth and warm-tinted surface, the beautiful cast of the Belvidere [sic] Apollo, exhibited by Brucciani, in the transept of the Great Exhibition. … We may therefore expect that the small-size copies in ‘Parian’, which Mr. Copeland intends to have accurately reduced by scale from the large cast, will, when given to the public, find the extensive favour they are sure to deserve.19

The Copeland Parian statuettes of the Greek Slave were mediated by cumulative layers of reproduction and material translation, with each process couched in relation to its fidelity, beauty and utility. This was a discourse that allowed a porcelain reduction of a cast reproduction the same agency as the marble statue from which it was derived; the question of authenticity does not have a place here. If there was trickery at work in the composition of materials and processes, it was not intended to deceive the consumer but to preserve and extend the professional reputation of the maker by preventing others from appropriating their methods. The labours of Brucciani, Cheverton and Copeland were given equal, if not greater, attention and interest than those of Powers in this context. During the Great Exhibition, Cheverton and Brucciani also collaborated on the reproduction of a miniature edition of the canonical sculpture known as Theseus from the East Pediment of the Parthenon. Commissioned by the Arundel Society, Cheverton produced a reduction of the sculpture in alabaster at one-third scale, after which Brucciani cast seventy plaster reproductions for subscribers who had paid one guinea for the cast and the chance to win what was described by the Journal of Design and Manufactures as the ‘original alabaster’.20 The Journal went on to compare the precision of the process with photographic technologies: Mr. Cheverton’s process of reduction insures the most wonderful accuracy, and will, we hope, be brought into active operation by manufacturers in reducing high works of formative fine art to a scale adapted for English houses of the usual size, so as to command probably a remunerative amount of sale. As the process is by a machine perfected by Mr. Cheverton, it may be said to be more a work of nature than of art, and ranks in its quality with the Daguerreotype and Calotype … the faithfulness of Mr. Cheverton’s process is such that not only are all the proportions and traits of the original preserved, but in the parts where the original colossal marble has been injured by times, the surface being destroyed in many places, the transfer by the machine is so accurate, that the surface of the

52

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain reduction appears as is itself had been exposed to the same rough usage as the original, and a similar action of time and weather.21

The Daily News also noted ‘the truthfulness with which the dilapidated condition of the latter is depicted’ and praised the utility of the reproduction for those who had not studied the marble original in the British Museum.22 The call for electrotype editions of the work was met. The Irish Industrial Exhibition of 1853 included a number of electrotypes of classical statuary from the reductions produced by Cheverton, including Theseus. The catalogue of the exhibition argued for the place of electrotyping for the development of the fine arts and noted that ‘nothing, for instance, could excel the sharpness and beauty of the numerous statuettes and other art-manufactures of Elkington and Mason’.23 In the same year, plaster casts of Cheverton’s Theseus were advertised for sale by the Arundel Society through the dealer Colnaghi, priced at £1 1s., with bronze electrotype versions available directly from Elkington for £10 10s.24 Established in 1848, the objectives of the Arundel Society were ‘to preserve the record and diffuse a knowledge of the most important remains of painting and sculpture, to furnish valuable contributions towards the illustration of the history of Art, to elevate the standard of taste in England, and thus incidentally to exert a beneficial influence upon our native and national schools of painting and sculpture’.25 Speaking on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition by the Arundel Society at the Crystal Palace in 1855, the architect Matthew Digby Wyatt described Cheverton’s reductions of Theseus, Ilissus and slab 47 of the Parthenon Frieze as ‘reproduced microscopically, almost magically … so as to bring down faultless models of the very best class of works of art to the level of the pockets of the great majority among us’.26 The constant references to the fidelity, truthfulness and almost impossible precision of the objects produced through Cheverton’s sculpture reducing machine obscure multiple processes of reproduction and material translation. Reflecting on the work of the Arundel Society in 1869, Frederic W. Maynard described Cheverton’s method: ‘A cast from the original was first obtained, which, with figures of such magnitude, may be considered as expressing every characteristic of form and surface as perfectly as the marble itself. From the cast Mr. Cheverton executed his reduced model in alabaster.’27 Given the collaboration between Cheverton and Brucciani in the production of plaster casts of the miniature alabaster, it is possible that the fullsized plaster casts from which the alabaster reductions were made were also supplied by Brucciani, although his relationship with the British Museum was not formalized until 1857.28



Exhibitions Great and Small

53

When the Victoria and Albert Museum published the penultimate catalogue of plaster casts derived from the Brucciani moulds in April 1936 (the final catalogue being issued in January 1939), reductions of Theseus and Ilissos were listed for sale as part of the category of ‘reductions of classical figures of which full-size casts are not obtainable’. The catalogue described this selection of plaster casts in the following cautionary terms: ‘These reductions form part of the collections taken over by the Museum with the stock of Messrs. D. Brucciani & Co. The accuracy of such reductions cannot be guaranteed and in consequence their use for study in schools of art or as documents can hardly be recommended.’29 The contrast between the reception of these objects in the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth could not be more marked, from facsimiles invested with almost incredible exactitude and truth to untrustworthy objects that were reduced not only in scale but also in function and status. It is significant that shortly after the collaboration between Brucciani, Cheverton and Copeland in the wake of the Great Exhibition, Brucciani established a temporary showroom at 74 Bold Street in Liverpool geared towards the market for smaller decorative ornaments.30 The emphasis of the adverts issued in the Liverpool Mercury was not so much on the casts from antique statuary, but the ‘modern masters’ such as John Gibson, whose connection to Liverpool was noted. Busts of members of the royal family and political elite were also for sale, as were reduced statuettes and fragments of architectural ornament ‘suitable for drawing-rooms’.31 These objects were not just available in plaster of Paris, but also in marble and alabaster, which suggests that they were intended to appeal to the middle-class market for ornamental commodities. The extent of the objects offered for sale by Brucciani was revealed in a further advertisement in the Liverpool Mercury in December 1852, which appealed to the ‘principals of schools’ to avail themselves of the opportunity to purchase ‘casts of hands, feet, &c., also casts from leaves and other natural objects, suitable for models to draw from, for the decoration of rooms, halls, gardens, &c’.32 These small casts were marketed as both didactic and decorative objects; it was the way in which they were used and displayed that determined their character in a given context. This dual quality was also noted in relation to the larger figurative reproductions of classical and contemporary sculpture, which in turn had the capacity to characterize the spaces in which they were shown. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Brucciani established and reinforced the reputation of his business in the spheres of fine art, education and industry through the vehicle of the international exhibition. But no less

54

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

important were the temporary exhibitions in which Brucciani displayed plaster casts beyond South Kensington and its emulators. The second half of this chapter examines these diverse contexts of display.

Brucciani beyond London Before the proliferation of regional schools of design from the 1840s onwards, reproductions of canonical antique statuary were largely confined to the town and country houses of the aristocracy, generally acquired in Italy or France during a grand tour. As objects that had already been radically decontextualized through material translation, geographical relocation and modification of meaning, it is difficult to recover just how incongruous plaster casts of antique sculptures were in Britain’s regional towns and cities, displayed before a new extended audience without a classical education. During the summer of 1850, the Free Trade Hall in Manchester was the site of a ‘Cosmorama’ described by the Manchester Times as ‘a grand Exhibition of a novel character’.33 In addition to the construction of a large and an elaborate fountain, Brucciani supplied ‘casts of antique and modern sculptures, including the Apollo, Diana; the Shepherd, and the Mercury (of Thorvaldsen), Boy extracting Thorn, Boy with Butterfly, Crouching Venus with Mirror, and others’.34 It is not recorded on what terms the casts were supplied. Given the frequency that casts by Brucciani were displayed in temporary exhibitions around the country, it seems possible that the business kept a travelling or loan collection for this purpose. They would not have wanted to risk damage to their stock of first casts – used as type specimens for the production of new moulds – nor would it necessarily have been economical to produce new casts for such short-term displays. There were, however, instances where the mechanisms of commission for public display were more visible, although what Brucciani was paid for work undertaken outside the stock listed in the catalogues is most often absent from the extant records. In 1858, Brucciani exhibited plaster casts at what was advertised hyperbolically as ‘The Largest Waxwork, Sculpture Galleries, and Musical Promenade in the World’.35 The proprietor was William Allsopp, who in 1857 had established what he called the ‘New Crystal Palace’ on the ground floor of the Teutonic Hall on Lime Street in the centre of Liverpool. This was not the end of the association between Brucciani and Allsopp. In September 1859, the Liverpool Mercury exclaimed ‘Excitement extraordinary!’ at the



Exhibitions Great and Small

55

prospect of the new waxwork figure of ‘the Richmond Poisoner’ Dr Thomas Smethurst, modelled by Brucciani from courtroom sketches made during his trial.36 Smethurst had been convicted for the murder of his wife Isabella Bankes (the relationship was bigamous as Smethurst was already married) and forcing her to sign over her estate before her death from suspected arsenic poisoning. The trial was very widely reported in the periodical press and the guilty verdict meant Smethurst would have hanged, had the Home Secretary not unexpectedly commuted his sentence on the grounds of insufficient evidence. As a result of this surprising decision, Allsopp’s advertisement noted that the model would not be placed in the Chamber of Criminals as had presumably been planned. In May 1860, Brucciani again provided exhibits for Allsopp in Liverpool in the form of ‘finely-executed busts … modelled from life’ of the boxers Tom Sayers and John Carmel Heenan after their infamous illegal bare-knuckle fight on 17 April 1860.37 Peter Bailey described the working-class men who entered the ring during this period as ‘great popular heroes’, while the sport also attracted the support of the aristocracy, who mythologized the fist fight as a levelling mechanism that built character and resilience.38 Although these busts are now lost, it seems likely that they took the form of the idealized representations of Sayers and Heenan that proliferated in prints and other souvenirs such as the innocuous figurines produced by the Staffordshire Potteries. While some depictions chose to reproduce the hideous effects of repeated blows to the face from photographs that had been taken after the bout, Brucciani’s stockin-trade was the duplication and dissemination of the ideal. Allsopp advertised the presence of ‘Emperors, Kings, Princes, Princesses, Dukes, Lords, Statesmen, Divines, Poets’ in the form of the plaster casts supplied by Brucciani, which included the most canonical glorification of a violent contest in the form of a full-sized reproduction of Michelangelo’s David.39 In addition to the busts modelled by Brucciani, it was reported that Allsopp had also ‘procured fulllength figures, modelled in wax, of these famous combatants, a spectacle which is creating some excitement in the north’.40 While the majority of the sculpture on display at Allsopp’s appears to have been selected from the standard Brucciani catalogue of plaster casts, the criminals and contemporary heroes were modelled in wax, although it is not clear whether Domenico Brucciani personally had a hand in their production. While plaster retained its association with legitimate sculptural practice and by extension with high art, in the popular imagination wax was the medium of Madam Tussaud. It was a material denigrated for its tendency to result in an excess of detail, of too great a fidelity to life, or to death

56

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

in the case of the wax anatomical models or écorché figures produced in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards.

The Galleria delle Belle Arti On Saturday 23 July 1864, Brucciani opened his Galleria delle Belle Arti at 40 Russell Street, Covent Garden. Like Brucciani’s decision not to anglicize his name, the Galleria delle Belle Arti – Gallery of Fine Arts – spoke of the cultural heritage of Italy that had been such a potent influence on the British imagination. Brucciani sought to capitalize on his Italian identity by attaching it to the material culture of ancient Rome and the Italian renaissance rather than the abject figurinai wandering the streets of contemporary Britain, who we met in the first chapter. One month before the opening, Brucciani placed advertisements in the periodical press, including the following in the Morning Post: ‘Mr. Brucciani respectfully informs the nobility, gentry, artists, and public generally that his Large New Gallery is now completed, and will be Opened in a few days, notice of which will be given, with an extensive Collection of Reproductions of Ancient and Modern Art, original Marble and other Statues, Busts, &c.’41 Several articles were published in the days after the opening, with an extended review in the Art-Journal published just over three months later in November 1864. The Era was the first to publish an appraisal, describing Brucciani as a ‘well-known and talented artist’ and the space, contents, arrangement and purpose as a gallery of fine art rather than a commercial showroom. The Morning Post reported that ‘Mr. Brucciani has been long and honourably known in connection with statuary and works of architectural decoration in this country … and enjoys a well-deserved celebrity’, later describing him as an ‘ingenious artist’.42 The reports were particularly effusive about entry being free to the public and named students, sculptors, artists and ‘the simple lover of the massive and beautiful’ as the beneficiaries of this ‘liberality beyond all praise’.43 The utility of the collection operated with the same logic that defined almost all public exhibitions of plaster casts in the second half of the nineteenth century: to bring together facsimiles of the canon of European sculpture from disparate places and times for the purposes of instruction and comparison. The Era promised their readers ‘a treat of no ordinary kind, for they will look upon the collection not to be matched in the world, and will have before them perfect copies of those celebrated works which form the gems of all the sculpture galleries of Europe’.44



Exhibitions Great and Small

57

These claims might seem hyperbolic for what was essentially the opening of larger commercial premises in the same street in which Brucciani had been trading for decades, but in 1864 the places in which the British public could see comprehensive collections of plaster casts were limited. The Morning Post commented on how remarkable it was that a collection of ‘the choicest works of the greatest masters’ did not already exist.45 The Galleria attracted positive notices not just for the quantity of sculpture on display, but crucially also for the quality of the plaster casts. Just as the commentary on Brucciani’s work for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and International Exhibition of 1862 had emphasized the fidelity, craftsmanship and artistry of his work, so too did the periodical press in their reviews of the new gallery. The Morning Post gave a particularly sophisticated reading of the distinction between the original and the copy and noted that the difference was more phenomenological than material: These copies are so spirited and truthful in expression, and so critically accurate in every minute particular of form and feature, that for all purposes of artculture they are veritable reproductions of the works from which they have been modelled. It is only in the historic associations, and in a certain personal value, more ideal than actual, attaching to the originals, that they differ from them.46

The plaster casts were not only positioned as proxies for the sculpture from which they were derived, but the collection as a whole was also framed as a surrogate for travel. Encounters with what was considered to be the pantheon of sculpture were no longer reserved for those wealthy enough to complete a grand tour in the manner of the aristocracy of the eighteenth century. The periodicals that published articles on Brucciani’s Galleria celebrated that it was ‘open to all comers, whether they may desire to purchase or to study’ as a democratic leveller, although they did not engage in the same rhetoric as emerging public museums regarding the ennoblement of the working classes through exposure to exemplary objects. The firmly middle-class Art-Journal took a slightly different perspective on the utility of the collection, which their journalist described as ‘a valuable preparation for the contemplation of the inestimable sculptural treasures of Rome, Naples, and others of the Italian cities’ and ‘a capital refresher to the memory of the scattered sculptures of the Continent’.47 The Art-Journal took the position that plaster casts were useful in a supplementary capacity but could not be considered substitutes for the experience of viewing the original work: an argument that would later gain traction in museums as they sought to replace their cast collections with ‘real’ objects.48

58

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Although plaster casts had been displayed at the South Kensington Museum since its origins in the Government School of Design from 1837, the impressive Architectural Courts (later renamed the Cast Courts) did not open until 1873. Similarly, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge displayed around forty casts donated in 1850 and expanded its collections in the 1870s under Sidney Colvin (1845–1927) and Charles Waldstein (1856–1927), although a separate Museum of Classical Archaeology was not founded until 1884.49 This was also the year in which the cast collection began at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology in Oxford, with a purpose-built Cast Gallery not opened until 1961.50 The manufacture, acquisition and display of plaster casts had a longer history at the British Museum, at which Brucciani was appointed formatore in 1857, but again the approach was ad hoc.51 In addition to providing reproductions of antique sculpture yet absent from public museums, Brucciani’s Galleria also displayed reproductions of ‘modern statues’ by contemporary British, European and North American sculptors. Where it differed from the content and presentation of a museum of classical archaeology was in the concurrent display of statues reconfigured as lamps; busts and statuettes of historical and contemporary public figures (including ‘an extremely clever comic one of Lord Palmerston and the Emperor Napoleon walking arm in arm in an attitude of the most abandoned burlesque’); architectural ornament; casts of animals and botanical specimens and écorché.52 The diverse selection reflected the diverse markets for plaster casts: museums, art galleries, schools of art and design, public buildings and domestic homes and gardens. Only the Standard made reference to the location of the Galleria, suggesting the author of the article had some difficulty in finding it: ‘A walk round this wellfitted and tastefully-arranged gallery will well repay the trouble of discovering its locality directly opposite the stage door of Drury-lane Theatre.’53 Although the area around Covent Garden and Drury Lane offered many respectable pursuits – not least the theatres of the same names – it was notorious for prostitution and poverty. Charles Dickens wrote a particularly resonant contemporary account of the neighbourhood at night, revealing the presence of an abject young underclass: Covent-garden Market, when it was market morning, was wonderful company. The great waggons [sic] of cabbages, with growers’ men and boys lying asleep under them, and with sharp dogs from market-garden neighbourhoods looking after the whole, were as good as a party. But one of the worst night sights I know in London, is to be found in the children who prowl about this place; who sleep



Exhibitions Great and Small

59

in the baskets, fight for the offal, dart at any object they think they can lay their thieving hands on, dive under the carts and barrows, dodge the constables, and are perpetually making a blunt pattering on the pavement of the Piazza with the rain of their naked feet. A painful and unnatural result comes of the comparison one is forced to institute between the growth of corruption as displayed in the so much improved and cared for fruits of the earth, and the growth of corruption as displayed in these all uncared for (except inasmuch as ever-hunted) savages.54

As we have seen in the introductory chapter, child labour was also embedded in the plaster trade and as Peter Malone discovered, when the census was taken in 1861, Brucciani was recorded as employing twenty-five men and five boys.55 The Art-Journal provided the most comprehensive description of the interior of the Galleria, noting that it was 100 feet long by 25 feet wide and ‘extremely well lighted, and full, even to the ceiling, of casts and copies of all the finest statuary in existence’.56 On entering the gallery of Mr. Brucciani, the visitor is struck with the arrangement and order of the place: he finds himself in an atmosphere much purer that that of the abodes of the gessai he may have seen in Italy; and it is at once felt that the selection has been made with infinite knowledge and taste, and also that the perfection of the casts is a result due only to the skill of an artist.57

The Observer provided what was perhaps the most balanced assessment of the Galleria: ‘Although, of course, purely a commercial speculation, the opening of this gallery is not without importance as a matter of art cultivation, since no class of works requires more space to be appreciated, and no such good opportunity as the one now given has hitherto been offered for their inspection.’58 With his unrivalled stock of moulds from European and British collections, in 1864 Brucciani was in a better position to display a more comprehensive selection of plaster casts than any museum or educational institution in the country. Recalibrating his showroom and workshop as a gallery of fine art open to the public free of charge appears to have been a sound commercial decision, raising the profile of a business that had already benefited from the publicity of the international exhibitions of the previous thirteen years. The establishment of the Galleria delle Belle Arti marked the beginning of the most prolific phase of production for Brucciani and the next decade would promise the most prestigious commissions of his career, which are examined in Chapter 5.

60

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Exhibiting plasters in parks and gardens In addition to the schools, exhibitions and domestic homes in which plaster casts were displayed, Brucciani engaged in the established tradition of displaying reproductions of canonical statuary in outdoor settings. Unlike the bronze, lead or zinc reproductions installed in the gardens of country houses, Brucciani’s fictile stone and plaster casts were acquired for a diverse range of contexts, often temporary decorative displays installed to provide a classicizing mise en scène. For instance, Brucciani was credited with having supplied statuary for Cremorne Gardens, although the particular sculptures are not recorded (Figure 3.5).59 Between 1843 and its closure in 1877, Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea operated as a popular pleasure garden, which featured ‘a “monster pagoda” … theatres, a circus, a banqueting hall, an American bowling saloon with American drinks … a maze, a gypsies’ tent and spacious lawns with flowers and trees’ (Figure 3.6).60 In June 1864, a fête was held at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Gardens in South Kensington to raise funds to build a Female School of Art in Bloomsbury, with a bazaar held in the southern arcades. Inaugurated by the Princess of Wales, the event was intended to be prestigious and the exhibitors were carefully

Figure 3.5 ‘Cremorne-gardens. The orchestra’, Illustrated London News (28 June 1851), 619. Wood engraving. Collection of the author.



Exhibitions Great and Small

61

Figure 3.6 ‘Cremorne gardens. – The maypole dance’, Illustrated London News (14 August 1858), 149. Wood engraving. Collection of the author.

selected to represent the highest standards of taste and craftsmanship. The Times reported that none of the worthless gew-gaws unfortunately so common at fancy fairs were to be found, their place being supplied by statuettes and pictures, many of them contributed by the first artists of the day, photographs, jewellery, Bohemian glass from the famous warehouses of Steinberger of Prague; ornamental leather-work, contributed by Klein of Vienna; vases, casts from the antique from Brucciani’s workshops, drawings by the pupils of the school, &c.61

Opened on 5 June 1861 with the permission of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, the Gardens were situated in 22½ acres adjacent to the South Kensington Museum and close to the site of the Great Exhibition; the selection of ornamental objects presented for sale was clearly informed by these precedents in ‘Albertopolis’.62 The event was reprised two years later and ‘a small but well-arranged selection of sculpture, furnished by Mr. Brucciani, guarded the entrance from the horticultural grounds’.63 On 25 July 1864, Brucciani casts were again displayed in a horticultural setting, when the Duchess of Wellington, Elizabeth Wellesley (1820–1904),

62

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Mistress of the Robes to Queen Victoria from 1861, ‘assembled the members of the Corps Diplomatique and the nobility remaining in London at Apsleyhouse last evening, as a farewell gathering at the close of the season’.64 Apsley House, designed by Robert Adam (1728–92) in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and situated at the entrance to Hyde Park, was one of the most impressive addresses in London. The Times gave an account of the nocturnal garden scene: The special attraction of the evening was, however, found in a peculiarly novel al fresco exhibition, consisting of the lighting-up under various effects of colour of a number of choice works of sculpture arranged in the garden at the rear of the mansion. These works included copies of Gibson’s ‘Venus’, Thorwalsden’s [sic] ideal rendering of the same goddess, Power’s ‘Greek Slave’, and an Italian ‘Improvisatore’ by Debay, &c., from Brucciani’s new gallery of the fine arts in Covent-garden. The illumination of these beautiful works of art, including the foliage of the trees and shrubs amid which they were placed, was under the superintendence of Professor Pepper, who appropriated to this purpose large voltaic batteries arranged on Grove’s principle, which were connected with lamps and parabolic reflectors, constructed by M. Serrin, of Paris. The colours applied to this object were vivid shades of red, amber, blue, green, and white, the ever-changing and floating beams of coloured light on the various groups producing a most charming effect.65

Although the article does not provide a full list of all the casts displayed in the garden of Apsley House, it is significant that those chosen for special mention were reproductions of nineteenth-century sculpture and not examples from the classical canon. All four sculptors had been represented at the International Exhibition two years earlier in 1862, with Brucciani’s cast of Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave and John Gibson’s Tinted Venus having received considerable public attention and critical discussion. The mode of their display in the garden of Apsley House owed a debt to the polytechnic composition of the international exhibitions and the illumination of the casts referenced the polychromy debate. The scientist John Henry ‘Professor’ Pepper (1821–1900) was appointed as a lecturer at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in 1848 and became Director in 1852. It is likely that his connection with Brucciani emerged as a result of Pepper’s work with the Department of Science and Art and the Sydenham Crystal Palace, where he displayed the popular spectral illusion known as ‘Pepper’s Ghost’.66 The Parisian engineer Victor Serrin (1829–1905) had also exhibited at the 1862 International Exhibition, with a ‘self-acting regulator for electric light’, a batterypowered arc lamp invented in 1857 and later used for lighthouses.67



Exhibitions Great and Small

63

Towards the end of his life, Brucciani was credited with the decoration of the Winter Gardens in Blackpool (Figure 3.7).68 On the occasion of the opening in July 1878, the Illustrated London News recorded that the sculptures on display included a statue of Richard II, works by Canova, Gibson, MacDowell, busts of the royal family and ‘other eminent persons’.69 Photographic postcards from the turn of the century show plaster casts including Gibson’s Venus displayed among the dense foliage of the entrance to the Winter Gardens, otherwise known as the Floral Hall (Figure 3.8). With cast iron columns and a glass roof, the Floral Hall was also decorated with plaster reliefs by Brucciani. In his Buildings of England series, Nikolaus Pevsner, writing nearly a century later, noted that the reliefs were ‘copies of Luca della Robbia panels designed for the Cantoria of Florence Cathedral in 1431–8 and the only survivors of a once extensive scheme of statuary’.70 Pevsner described the purpose of the Winter Gardens as a space in which a middle-class clientele could promenade and be entertained in the theatres, ballroom, cafes and bars that formed part of the giant covered complex.71 The display of plaster statuary and reliefs among abundant evergreens conformed to the model established by the Great Exhibition, fused with the

Figure 3.7  ‘The winter gardens and aquarium at Blackpool, Lancashire’, Illustrated London News (20 July 1878), 66. Wood engraving. Collection of the author.

64

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 3.8 Valentine’s Series, ‘Entrance to Winter Gardens, Blackpool’, 1909. Photographic postcard. Collection of the author.

opportunities for leisure and recreation extended by the Crystal Palace and the Alexandra Palace. With the exception of the Blackpool Winter Gardens, the horticultural schemes which included Brucciani’s reproductions of historic and contemporary sculpture were most often temporary, but Brucciani also catered for the market for permanent outdoor sculpture. A commentator writing for the Standard in 1860 described the arrangement of Brucciani’s showroom and having noted the presence of plaster casts of antique and contemporary statuary, the writer was impressed by ‘the large number of fountains, vases, and statues constructed of artificial stone … which lay disposed in all directions’.72 Brucciani advertised on the back page of his catalogue of 1864 that ‘the subjects can be supplied in artificial stone, impervious to the weather, for gardens, parks, &c.’ which suggests that the consumer could choose to have any object listed in the catalogue manufactured in this material.73 The composition of Brucciani’s artificial stone is not recorded, but during the nineteenth century, formulations of durable cast stone were generally cement-based, mixed with variable quantities of natural stone, sand and marble dust. Such was the recipe used by contemporaries. Felix Austin and John Seeley in the production of fountains, vases and other forms of ornamental garden ware ‘warranted to stand the severest frost’.74 The existence of examples of Brucciani’s outdoor



Exhibitions Great and Small

65

sculpture is poorly documented, with only two works possibly accounted for in the published literature: Diane de Versailles (or Diana with a Stag) in Grove Gardens, Richmond upon Thames, and Diane de Gabies (or Diana Robing) in the gardens of Orleans House Gallery, also in Richmond upon Thames.75 Both works have been identified as composed of artificial stone and dated to the 1910s, when the Brucciani business operated as a limited company under Paul Joseph Ryan at 254–258 Goswell Road.

Plaster casts and production of ceremonial space From the late 1860s onwards Brucciani supplied statuary for temporary ceremonial or processional displays in public spaces, most often in London but occasionally elsewhere in Britain. In March 1863, Brucciani supplied plaster statues of Fame for the decorations erected in celebration of the marriage of the Prince of Wales to the Princess of Denmark (Figure 3.9). Displayed on temporary pedestals at the north and south approaches to London Bridge, they formed part of a sculptural scheme that included statues of the kings of Denmark and Danish

Figure 3.9  ‘The royal procession at the grand arch, London Bridge’, Illustrated London News (21 March 1863), 300–1. Wood engraving. Collection of the author.

66

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

warriors.76 The periodical the Builder praised the way in which London Bridge had been ornamented with sculpture and expressed the hope that the design would provide a model for the permanent decoration of bridges in London.77 The article went on to commend the effect of the bare plaster statues, which the author thought better resembled figures of Peace rather than Fame given their lack of trumpets, and recommended that their superior surface be replicated in plaster casts displayed indoors: The figures, which were only casts, were creditable to Mr. Brucciani, who supplied them with other sculptures. Left white, the shadows told in them in a manner to show that plaster, when quite new, has a particular advantage; one, however, which we are not certain would be admitted by sculptors as pertaining to it. It may seem by no means possible to preserve the white or render the plaster durable to the open air; but such casts might, we think, be hardened, so as to preserve the effect, and fit them to play an important part in the decoration of interiors, where casts which have been painted for their preservation certainly fail to produce anything like the same result.78

Almost exactly one year later, in March 1874 Brucciani was commissioned to decorate the route of the state entry into London for the Queen and the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh. The Morning Post gave details of the forthcoming event: ‘At the Oxford-circus will be a statue by Brucciani, holding a wreath in the right hand and a palm branch in the left; this will be placed in a handsomely decorated kiosk or temple.’79 The temple structure contained five busts by Brucciani: Queen Victoria, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh and the Prince and Princess of Wales, topped with a gilded dome and festoons of red and white flowers (Figure 3.10).80 The sculptures presented the appearance of permanence and materialized the symbolic power of the monarchy. They brought the behavioural regulation of the public art gallery and museum onto the streets, reshaping public space and acting as sentinels. Through descriptions and illustrations published in the periodical press, they also advertised and circulated Brucciani’s business – plaster busts of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had been produced by Brucciani since at least 1852 and the Prince and Princess of Wales since at least 1863.81 In the summer of 1874, a new sculptural scheme was unveiled at Leicester Square in the West End of London, designed by the architect Sir James Knowles and funded by the Member of Parliament Albert Grant.82 It included four stone busts of worthies associated with the surrounding area: the scientist Sir Isaac Newton by William Calder Marshall; the surgeon John Hunter by Thomas Woolner; the artist William Hogarth by Joseph Durham and the



Exhibitions Great and Small

67

Figure 3.10  ‘The procession in Oxford-Circus’ and ‘The procession at the foot of Regent-Street’, Illustrated London News (21 March 1874), 373. Wood engraving. Collection of the author.

founder of the Royal Academy of Arts Sir Joshua Reynolds by Henry Weekes. The centrepiece of the scheme was a Sicilian marble reproduction of the commemorative statue of Shakespeare in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, which had been installed in 1741 to the design of the architect William Kent (1685–1748) and carved by the sculptor Peter Scheemakers (1691–1781) (Figure 3.11). The York Herald, Orchestra, British Architect and London Reader attributed the marble reproduction to Brucciani.83 Elsewhere the work was ascribed to the Carrara-born sculptor Giovanni Giuseppe Fontana (c. 1821–93). The Illustrated London News noted that there had only been three months between the completion of the design and execution of the whole Leicester Square scheme and that ‘Shakespeare was only completed in the time

68

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 3.11 J. R. Brown and F. George Williams, ‘The Shakspeare [sic] fountain, Leicester Square’, Builder (4 July 1874), 567. Wood engraving. Collection of the author.

allowed by the indefatigable exertions of Signor Fontana, who worked literally day and night, assisted by skilled workmen brought over for the purpose from Italy and France’.84 It is possible that Brucciani was part of this group, being embedded in the close network of Anglo-Italian art workers operating in London during the second half of the nineteenth century.85 Fontana also exhibited a marble sculpture at the International Exhibition in 1862 titled Cupid Captured by Venus, so it is possible that the two men were known to one another as exhibitors of a similar age, background and profession.86 As a sculptor and regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy, it was Fontana who held the higher status and retained authorship of the marbles that were most often a collaborative endeavour.87 Although best known for his works in plaster, Brucciani had supplied reproductions in marble since at least 1852.88 Although the extent to which Brucciani was involved in the Leicester Square scheme is difficult to determine, it is clear that the conditions existed which would have made his involvement both possible and plausible. Brucciani continued to supply casts for ceremonial events, including the return of the Prince of Wales from India via Portsmouth Dockyard in May 1876. The York Herald described the scene: ‘At intervals in the elaborate decorations were placed groups of statuary, by Brucciani, of London, ordered expressly by



Exhibitions Great and Small

69

the Corporation for the ceremony.’89 Although the names of the statues were not recorded, it is significant that sculpture formed part of this homecoming ritual, which also included displays of flowers and evergreens, ancient arms and amour, trophies, Venetian masts, bunting and a triumphal arch.90

Decorating the Alexandra Palace (twice) On 24 May 1873, the Alexandra Palace opened as a vast new venue for public recreation and entertainment with an elaborate flower show and concert. Prominently situated on Muswell Hill in North London across 220 acres of parkland, the venture immediately drew comparisons with the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, which had opened two decades before. An article in the Musical World noted that on a clear day it was possible to see ‘the famous House of Glass on Penge Hill’ from the Alexandra Palace and remarked that both buildings were equidistant from Charing Cross, the former six miles to the south and the latter six miles to the north.91 The journal Le Follet described the new building as a ‘younger sister rather than rival to the Crystal Palace’ with ‘a family likeness’ to the building designed for the International Exhibition of 1862, the materials of which were used in the construction.92 Like the Crystal Palace, the Alexandra Palace also displayed a number of plaster casts by Brucciani, ‘who has ranged along the whole visa of the building copies of the finest sculpture that adorns the palaces and museums of Rome, Florence, and other cities’.93 Numbering approximately 130 casts, the statuary was arranged in four groups in the central transept, representing the four corners of the earth. Monumental versions of Melpomene and Thalia stood at either side of the stage in the theatre and the nave contained reproductions of the canon of antique sculpture. Canova’s Three Graces, Powers’ Greek Slave, MacDowell’s Eve, Thorvaldsen’s Mercury about to Kill Argus and Shepherd Boy and Gibson’s Venus were also displayed, as were a number of busts representing historical and contemporary figures (Figure 3.12).94 Only sixteen days after it opened, however, the Alexandra Palace was destroyed by fire. Just two years later, the Alexandra Palace had been rebuilt, and Brucciani once again furnished the interior with statuary. In March 1875, The Times reported on the forthcoming reopening and noted that the Exhibition Department had already received applications from ‘such well-known names as Mortlock, Elkington, Jackson and Graham, Doulton, Salviati, Chubb, Minton,

70

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 3.12 ‘Opening of the Alexandra Palace’, Illustrated London News (31 May 1873), 518. Wood engraving. Collection of the author.

Searle, Benson, and Brucciani’.95 Plaster casts were exhibited alongside art pottery, electroplate, furniture, glass and locks, most of the manufacturers of which had also exhibited at the Great Exhibition and formed associations with the South Kensington circle with which Brucciani was strongly associated. A reporter from the Morning Post lamented the commercial imperative of these ventures: It is indispensable in these gigantic enterprises that there should be a large admixture of the bazaar element – it is absolutely necessary to make it pay – a sordid consideration perhaps, but one which now enters into every speculation. There will be stalls for such exhibitors as … Signor Brucciani, and others. The groups of statuary which are to be seen lying pell-mell about the building at present are all sent by the latter exhibitor, and very beautiful they are.96



Exhibitions Great and Small

71

Once the Alexandra Palace had officially reopened to the public in May 1875, the Morning Post reported on the combination of casts from the antique and representations of contemporary political and religious figures: Everywhere the eye lights upon some sculptured bust or full-length figure – some representation of mythological nymphs or the head and shoulders of a poet, a soldier, or a statesman. These are all from the atelier of Signor Brucciani, who may be especially complimented upon the admirable likenesses of Lord Palmerston and the Archbishop of Canterbury.97

Populating the Alexandra Palace with this combination of classical and contemporary figures represented an established ornamental strategy, an elision of the past and present materialized in plaster (Figure 3.13). The prominent display of plaster statuary in this architectural setting also deliberately recalled its recent ancestors – the Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace and the International Exhibition – and functioned as a shorthand for the continuation of their form of rational recreation. Exhibitions great and small were crucial for the development of the Brucciani business. Before the Great Exhibition of 1851, Brucciani’s primary market

Figure 3.13  ‘The central hall, Alexandra Palace’, Illustrated London News (17 April 1875), 368. Wood engraving. Collection of the author.

72

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

was the emerging national network of Government Schools of Design. After 1851, the establishment of the Department of Science and Art and the ‘South Kensington System’ not only extended the provision of art and design education through Schools of Art, but also embedded public exhibitions and the formation of regional museums in its didactic programme. With the reconstitution of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham from 1854 and the International Exhibition of 1862, Brucciani benefited from unparalleled opportunities to display his practice in public. The 1862 Exhibition also presented opportunities to collaborate with other makers of sculptural reproductions. By working with Benjamin Cheverton, Copeland and Elkington, Brucciani extended his market by producing miniature reproductions offered in alabaster, Parian ware and electroplate which promised unprecedented fidelity and durability. These objects were perceived as not just useful exemplars for an educational market, but also decorative commodities for domestic display. While large exhibitions in London presented Brucciani’s work to the widest possible public, smaller regional exhibitions were no less important to the business and presented opportunities to deviate from the production of plaster casts of canonical classical sculpture, most notably with the waxworks of contemporary criminals commissioned for the ‘New Crystal Palace’ at the Teutonic Hall in Liverpool. In 1864, Brucciani applied the logic of the public exhibition to his new showroom and workshop at 40 Russell Street, Covent Garden. Styled the Galleria delle Belle Arti, the venture was advertised in the same terms as the exhibitions of which he had been a part during the 1850s and early 1860s. The commercial imperative of the operation was downplayed in favour of the educational benefits of displaying the greatest sculpture of antiquity and of the present together in one place, overcoming the historical, cultural and geographical distances between the works in their original incarnations. The second half of the nineteenth century also presented opportunities for Brucciani to exhibit his work outdoors in public parks and gardens and private horticultural settings. Although it was possible to display works in plaster outside for short durations in fine weather, works intended to be more durable required the use of artificial stone, a material innovation used widely for statuary and architectural ornament during this period. Brucciani offered to supply any object listed in the catalogue in this material, which can be considered a continuation of the longer tradition of displaying reproductions of classical sculpture in stone, bronze, lead and zinc in the gardens of country houses. Brucciani was also called upon to exhibit sculpture in urban settings in order to



Exhibitions Great and Small

73

construct temporary ceremonial spaces for royal processions, mostly in London but also in Portsmouth to welcome the Prince of Wales back from India. The next chapter will explore the functions of Brucciani’s plaster casts beyond the museum and public exhibition, firstly through an analysis of the practice of casting death masks and secondly by examining the role of casts in spaces of leisure and recreation, including dance halls, theatres, opera houses and private clubs. By attending to this expanded field of production and display, the extent to which Brucciani’s work permeated the cultural, educational and social spaces of nineteenth-century Britain will be revealed.

74

4

Death Masks and Dance Halls

The production and display of reproductions of canonical sculpture brought Domenico Brucciani and his firm considerable success in the spheres of art and design education, public exhibitions and museum collections, which built a respectable reputation for the business. But before this prestigious position was consolidated with the opening of his Galleria delle Belle Arti in 1864, Brucciani was vulnerable to the less reputable associations embedded in his practice as a formatore and the material of his profession. The aphorism ‘clay the life, plaster the death, bronze [or marble] the resurrection’, variously attributed to the sculptors Bertel Thorvaldsen, Antonio Canova and others, points towards the anxieties identified with plaster as the material most closely associated with death and more specifically with the production of death masks. These posthumous portraits were part of the stock-in-trade of the formatore and Brucciani was commissioned to make them throughout his career in London. The first part of this chapter traces these objects and their contexts from his earliest recorded works in 1833 to a death mask made after Domenico Brucciani had died and the firm was under new ownership. The selection includes the death masks of John Lambert (1833), an employee of a wine merchant close to Brucciani’s workshop; Edmund Kean (1833), a famous Shakespearean actor; Daniel Good (1842), a notorious murderer; the champion pugilist Ben Caunt (1861); the celebrated writer William Makepeace Thackeray (1863); the exiled Napoleon III (1873) and the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1882). The resulting objects occupied the liminal territories between life and death, portrait and document, relic and sculpture and were particularly susceptible to rejection by those who had commissioned them owing to their tendency not to sufficiently resemble the deceased in the minds of the living. The second part of this chapter investigates a related aspect of Brucciani’s business which also operated between the reputable and disreputable. His extensive and long-standing involvement in the decorative schemes of dance halls, theatres and other recreational spaces

76

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

continued the tradition of elaborate plaster ornament applied to domestic, public and religious interiors by Italian stuccatori from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, but as with the production of death masks, Brucciani’s work in this sphere collided with less salubrious forms of popular entertainment that had more in common with the ignoble spectacles of the sideshow. Operating at the margins of polite taste, Brucciani’s association with the death mask and the dance hall both contrast and intersect with the more socially and culturally elevated elements of his business and provide a richer account of his practice beyond the art gallery, museum and school of art.

Posthumous plaster heads and hands The very earliest references to Brucciani in the British periodical press offer reports on his production of posthumous plaster casts. In 1833, the Morning Post noted the sudden death of John Lambert, the principal clerk of a Covent Garden wine merchant owned by George Belshaw. The short article described the deceased as ‘a person of very considerable classical attainments, highly honourable feelings, and independent manners’ with a wide circle of respectable friends who requested that a death mask be made by Brucciani.1 It is not surprising that Brucciani was commissioned for this task given the close proximity of the two businesses in Covent Garden, but it does indicate that the firm was trusted to execute this delicate operation by a relatively esteemed client. Domenico Brucciani would have been around nineteen years old in 1833 and it is not clear whether it was he, or the then owner of the business Luigi ‘Lewis’ Brucciani. Nothing more is known of the production or reception of the resulting object, although it does demonstrate that the Brucciani business was engaged in the practice of making death masks during the earliest years of Domenico’s time in London. In the summer of the same year, the Bruccianis produced a death mask of a much more famous figurer, the actor Edmund Kean (1787–1833). Matthew Mackintosh recorded that the face and head were cast by Brucciani immediately after Kean’s death on 15 May 1833, and that ‘many thousand copies of it were afterwards sold through the streets by Italian image vendors’.2 Although the two death masks recorded as having been taken by Brucciani in 1833 depict men at opposite ends of the scale relative to their public profile, they shared strong professional associations with the streets surrounding the Brucciani workshop and showroom at 5 Little Russell Street in Covent Garden. Kean made his name



Death Masks and Dance Halls

77

at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and would end his career at the Covent Garden Theatre on Bow Street.3 The prolific collector of death masks Laurence Hutton (1843–1904) spoke of the confusion surrounding the mask of Kean: There are two alleged death masks of Edmund Kean in existence which do not in the least resemble each other. One is reverently preserved in the rooms of a now degenerate dramatic social club back of the bar of the Harp Tavern near Drury Lane and Covent Garden Theatres in London. Tradition hath it that Kean was a member of this institution, and the mask hangs over the chair in which he is said to have consumed glass upon glass of whiskey after the play and even between the acts. … The other mask – my mask – has been accepted as the real Kean by Sir Henry Irving, Edwin Booth, and other lights of their profession. … My own belief is that mine is Kean after death and that the other is perhaps Kean from life.4

The mask in his possession – now in the collection of Princeton University Library – has no provenance, so it is not possible to determine whether it was made by Brucciani or was one of the ‘many thousand’ pirated copies referred to (Figure 4.1).5 Just under a decade later in 1842, it was reported that Dr John Elliotson (1791–1868) had commissioned a phrenological head to be cast from a recently executed murderer, the ironically named Daniel Good (Figure 4.2).6 Elliotson was a prominent phrenologist who, in the words of the medical historian Roger Cooter, possessed ‘an impish compulsion continually to shock respectable

Figure 4.1 Brucciani, Death mask of Edmund Kean, 1833. Plaster. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

78

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 4.2  Phrenological head of Daniel Good after execution, undated. Plaster. 310 × 190 × 220 mm. Courtesy of the Mayor’s Office of Policing and Crime.

society and continually to test the threshold of toleration of his peers in the medical profession’.7 In this instance, it was not Brucciani who took the mould, but his employee and fellow Italian Bartholomew Casci (likely to have been anglicized from Bartolomeo).8 It was noted that Casci was at liberty to make copies of the head and to sell them from his home at 3 Harford Buildings, Drury Lane, and through the nearby Brucciani business at 5 Little Russell Street.9 The subject, Daniel Good, was a coachman convicted of the brutal murder of his mistress Jane Jones in Roehampton near Putney on 3 April 1842.10 Extensively reported across the country in highly sensationalized and detailed accounts, the case caught the popular imagination and immediately entered the canon of early Victorian violent crime. When Good was apprehended in Tunbridge Wells and brought before Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on 18 April 1842, the Standard reported that ‘at an early hour a dense crowd assembled in front of the office, and never since the time of [James] Greenacre’s examination have we witnessed such an intense interest of the part of the public to obtain a glimpse of the wretched miscreant’.11 The extent to which phrenology had penetrated the popular discourse is clear in descriptions of Good as having a ‘swarthy complexion and dark visage. … His forehead is of moderate size and exceedingly wrinkled; his hair and whiskers are jet black … his sunken small black eyes appeared exceedingly piercing’.12 Illustrations of Good proliferated in the popular press, with lurid imagined depictions of the murder and its aftermath. The concern with the appearance of Good was so great that even the otherwise respectable,



Death Masks and Dance Halls

79

middle-class Illustrated London News was compelled to provide an engraving of Good, which even included a facsimile of the attorney’s signature attesting to the fidelity of the likeness (Figure 4.3). The accompanying article gave an apologetic rationale for the publication of the portrait: It is not our intention to disfigure the pages of the ‘Illustrated London News’ with engravings, especially connected with crime and its consequences; we do not profess to be of the ‘raw head and bloody-bones’ school, nor do we desire to encourage the taste of such as are only gratified with pictorial representations of murders and murderers; but in the case of the man, now counting the few last hours that separate him from eternity, the crime for which he will suffer, as well as the revolting circumstances attending it, give a more general interest to the affair than ordinary offences of this character possess. Many of our readers may be disciples of Lavater, and to them we shall for once, in such a case, afford an opportunity of exercising their judgement upon the countenance of this man.

Figure 4.3  ‘Execution of Daniel Good’, Illustrated London News (21 May 1842), 32. Wood engraving. Collection of the author.

80

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain We are assured the likeness is a correct one, and as such we give it, though not quite sure if we ought not to apologize for its appearance in this paper.13

The reference to Lavater revealed a different set of priorities. Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) was associated with the revival of physiognomy which predated the emergence of phrenology. Although both are now considered pseudo-sciences, Lavater was credited with attempting to establish physiognomy as a legitimate science based on empirical observation, whereas the practice of phrenology was quickly appropriated as a form of popular entertainment.14 Photography was not yet the established medium of either criminal proceedings nor the reporting of them in the periodical press, so the image of Good was wide open to the interpretation of the wood engraver. This slippery image could only be fixed by the production of a death mask, interpreted as the incontestable index of the face. But just as the indexicality of photography would later be called into question, the status of the plaster death mask as an unmediated impression was also challenged. As Marcia Pointon has noted, ‘The objects that result from these imprints are very far from natural; they involve … extensive process and agency, and they bear the marks of both.’15 There appear to have been multiple agencies at work on the production of the posthumous phrenological head of Good. Despite protesting his innocence throughout the proceedings, Good was found guilty and hanged on 23 May 1842 at Newgate Prison. James De Ville (1777–1846) donated a cast of the head of Good to the Phrenological Society in Edinburgh in December 1842.16 De Ville was a successful plaster figure maker in London who amassed a large collection of phrenological heads and skulls of both humans and animals, using them as comparative objects to inform the content of his public lectures on practical phrenology.17 De Ville had collaborated with Elliotson in the past, even taking a life cast of his head with his improved method of rapid mouldmaking, but it is not clear if De Ville’s head of Good was derived from a mould he had made himself.18 The matter is further complicated by another account in the Phrenological Journal of an anti-phrenological lecture given at the Adelphi Theatre in London by John Brindley, who used a cast of the skull of Good to ‘demonstrate the utter fallacy of the phrenological hypothesis’. It was reported that the cast of the skull was taken by Brindley himself, ‘a few minutes after the execution, in the presence of Dr Elliotson and other medical gentlemen’.19 In contrast, the Illustrated London News reported that ‘Dr. Elliotson afterwards took a cast of the murderer’s head in the presence of several medical and scientific gentlemen’.20 Elliotson is the common point of reference among these



Death Masks and Dance Halls

81

otherwise conflicting accounts, perhaps pointing towards the possibility of the production of several different moulds among the various parties with a strong interest in materializing the cranial measurements of a ‘popular’ murderer. In an address to the Phrenological Society, Brindley’s position was strongly contested by the pupil and close friend of Elliotson, Edmond Sheppard Symes.21 From the cast of Good’s head, Symes deduced ‘his poor intellect, his propensity to theft, cunning, lying, debauchery, and extreme violence, – counterbalanced only by great affection for his child, and by general respectfulness to his superiors’.22 But of course all these characteristics had been determined long before the phrenological callipers had provided the measurements of Good’s head, with the plaster cast deployed as the unassailable material evidence of criminality. The only identified phrenological head of Good is difficult to attribute to a particular maker. Belonging to the Crime Museum of the Metropolitan Police Service at New Scotland Yard (also known as the ‘Black Museum’), the head is not displayed as an object with an author but as an instructive subject forming part of a collection of death masks of prisoners executed at Newgate. The Crime Museum is not open to the public, but functions as a teaching collection for the use of the police service.23 As the Brucciani firm built a secure and respectable base of institutional and individual patrons during the 1850s, they moved away from the production of phrenological heads. Although they ceased the manufacture of death masks of executed criminals, they did not stop making posthumous casts altogether, but moved from the infamous to the famous. In 1861, Brucciani cast the death mask of the famous pugilist Ben Caunt (Figure 4.4). Laurence Hutton acquired a copy for his collection and rationalized its inclusion alongside ‘the profoundest of England’s philosophers’ in the following terms: ‘He was a leader in his own profession, and at one time, perhaps, the best-known man in all England. … His head is certainly a strong one, and, in a phrenological way, he was better than many of the men among his contemporaries who did better things.’24 In recollections published a decade later, Hutton was more disparaging about Caunt’s status and questioned the reason a death mask was made: Another mask by Brucciani was that of Ben Caunt, the professional prizefighter and one-time champion of England, although why Brucciani thought the bruiser worthy of a death mask I never quite understood. Mr. Caunt, with a broken nose, retired from the slugging business in the early forties and kept a respectable sporting public-house called ‘The Coach and Horses’ in St. Martin’s Lane, London, until he was knocked out forever in 1861.25

82

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 4.4  Brucciani, Death mask of Ben Caunt, 1861. Plaster. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

The reproduction of the posthumous head of this ‘bruiser’ from the ‘slugging business’ can be considered a transitional moment in the manufacture of death masks by Brucciani. In common with the death masks of John Lambert and Edmund Kean made in 1833, the mask of Caunt represented a popular figure with strong local connections. Just as Lambert and Kean held professional associations with the Covent Garden area, as the quotation recorded, Caunt ran the Coach and Horses public house in St Martin’s Lane in Covent Garden until his death, and it is possible that Brucciani and Caunt were known to one another as local business owners if not personal acquaintances. Caunt’s death having come so shortly after the international prizefight between Tom Sayers and John Carmel Heenan discussed in the previous chapter, the death mask may also have been produced to capitalize on the momentum generated by this incredibly popular spectacle and the high stock of the pugilist in the contemporary imagination. Although celebrated figures across social strata, the figure of the boxer was not universally revered and the sport was condemned in some quarters as a brutal anachronism.26 As Brucciani became more successful, he moved away from making death masks of divisive or marginal men in favour of those forming the top tier of cultural and public life, the first of whom was the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. On Christmas Day of 1863, Brucciani was summoned to the home of the recently deceased Thackeray by his doctor Sir Henry Thompson, to make a death mask and mould of the right hand (Figure 4.5). At this point, the Brucciani firm



Death Masks and Dance Halls

83

Figure 4.5  D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Death mask and right hand of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1908. Plaster. 216 mm × 164 mm. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

had expanded to a workforce of twenty-five men and five boys and had enjoyed recent critical acclaim at the International Exhibition of 1862. Their reputation made them the clear choice for such a delicate and prestigious commission as the last portrait of the great author, which would go on to serve as the model for posthumous artistic representations in both two and three dimensions. In September 1891, almost three decades after Thackeray’s death, Thompson sent one of the casts of the right hand to the American playwright John Augustin Daly with the following explanatory note: On the morning on which my poor friend Thackeray was found dead in his bed, I was sent for to see him. He had evidently been dead for some 4 to 6 hours and I went to Brucciani, a famous artist here at the time, in cast-production from the body, to take one each of his face & of his right hand. By some mischance the former was not agreeable, none of the charm of expression so attractive during life, & it was rejected. But the hand is a portrait & recalls to me very strongly the character of the original. Please accept it, in the little case, as a mark of my great respect for one who so highly appreciates the master & his writings & who possesses those invaluable autographs.27

84

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

The rejection of the cast produced from the mould taken directly from Thackeray’s face is particularly significant. Thompson blamed ‘mischance’ for the distressing discontinuity he perceived between the living man and the dead mask, but the failure of resemblance, of fidelity to the subject, was perhaps not a failure in the manufacture of the object but in its conception as the most faithful possible portrait. How could it not be so when the mould had been formed through direct, unmediated contact with the man himself? It appears that Thompson, even as a man of medicine, had not taken the transformation of the lifeless musculature into account, nor the effect of the weight of the plaster for the mould. Phrenology had led its followers to believe that the head contained and communicated the inherent character of the person in a fundamental and unassailable way, which perhaps contributed to the sense that these pallid, sunken features constituted a betrayal of the achievements and stature of the man and his work. The proliferation of photomechanical portraiture also worked against the success of the cast, having quickly been established as the medium of truth in the popular, scientific and artistic imagination. Early adopters and developers of emerging photographic technologies in Britain set the tone for the ways in which photographic images were understood. William Henry Fox Talbot and Robert Hunt conceptualized the images that resulted from their experiments as self-making or ‘autogenic’, which for Steve Edwards resulted in ‘a powerful homologous displacement of human agency from the scene of production’.28 In addition to the shared language of the imprint and the index noted by Pointon, the displacement or erasure of agency was common to the plaster cast as well. The formatore was positioned as merely a technical facilitator of a process in which the meeting of the body and the wet plaster was seen to be all that was required to ensure an accurate resemblance, a three-dimensional document of the dead.29 Comparing an albumen print of Thackeray in the last year of his life to the death mask, it is clear that so much of what were considered the crucial signifiers of the man were missing from the cast (Figure 4.6). The characteristic curls of white hair, distinctive small spectacles and the clothing of his station were absent. The fragmented plaster right hand, however, could operate as an autonomous object and was not subject to the same degree of physical transformation after death. The casts of Thackeray’s face and hand did not enter the published catalogue of the Brucciani company, although the collector Laurence Hutton recalled that to his surprise he was able to purchase a mask of Thackeray directly from the Galleria delle Belle Arti in 1890, after having visited the Harp Tavern close by to view the disputed death mask of Edmund Kean referred to at the beginning



Death Masks and Dance Halls

85

Figure 4.6  Ernest Edwards, William Makepeace Thackeray, c. 1863. Albumen cartede-visite. 85 mm × 54 mm. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

of this chapter. Hutton described the anguish caused to Thackeray’s family on learning that the death mask had been made available for sale (Figure 4.7): It was very distressing to Thackeray’s mother and to his daughters, who supposed that the mould and the casts from it had been destroyed as was their strongly expressed wish. Mrs. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, the novelist’s surviving daughter, finding to her surprise in 1890 that it still existed and had come into my collection, was good enough, after some natural hesitation, to permit me to have it engraved for my book and later to give it a home at Princeton.30

In 1890, Domenico Brucciani had been dead for a decade and the business continued under new ownership, including fellow Anglo-Italian formatore Joseph Louis Caproni (1845–1900), who was trading under the name D. Brucciani in 1891.31 It seems possible that agreements that may have existed to prevent the

86

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 4.7  D. Brucciani, Death mask of William Makepeace Thackeray, 1863. Plaster. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

reuse of moulds and public sale of the resulting death masks during Brucciani’s lifetime were either reneged upon or unknown to the new proprietors. These later editions purchased by Hutton shared a distinct form that was quite different to earlier iterations. Hutton’s death mask of Thackeray has a shallow profile, visible seams from the piece mould and generic oval frame, whereas earlier casts included the neck, ears and in some cases the whole head, both as a source of phrenological or empirical information and as a demonstration of the skill of the formatore in handling the difficult areas of the ears and hair.32 Other examples of Thackeray’s right hand exist too. The son of Henry Thompson, the Egyptologist Herbert Thompson, bequeathed one to the Fitzwilliam Museum, which entered the collection after his death in 1944. Once the most prestigious of objects, presented in a case of maroon leather and silk, it was initially rejected by the director who decided that ‘it should remain with the rest of the discarded objects belonging to the Sir Herbert Thompson bequest for altruistic disposal through the Treasurer’. The version held by the National Portrait Gallery is different again, having been presented by Paul Joseph Ryan, the managing director of D. Brucciani & Co., Ltd. in May 1908. The correspondence between Ryan and Director Lionel Cust suggests that the casts had been made especially for the Gallery from the original moulds, which might account for their superior condition. Brucciani received a much more positive reception for his death mask of Napoleon III, made just four hours after his death at Chiselhurst on 11 January 187333 (Figure 4.8). An account of the process published in the Daily News



Death Masks and Dance Halls

87

Figure 4.8 D. Brucciani, Death mask of Napoleon III, 1873. Plaster. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

provides one of the most detailed descriptions of the practice of making a mould for a death mask from a public figure. The article also revealed the real anxieties associated with the process, as expressed by the wife of Napoleon III, Eugénie, during the visit by Brucciani and his unnamed assistants: The body of the Emperor was arranged on the little camp bedstead which stands at the side of the larger one he usually slept on, and on which the surgical operations had been performed, and the Emperor breathed his last. But before the mask was taken, the affection of the Empress, which would have fain falsified the verdict of the physicians, suggested that a mirror should be placed near the Emperor’s mouth to test whether or not a spark of life remained. A small hand mirror was sent by the Empress for the purpose, and applied according to her Majesty’s desire. But, as was expected, the glass remained untarnished by a breath, and so the Empress was informed. But here solicitude went further, and she sent two quills, with the desire that they might be inserted in the nostrils prior to the pouring on of the plaster, as is the custom when a mask is taken from a living model. On a respectful intimation being conveyed to the Empress that such an arrangement was unnecessary, she waived her desire, and permitted Signor Brucciani to proceed with his work, and the preparations for the impression of the whole of the head and upper part of the breast of the Emperor were quickly made. The massive moustache was carefully waxed and brought down over the points of the mouth towards the chin, and the imperial was also waxed and pressed close to the chin. These and other minor arrangements resulted in the production of a most faithful likeness.34

This extract also illustrates the kinds of interventions that were necessary to ensure the resulting death mask looked as much like the living face as possible.

88

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

The treatment of hair was particularly important in this respect, it being crucial to flatten and wax into shape so as not to trap it in the plaster mould and to reconstruct a recognizable arrangement of the facial hair that was so strongly associated with the public image of Napoleon III. The result was really only an approximation, given that it would have been almost impossible to cast the form of the moustache as it projected outwards from the face. Brucciani had only partially solved the problem by smoothing the moustache flat across the cheeks, coming to a point at the level of the jawbone. It is quite possible that in addition to this preparatory work, the resulting mould was also subject to ‘improvement’ by the formatore. Pointon has noted that it was not unusual for the matrix for a death mask to be ‘amended’ before positive casts were made.35 But as these practices threatened to undermine the indexical character of the death mask and its legitimacy as a phrenological specimen, there is little documentation to evidence the extent to which a given mask had been altered during the process of its production. In any case, in contrast to the reception of the mask of Thackeray, the death mask of Napoleon III was received with positive notices in the periodical press. The Northern Echo declared that ‘the countenance was remarkably calm, as if in sleep’ and the Daily News similarly reported that ‘the cast since taken from the mould shows the Emperor’s face to be very round and full, and marked with a most peaceful expression, and it does not bear a trace of pain’ and further that Domenico Brucciani himself might be commissioned to execute a posthumous bust in marble based on the death mask.36 The suggestion that the Empress might choose Brucciani to complete the prestigious marble bust turned out to be erroneous, as the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux had already received the commission in 1871 from the son of Napoleon III, although the work was not finished until after his death37 (Figure 4.9). It was initially reported that Carpeaux would use the Brucciani death mask to complete the portrait, although Édouard Papet has argued that it is unlikely the cast was ever used for this purpose.38 Despite the apparent rejection of the death mask by Carpeaux, the plaster cast still attracted praise as an object of historical and artistic interest on its own terms. In 1910, a correspondent from the illustrated magazine the Graphic provided an account of the Brucciani business under the title ‘The Duplication of Genius: Where the Copies of Famous Statues Are Made’. The reporter drew attention to the production of death masks as ‘one special department of their work’, encouraging the reader to ‘compare that of Napoleon III, taken by them at Chislehurst, with that of the Great Napoleon, taken by the doctor at St. Helena’39 (Figure 4.10). The implication was that the Brucciani cast



Death Masks and Dance Halls

89

Figure 4.9 Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, ‘Napoléon III (1808–73), Emperor of the French’, 1873. Marble. 521 × 368 × 289 mm. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Figure 4.10 ‘Three famous death masks’, Graphic (19 November 1910), 807. Photograph. Collection of the author.

was far superior in execution and detail, most evident in the handling of the ears and hair with the difficult undercuts of the former and challenging texture of the latter, coupled with its tendency to become embedded in the mould. The closest testimony on Brucciani’s approach to the production of posthumous casts came from his former ‘chief moulder’ Luigi Finili.40 He gave an account of the process of making a death mask to a reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette in 1892:

90

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain We go to the room where the dead person lies as soon as we are applied to by the family. The sooner this is done after the body is cold and laid out the better, for once life is gone a day makes all the difference to a face. The first part of our work is to rub oil all over the face and pomade into the hair (and beard, in case of a man). Then the soft plaster is put on, and in a very short time, when has got a little warm, we take the mask off, and our work is done. … As you can imagine, it is never a very pleasing task.41

Finili went on to articulate one of the reasons his clients chose to only have a cast made of the hand: ‘Many people prefer to have a model of their dead friend’s hand instead of the face. They do not care to let anybody touch the face, but they do not seem to mind so much about the hand.’42 Finili was careful to explain that the process of making a mould from the face should not, when carried out with care and skill, leave a discernible trace on the body of the deceased. Two years after Domenico Brucciani died in 1880, the business that retained his name was commissioned to produce what would be their last significant death mask, when William Rossetti called on them to cast the head and right hand of his brother, the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) (Figure 4.11). Although it had been recorded that Dante had not wanted a death mask to be made, William went ahead with the procedure as, in his words, ‘a thing which ought not to be omitted for men of a certain degree of mark’.43 But as in the case of Thackeray, the outcome of the process was not the serene and noble portrait that had been envisaged. William Rossetti gave the following magnanimous

Figure 4.11  D. Brucciani and Co., Death mask of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1882. Plaster. 330 mm high. © National Portrait Gallery, London.



Death Masks and Dance Halls

91

verdict: ‘These casts were taken with no less skill than that which the Brucciani firm always command; but it is a fact that the head proved extremely disappointing to all of us, and seems barely to suggest what my brother was like.’44 The deforming tendency of the death mask caused William Rossetti to reject the cast of the face of his brother as an authentic portrait. He wrote: From a certain point of view a cast admits of no dispute; but from the point of view of likeness realizable by the eyes and the feelings of survivors, I am obliged to allow that this cast proves a total disappointment; I would hardly have ventured to say that it represents my brother, and will definitely affirm that it misrepresents him. Even the dimensions of the forehead seem stinted and contracted.45

Of all the features of the face that were subject to the distorting effect of the plaster, the dimensions of the forehead seem least likely to suffer, having less soft tissue and a more robust bone structure to support the weight of the plaster mould. It is possible that William’s comments were also loosely informed by a phrenological understanding of the dimensions of the head and he was lamenting the failure of the cast to embody and communicate the perceived genius of his brother. He appeared to struggle to reconcile the truth value of the cast with its failure to resemble his kin. The subjectivity of resemblance is demonstrated by the reaction of the novelist and playwright Hall Caine (1853–1931), writing about his own copy of the Rossetti mask, who felt in complete contrast that ‘the upper part of the head is very noble, but the lower part is somewhat repellant’.46 Caine was present when Rossetti died and provided an account of the appearance of his friend: His face was perfectly placid, the convulsive expression was gone, even the tired look that had clung to him in sleep as the legacy of the troubled years, quite smoothed away. … Shields spent the morning in making a pencil sketch of him, finding it a painful task, and weeping most of the time. Later in the day a plaster cast was taken of his head, and also of his small delicate hand. I still possess both the drawing and the cast.47

Shields was Frederic Shields, fellow artist and friend of Rossetti, whom he had first met in 1864. Shields received one of the casts of the hand and inscribed a curious couplet on the base: ‘D.G. Rossetti’s cunning right hand, that clasped mine in friendship once.’48 William Rossetti wrote that he had requested the drawing, ‘and it was a truly self-sacrificing act of Shields, the most high-strung and susceptible of men, and my brother’s devoted friend, to whom such a task was a wrench

92

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

indeed’.49 The result, which was reproduced by Shields for Christina Rossetti and Frederick Richards Leyland, was all that the death mask could not be (Figure 4.12). William Rossetti declared Shields’ work to be the definitive posthumous portrait of his brother: ‘The details here are very precise, and, to anyone who desires to know what were the facial mould and type which Rossetti had come to at the close of his life of nearly fifty-four years, they furnish an irrefutable document.’50 It is not surprising that the family and friends of Dante Gabriel Rossetti preferred the drawing to the plaster cast; the expression is peaceful, the curls of the hair and beard have not been flattened by waxing and the weight of wet plaster, there is tenderness and sensitivity, interpretation and omission. An article about the collection of Laurence Hutton published in the Chicago Tribune in 1904 concluded that ‘plaster or metal casts of the hands of the world’s great men and women are now regarded as more accurate evidences of their characteristics and peculiarities than death masks or examples of handwriting’.51 Pointon tied the tradition of casting hands more specifically to the body of work left by the deceased and its ability to transcend the mortal body of its maker: ‘Casts of hands are tied into the convention that the oeuvre confers immortality after the last mortal breath.’52 The hand also retains an affective quality even after its dislocation from the body and its translation into an inert material. To hold the hand is a gesture of intimacy and fellow feeling that can be to some degree re-enacted with a plaster surrogate. There is the physical equivalence of hand in

Figure 4.12  Frederic James Shields, ‘The dead Rossetti’, 1882. Chalk on paper. 337 × 279 mm. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, USA / Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial / Bridgeman Images.



Death Masks and Dance Halls

93

hand. But to hold the plaster head or face, particularly a face utterly transformed by death and material transmutation, was quite a different prospect. Of course a disembodied hand of any sort can be strange and unsettling to behold, but the disembodied head brings with it the symbolic violence of decapitation that has not been neutralized by the conventions of the portrait bust. Coupled with the sense that the death mask failed to embody the intellect and imagination located in the heads of Thackeray and Rossetti, it is clear that the death mask could not easily enter the category of portraiture, as that which both physically resembles and reveals something of the interior life of the subject. The hand, however, could successfully stand in for the achievements of the writer and the artist. It was the instrument of their creativity and not simply an index of death. Brucciani’s production and reproduction of posthumous plaster moulds and casts illustrates both the trajectory of his career from the local to the international alongside the wider histories of memorialization and popular science.

The places of plaster and the spaces of rational recreation Just as the posthumous plaster cast sat between ghoulish spectacle and noble memorial, Brucciani’s decorative schemes for dance halls, theatres and gentlemen’s clubs oscillated between the respectable and the disreputable, with the proprietors of these venues often keen to capitalize on Brucciani’s prestigious associations and, crucially, the capacity of plaster casts to define and redefine the spaces in which they are displayed. The common aspiration of these ventures in the second half of the nineteenth century was to enter the mutable category of ‘rational recreation’. According to the sociologist Peter Bailey, the drive to provide didactic or otherwise wholesome leisure activities for the working classes beyond the public house ‘proceeded from a basic humanitarian sympathy with the plight of the urban masses’, while at the same time promoting temperance, diffusing middle-class values and guarding against the perceived threat from radical political movements.53 Unlike their role in the public exhibitions and their explicitly pedagogic function for art and design education, in the following contexts plaster casts were displayed less as exemplary object lessons and more as part of a complete decorative scheme designed to define or redefine the meaning of the space and the social activities and interactions which took place within it. In 1846, Brucciani supplied plaster casts for the new ‘Grand Casino’, a conversion of the Adelaide Gallery that had opened as the National Gallery

94

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

of Practical Science in 1832.54 Published in 1849, Sketches of London Life and Character provided an evocative description of the National Gallery of Practical Science during the early years of its existence: Fearful engines revolved, and hissed, and quivered, as the fettered steam that formed their entrails grumbled sullenly in its bondage; mice led gasping subaqueous lives in diving-bells; clock-work steamers ticked round and round a basin perpetually, to prove the efficacy of invisible paddles; and on all sides were clever machines which stray visitors were puzzled to class either as coffee-mills, water-wheels, roasting-jacks, or musical instruments. There were artful snares laid for giving galvanic shocks to the unwary; steam-guns that turned bullets into bad sixpences against the target; and dark microscopic rooms for shaking the principles of teetotalers, by showing the wriggling abominations in a drop of the water they were supposed daily to gulp down by pints.55

But by 1843, The Times reported: ‘We were somewhat surprised to witness at this place last night a series of exhibitions, we cannot say entertainments, which bear no sort of relation to science either in practice or theory, and which are certainly neither adapted to enlighten an audience nor confer much respectability on the establishment in which they were displayed.’56 A singing confederate, a flea circus and the inhalation of nitrous oxide particularly caught the attention of the reporter and led him to conclude that ‘it is surely too much to call the building in which such scenes are exhibited the “Gallery of Practical Science”’.57 The transition from a space of rational recreation towards popular entertainment was reflected in the repurposing of its exhibits: ‘The oxy-hydrogen light was slily applied to the comic magic-lantern; and laughing gas was made instead of carbonic acid. By degrees music stole in; then wizards; and lastly talented vocal foreigners from Ethiopia and the Pyrenees. Science was driven to her wit’s end for a livelihood, but she still endeavoured to appear respectable.’58 The contemporary commentator went on to describe the continued decline of the last vestiges of its original incarnation and lamented that ‘between the two stools of philosophy and fun, Science shared the usual fate attendant upon such a position – she broke down altogether’.59 Once the pretence of scientific endeavour had been abandoned, the space was entirely given over to music and dancing and renamed the ‘Grand Casino’. Despite the new designation it was not a place for gambling, and Brucciani’s plaster casts were brought in to symbolically renegotiate the terms of the reconceptualized space. The Morning Post praised their inclusion in the decorative scheme and described the statuary as ‘tastefully arranged in the orchestra, the vestibule, and other



Death Masks and Dance Halls

95

parts of the building’.60 The deployment of reproductions of antique sculpture was clearly part of an attempt to maintain and even extend the respectability and reputation of the former National Gallery of Practical Science in its new guise. They were intended to show that culture had not left the building with the steam engines and scientific apparatus. In some ways, the plaster casts could also be interpreted as sentinels with a potent symbolic function to preserve order; the balance between the preservation of decorum in public and the provision of social mechanisms for releasing the pressures of the working week was seen as critical in Britain during the 1840s. Fear of popular uprising associated with the emergence of Chartism fused with continued anxieties over the unrest in Europe in the wake of the revolutions in France in 1830 and 1848. Published in 1849, an account of the Grand Casino made explicit reference to the perceived propensity of the French to riot and by extension, the importance of a ‘wholesome institution’ like the Casino to act as a diversion for those whose discontent might otherwise manifest in violence: Individuals who are cooped up all day, on high stools or behind counters, must have some method of setting free their constrained energies. In France they despoil palaces and upset thrones, when they are out on the loose; in England, formerly they stole knockers and smashed lamps; and they also got wonderfully drunk. … Bad ingredients there are, without doubt, in its composition – but so there are in every public assembly; and the question is, whether these objectionable particles might not be worse occupied than in listening to a capital band, sucking up most inoffensive sherry cobblers, or flying round and round in a polka or waltz, until they have hardly got an atom of wind in their lungs, or a leg to stand upon?61

The plaster casts supplied by Brucciani also acted as mediators between the classes, providing familiar decorative terrain for the aristocracy. Before the Great Exhibition of 1851, the only places that displayed collections of plaster casts of antique sculpture were country houses, academies of art, schools of design and learned societies, none of which were particularly publicfacing. Just before the opening of the Great Exhibition, Brucciani designed and executed an ambitious interior scheme for Astley’s Amphitheatre in Lambeth, an equestrian proto-circus founded by Philip Astley in 1773. A coloured aquatint published in 1808 depicts the interior as a restrained and almost austere space in muted hues of peach and sky blue. Even accounting for the possibility that the print has faded over time, the contrast between this depiction and a print produced after the Brucciani refurbishment is striking.

96

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

The Era provided an account of its appearance shortly after the completion of the redecoration: The front panels of both tiers of boxes have been painted of a beautiful pomona green, relieved with white, and in the centre of each appeared convex mirrors, surrounded by highly ornamental gilded frames, and supported by other mirrors in the girandole style, between which, and around the whole area, was a profusion of equestrian figures in bas relief, illustrative of the triumphs of Alexander the Great.62

Brucciani continued his association with public exhibitions, popular science and interior decoration by supplying plaster statuary to Dr Kahn’s Museum and Gallery of Science at 3 Tichborne Street, London, during the winter of 1857.63 Set up in 1851, Kahn’s Museum occupied several locations in the west end of London, including 315 Oxford Street, 316 Regent Street and 232 Piccadilly.64 Having initially secured positive notices from the medical press, in 1853 the museum attracted the opprobrium of the Association Medical Journal, which ran an article titled ‘Indecent Exhibitions’ alongside a letter of complaint by W. B. Kesteven. It was reported that ‘the wax models of Dr. Kahn are very beautifully executed; and in a collection destined for medical students or others engaged in scientific pursuits, most of them might be exceedingly appropriate; but as mere sights for the general public, many of them can only be called filthy – and, as spectacles for women, outrageously abominable’.65 As a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Kesteven described his horror at finding that the section of the museum that was ostensibly restricted to medical men was accessible not only to laymen but also to women on payment of an extra shilling. He wrote: ‘Such an indiscriminate admission of the male public to see wax models of the male and female organs of generation under so many pathological and physiological conditions, I hold to be demoralizing; but when it becomes a still more grave offence against public morals, when we find that females are admitted to view the same models!’66 The relaunch of the Museum at 3 Tichborne Street in 1857 provided an opportunity to shift the collection away from the potentially salacious and corrupting wax models towards the display and demonstration of scientific and philosophical apparatus in the manner of the National Gallery of Practical Science (otherwise known as the Adelaide Gallery, converted into the Grand Casino in 1846) and the Royal Polytechnic Institution. Kahn announced the forthcoming opening of the new building in the Saturday Review, in which he stressed the ‘enormous outlay’ on the reconstruction of the building, which was



Death Masks and Dance Halls

97

now ‘decorated and fitted it up in a most appropriate manner’ with the reassuring presence of the plaster casts by Brucciani.67 The embedded assumption behind the inclusion of reproductions of classical statuary in the entrance hall was that they would materialize and legitimize the status of the building, its content and purpose as deserving the appellation ‘Museum’. The Era reviewed the new incarnation of the Museum in positive terms, as ‘judiciously arranged with those various objects of science and art for which the establishment has been so deservedly noted’.68 Although Kahn claimed the Museum was now ‘an institution of an entirely new character’, the controversial anatomical collection was not only retained but ‘considerably augmented’.69 Richard Altick has argued that the elements of the collection that had caused the most offence were still very much in use and served as a way for Kahn to advertise his treatments for venereal diseases, ‘conveniently situated on the prostitutes’ beat’.70 Despite some initial success in diverting the attention of the periodical press and the medical profession away from these activities through the relocation and reframing of the Museum, the brief period of respectability did not last. By 1862, Kahn had sold the lease to 3 Tichborne Street, although the Museum continued to operate under his name.71 The medical community saw through claims that the collection was simply a noble and educative venture and the ‘so-called Dr. Kahn’ was accused of quackery and of being ‘nothing more originally than a German barber’.72 Kahn and his associates were eventually prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act in 1873 and the Museum was broken up.73 Brucciani continued to supply casts to places of leisure and pleasure, including the Hall by the Sea in Margate, a concert venue in a converted railway station that had been built by the London, Chatham, and Dover Company, but never used. It was converted by the hoteliers and caterers Felix William Spiers (1832–1911) and Christopher Pond (1826–81) in 1866.74 Representations of the Hall published during its opening year show over a dozen plaster figures set in niches against the wall and accompanying the orchestra on stage. Oval portrait profiles in low relief are hung on the walls between the statuary, although the identities of the portraits are not revealed in contemporary descriptive accounts. The periodical the Era concluded that ‘the entire effect of the Hall is greatly enhanced by these examples of the Fine Arts’.75 The display of statuary in what had been intended as a railway station might have been incongruous, were it not for the interchangeability of the glass and iron architecture popularized by the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace.

98

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Some of the final commissions Brucciani completed were connected with theatre, opera and classical music. In a report on the Lyceum Theatre in London published in 1870, the Atlantic Monthly noted, ‘here the notorious Madame Vestris once displayed that leg of faultless symmetry, which was modelled, in compliment to its beauty, by Brucciani’.76 Lucia Elizabeth Vestris (1797–1856) was born Elizabetta Lucia Bartolozzi in London and became a celebrated singer, actress and theatre manager.77 It was not, however, Brucciani who first cast her legs, if he ever cast them at all. In 1831, Thomas Papera was charged with stealing a number of plaster casts from his cousin, ‘the celebrated Italian modeller’ James Papera. He had noticed plaster casts of Madame Vestris’ legs for sale ‘in the shop-windows of various artists about town’ and reported that ‘it was impossible these casts could have been made by any other artist, because he was the only person to whom Madame Vestris had ever “stood” to have a cast taken of her leg, and from that cast he had made one mould or model, and only one, and that was always kept with the greatest care under lock and key’.78 He went on to claim that they could not have been imitated, ‘for so beautiful and perfect was the symmetry of the original’, nor could the casts have been stolen, because ‘they were too rare and valuable an article to be kept ready made in the ordinary way of common shop-legs’.79 James claimed that Thomas had secretly made new casts from the original moulds to supply the great public demand and The Times later reported that ‘a leg was found in Mr. Brogeotti’s shop, in Russellstreet’.80 It is possible that this was Luigi Brugiotti (c. 1818–88), who traded in Leather Lane, Holborn. Although Brucciani’s principal premises were in Russell Street, Covent Garden, he was also associated with 1 Leather Lane which might explain the conflated reference.81 Thomas Papera was found not guilty and it was reported that ‘some of the jurors expressed dissatisfaction that the leg of the lady was not produced, and the learned counsel said it was the only thing they wanted to see’.82 The episode was satirized in print by the caricaturist William Heath, who depicted a lecherous gentleman exclaiming his desire for the plaster legs but lamenting the cost of acquiring both. If Brucciani ever made or sold plaster casts of Madame Vestris’ legs, either legitimately or pirated from Papera, they did not enter the published catalogues, which is unsurprising given that they were principally aimed at schools of art and public museums. In 1875, the Hanover Square Club was refurbished at a cost of £40,000 by Mr H. E. Tyler, with the grand staircase ‘ornamented with statues by Brucciani’.83 Demolished in 1900, the building had opened as the Queen’s Concert Rooms (also known as the Hanover Square Rooms) a century earlier and had hosted



Death Masks and Dance Halls

99

concerts by Paganini, Liszt, Haydn and J. C. Bach. An account published in 1878 described the alterations to the building: The large room has been preserved unaltered, as far as possible; but in other respects the building has undergone a thorough transformation, and has been raised a couple of storeys in height; the additional floors being devoted to chambers for such members as may wish to make the club their home, either permanently or temporarily. … The grand staircase, entirely of stone, is ornamented with statues holding jets of gas, and at the top is a large skylight, with an inner light of coloured glass.84

Brucciani offered sixty-one different ‘Figures for Gas Lights, Lamps, &c.’ in the catalogue published in 1864, from 1 to 6 feet in height and from both antique and contemporary sources.85 Brucciani also sold statuary to regional theatres in Britain. In Leeds, Brucciani furnished the New Theatre Royal, opened in September 1867 on the site of a modest late eighteenth-century theatre on Hunslet Lane on the south side of the River Aire, just outside the centre of town.86 The interior was described by the Builder in the following terms: The front is lofty, and is Italian in style. There are three doors in it, and they are sheltered from the weather by a permanent awning. The floor of the vestibule or crush-room is laid with encaustic tiles. The walls are coloured to harmonize with them, and stencil ornaments relieve the surface. Over the marble fireplace a large mirror is suspended; by the sides of the chimney-piece are a couple of niches, coloured blue, containing statues representing Tragedy and Comedy, holding lamps in their hands. Several pieces of classical statuary are also places in niches on the stairs. A broad flight of stone steps, ornamented by a gilt balustrade, leads to the upper saloon. The statuary has been supplied by Signor Brucciani.87

The theatre suffered a catastrophic fire on 28 May 1875, as did the local rival Royal Amphitheatre the following year on 2 March 1876.88 As the proprietor of the New Theatre Royal, John Coleman, could not afford to rebuild, the proprietor of the Royal Amphitheatre, Joseph Hobson, took the opportunity to quickly rebuild his theatre as the New Theatre Royal and Opera House, for which Brucciani supplied plaster casts of Melpomene and Thalia.89 These two casts were available as gas lamps in three different sizes of 1, 3 and 6 feet high.90 Just two weeks before his death on 10 April 1880, the Era praised a posthumous marble bust ‘by the well-known sculptor, Signor Brucciani’ of the Hungarian-German opera singer Thérèse Tietjens (1831–77) commissioned

100

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

by Major O. H. Goodenough of the Royal Artillery Band.91 The Era further announced that the work ‘has been made under the personal supervision of the sister and niece of the prima donna, and has been pronounced by them to be excellent, both as regards fact and figure’.92 The resulting bust is untraced, but that it was commissioned as an original work of sculpture and received as such provides an indication that during his later years Domenico Brucciani had shifted the balance of his own practice and public identity, which is confirmed by the Census Returns of England and Wales in 1871, where for the first time he identified his occupation as ‘Artist’.93 In October 1881, eighteen months after Domenico Brucciani had died, the Irish journalist John Augustus O’Shea (1839–1905) published the second part of an article in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News titled ‘Reminiscences of a Ringmaster’, in which he relayed the recollections of an anonymous (and almost certainly fictitious) ‘Seer of the Sawdust’.94 It concluded with the following anecdote: Tony [Twitters] and his brother Tim opened a gigantic hippodrome not a hundred miles from town, and gave orders to have it decorated up to the nines. As a neighbour of theirs, who had a music-hall, had it ornamented until it seemed a regular hall of statues, they commissioned Brucciani, the Italian imageman, who lived hard by Drury-lane, to do them a big thing in likenesses of the heathen gods and goddesses. He did them some beauties in plaster of Paris and terra-cotta, reproductions from the antiquay, and sent round his workmen to put them up. Very chaste and elegant they looked; but after the workmen left, Tim said to Tony: – ‘This will never do, they ain’t half showy enough, we must have those naked figures gilded all over – looks more gorgeous, likewise decent’. ‘Agreed’. said Tony, and they were covered with gold-foil. Brucciani came round a few nights afterwards to witness the performance and inspect his masterpieces. As soon as he cast eye of the statues, he threw an attitude, and spread-eagled his arms. ‘Dio mio!’ he exclaimed, ‘if Michael Angelo were to see that!’ ‘What, what! ain’t you pleased?’ said Tony. ‘It’s a profanation of art’, answered the Italian. ‘Tut, tut, Brucciani’, said Tony, ‘bring your pal Mike round any night he likes – there’s a box always at the service of you and friends, and my brother Tim will make his mind easy in three threes!’95

Although the article is no doubt a comical fabrication, that Brucciani was featured as a character demonstrates the extent to which he had established a public identity and a strong association with the decoration of theatres. It also provides an insight into the compromises faced by the business when it dealt



Death Masks and Dance Halls

101

with commissions outside the spheres of museums, art galleries and schools of art, where the primary motive was decorative rather than didactic. There were certainly precedents for such ostentatious and incongruous surface treatments; in 1867 Brucciani had provided statuary in ‘burnished gold’ for the Agricultural Hall in Islington.96 Opened in 1862 chiefly for the display of livestock, the large exhibition hall also hosted popular public spectacles including the famous French tightrope walker Charles Blondin (1828–97), accompanied in 1863 by the ‘Three Guards’ Bands, Barrett Minstrels, Master Shapcote the Infant Drummer … Evergreens and statuary by Brucciani’.97 In the production of death masks too, the Brucciani business vacillated between popular and high culture, moving between an actor and a murderer, a pugilist and a novelist, an emperor and an artist. Accordingly, the status of practice and resulting objects was contingent on the reputation of the subject and the purpose for which the mould was made. Even when the subjects were highly regarded, as in the cases of William Makepeace Thackeray and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the resulting death masks were rejected as portraits for failing to adequately index the living person and their achievements in the eyes of those closest to them. But despite these rejections, neither Brucciani nor his team of formatori were ever considered responsible for the dissonance caused by these perceived failures of resemblance. The critical reception of Brucciani’s plaster casts of classical and contemporary statuary emphasized their accuracy and truthfulness, but the mimetic fidelity of the death mask was contested. The practice itself was also loaded with both noble and macabre associations, from the tradition of religious bodily relics to the nineteenth-century preoccupation with phrenology and the pathology of criminality. Although never a central component of the Brucciani business, the production of death masks embedded Brucciani in the cultural and scientific milieu of Victorian Britain. His proximity to the famous and infamous and responsibility for materializing their faces and hands after death in turn secured Brucciani a public profile beyond the art gallery, museum and school of art.

102

5

Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

Alongside schools of art and design and temporary public exhibitions, art galleries and museums emerged as important markets for plaster casts in Britain, North America and Australasia during the second half of the nineteenth century. The collections which survived beyond the twentieth century have become crucial sites of scholarship, with two of the largest and most significant held at the Museum of Classical Archaeology, University of Cambridge Museums, and at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford.1 With a lineage drawn from the first Government School of Design, through the Great Exhibition and its afterlife at the Museum of Manufactures and on through the ‘Albertopolis’ of South Kensington, the plaster cast collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London occupies a central position in the literature and in the public imagination.2 As a collection that has remained relatively intact and visible to the public, the objects displayed in the Cast Courts (constructed as the Architectural Courts in 1873) continue to attract the most attention and scholarship.3 Domenico Brucciani and his business were strongly associated with South Kensington and the present chapter articulates the importance of this long relationship, while also demonstrating Brucciani’s significance to other national and regional museum collections in Britain, Australasia and North America.

The British Museum In 1849, Brucciani wrote to the secretary of the British Museum to request that he be supplied with plaster casts of objects from the museum’s collections at below the price at which they were offered for sale to the public; a request the Trustees refused.4 During this period (1839–57) the British Museum contracted William Pink (c. 1797–1857) to make casts from and for the collection. As Ian

104

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Jenkins has noted, it was under Pink’s tenure that the museum first published lists of casts available for purchase.5 Brucciani complained that he could not charge more than the prices published by the museum, nor could he purchase them below the published price in order to make a profit. The situation was resolved eight years later, after Pink died in 1857 and Brucciani was engaged to replace him as formatore to the British Museum. Brucciani signed Articles of Agreement with the Trustees of the British Museum on 18 July 1857.6 He was required to maintain suitable, approved premises for the storage of British Museum moulds at his own expense. The Trustees agreed to a single payment of £500 towards the removal of the moulds from the museum, for suitable shelving and for arranging, numbering and cataloguing the moulds. He was to be paid an annual fee of £130 for his duties. Brucciani was also responsible for keeping the moulds in good condition and insured to the value of £4,000 against fire damage. It was made clear that the moulds under Brucciani’s custodianship and those he would go on to make would remain the property of the Trustees and they had the authority to enter and inspect Brucciani’s premises at any time. Brucciani was also provided with a space in the British Museum for the production of new moulds, should the museum request them. The agreement stated that the first cast from each new mould should be delivered to the Trustees no more than three months after the completion of a mould, where they would join the casts stored beneath the Elgin Room. Brucciani was permitted to make as many casts as he saw fit from both new and existing moulds, although the prices at which he was allowed to sell them were regulated by the Trustees. The agreement could be terminated by the Trustees should Brucciani not meet his obligations; otherwise it was designed to last until his death.7 Brucciani’s working relationship with the British Museum was not without problems. In 1861, Charles Thomas Newton (1816–94), Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities, accused Brucciani of having left oily stains on the surface of a cornice from a mausoleum after having used gelatine to make the mould. As a result, Brucciani was banned from using gelatine to make moulds from objects in the collection without permission from the Trustees, who urged Brucciani to exercise greater caution in future. By October 1857, all the moulds had been transferred to 196 High Holborn, premises Brucciani rented especially for the purpose of storing the British Museum moulds, as stipulated by the agreement.8 Their location had the benefit of proximity both to the museum and to the Italian enclave in Holborn and its supply of formatori. A new price list was issued in 1857 too, but with minimal changes to the version published



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

105

the previous year under William Pink’s tenure.9 Brucciani continued his work for the British Museum until his death in 1880; the next chapter articulates the continued connections between the museum and the business after this point.

The South Kensington Museum Brucciani’s most long-standing professional association was with the South Kensington Museum. Beginning with its antecedents, the Government School of Design at Somerset House, the Great Exhibition at Hyde Park and the Museum of Manufactures at Marlborough House, and continuing through the various associated governmental bodies – notably the Department of Science and Art and the Board of Education – the Brucciani business would later come to an end as a department of its next incarnation as the Victoria and Albert Museum. The period between the opening of the South Kensington Museum in 1857 and the completion of its Architectural Courts in 1873 was particularly intensive for the development of the plaster cast collections. The following case studies from the 1860s illuminate the context for the growing collection through the curatorial programme and scholarship of John Charles Robinson; the comparative activities of other firms of formatori; Henry Cole’s instigation of the Pórtico de la Gloria commission and the augmentation of the collection by the ‘Convention for promoting universally reproductions of works of art for the benefit of museums of all countries’. Born in 1824, John Charles Robinson studied painting in Paris from 1844 before returning to take up the position of art master at the Hanley School of Design from 1847. When the national network of Schools of Design were reconfigured by Henry Cole in 1852, Robinson was appointed Teachers’ Training Master and dispatched to the regions to communicate and reinforce changes to the curriculum. By August 1853, Robinson had been redeployed as superintendent of Art Collections at Marlborough House, which during this period housed the Central School of Practical Art and the Museum of Ornamental Art under the new Department of Science and Art. Both institutions completed the transfer to the South Kensington site in 1857, where Robinson continued to operate until his position as Art Referee was abolished in early 1868 after relations had drastically deteriorated between Robinson, Cole and the Board of the Museum.10 It was during his brief engagement as Art Referee between 1863 and 1868 that Robinson reinforced his legacy through an extensive programme of acquisitions

106

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

and scholarship, although he was resentful of what was then perceived to have been a demotion from the curatorial position he had held for over fifteen years. As a result of the collecting agenda pursued by Robinson in this capacity, Anthony Hamber has described him as ‘the principle architect of the South Kensington Museum’s medieval and Renaissance collections’.11 Similarly, Timothy Stevens and Peter Trippi have characterized him as ‘the canon’s second key builder … accelerating the drive to acquire large numbers of older artworks’.12 During the 1850s, Robinson extended the holdings of Renaissance sculpture with works of variable significance. Robinson argued that reverence for the works of classical antiquity was to be encouraged and maintained, but not at the expense of other historical periods. He expressed the hope that an encyclopaedic collection of sculpture could be formed between the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum, with the former holding the objects of antiquity and the later works from the medieval period onwards. For Robinson the question was not primarily what to collect, but how to construct a comprehensive collection in an increasingly competitive international market. He offered the following solution: ‘A systematic collection of mediæval and renaissance sculpture … should comprise more than the actual marbles and terra-cottas; besides the original specimens, it should embrace a well-ordered series of auxiliary illustrations, especially of plaster casts.’13 The crucial term here is ‘auxiliary’. Having articulated his support for the collection and display of reproductions, Robinson went on to warn against the unregulated proliferation of casts in this context, arguing that reproductions could not embody authentic historicity, nor could they claim complete technical fidelity to the source material.14 Henry Cole remained a strong advocate for both established and emerging technologies of reproduction, and the plaster casts commissioned during the 1860s and 1870s were some of the most ambitious and monumental. The display of large objects was made possible by the construction of the North Court, which was built as an extension to the South Kensington site between 1860 and 1862. The Guide to the Art Collections of the South Kensington Museum of 1868 offered the following description of the new gallery: This lofty and spacious building is specially appropriated to the exhibition of Sculpture and Architectural Models and Casts of large dimensions, designed for erection in the open air, or in large halls or churches. Many of the most beautiful of these objects are, so to speak, incorporated into the building; the decoration here is much simpler than that of the South Court.15



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

107

Designed by Francis Fowke, the North Court had a self-supporting glass and iron roof constructed against the existing buildings to the north and west. The gallery had been built with an experimental system of blinds, heating and ventilation, of which Robinson is known to have disapproved. It was this space, however, that provided the stage for at least the partial realization of Robinson’s plan to illustrate the history of sculpture and architectural ornament from medieval to modern. In this context Trecento sculpture was principally represented by two plaster casts produced by Giovanni Ferdinando Franchi: the pulpit by Nicola Pisano from the Baptistery in Pisa and the pulpit by his son, Giovanni Pisano, from the Cathedral. Franchi, like Brucciani, was a native of Lucca. Unlike his rivals, Franchi, alongside his son Giovanni Antonio, diversified beyond the production of plaster casts into the manufacture of electrotypes and fictile ivories. After his death in 1874, the firm was absorbed by Elkington and Co. of Birmingham, principally known for their mass production of electrotypes. The Journal of the Society of Arts described the particular merits of Franchi’s methods: In 1846 he was rewarded by this Society for the production of casts in fictile ivory. He was the first person in this country that cast from gelatine composition moulds and he carried his process to a high state of perfection a year or two later, and perfected the means of casting from the round in moulds without seams, and thus laid the foundation for the production of the elaborate electro deposits richly undercut and in relief, for which he afterwards became so celebrated. … His casts in plaster are unrivalled; two of the specimens are in the South Kensington Museum, and consist of a reproduction of the pulpits from the Cathedrals of Pisa and Florence.16

The plaster cast of the pulpit of Nicola Pisano was purchased for the South Kensington Museum from Franchi for £116 13s. 4d in 1864.17 It was described in the Guide to the Art Collections of the South Kensington Museum of 1868 in the following terms: The sculptor was the father of Giovanni Pisano, and is generally regarded as the earliest of the distinguished series of Italian sculptors of the Middle Ages. He is believed to have studied the numerous remains of classic sculpture which existed in Pisa, and traces of the results of this study are discovered in several of the figures in the panels of this pulpit, which strongly resemble those on antique bas-reliefs still in the Campo Santo in that city.18

108

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

It is clear that Robinson’s, and by extension, Vasari’s interpretation prevails here, although the work of Pisano appears to have been positioned as late medieval rather than proto-Renaissance. As was the case in many catalogue descriptions of this period, there is no mention that the viewer encountered a reproduction. The didactic use value of the cast was thought to be equivalent to, if not greater than, the object from which the cast was derived and so their presence in the sculptural scheme of the North Court was not remarkable, nor was it considered a lack. It is only through comparison with the source that it is possible to identify the limitations of the plaster cast, particularly the uniformity of colour and surface that cannot replicate the particular characteristics of different materials and specifically in this instance, the range of stones used in the columns. The second pulpit in the collection was purchased from Franchi for £320.19 Acquired in 1865, this plaster cast reproduced the work of Nicola Pisano’s son, Giovanni. This work was only very slightly larger than the cast of the pulpit by his father that had been purchased the previous year, and yet it cost the Museum almost three times as much. The Guide to the Art Collections of the South Kensington Museum of 1868 summarized the difficulties associated with reproducing this pulpit, causing the additional expense: This pulpit suffered great damage from a fire which destroyed the roof of the cathedral in the year 1596. The panels were then deposited in the crypt of the cathedral; many other portions were removed to the arcades of the Campo Santo, and the remainder were incorporated into the new pulpit, a much smaller and plainer structure, which is still in the cathedral. Casts of the various portions were taken for the Museum in 1864 and 1865 by Mr. Franchi, with the permission of the authorities of the cathedral, and thus, more than 250 years after its destruction, a nearly accurate re-production of the pulpit was set up in the Museum.20

The description seems to attribute the reconstruction to Franchi, having cast and reassembled the dispersed fragments. This narrative did not, however, detail the complexities of the reconstruction. Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post recounted a slightly different version of events in 1872: A famous pulpit in marble, the work of Giovanni Pisano, and specially referred to by Vasari, had (the Architect says) disappeared from the Cathedral of Pisa, and was supposed to have been destroyed in the fire which happened there in the year 1595. A wood-carver, named Guiseppe Fontans, has, however, succeeded in disproving the supposed destruction. After a long search he has found nearly the



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

109

whole of the parts of the pulpit; some amid heaps of rubbish in the churchyard, others beneath the portico and in the vaults. All the statues, bas-reliefs, and capitals have been found; nothing, in short, is missing, but the entablature and the base. The work is to be immediately put together, made good, and replaced.21

This account came slightly closer to the accepted biography of this object conveyed by the Victoria and Albert Museum today, which is that the firedamaged pulpit was taken apart in 1602, with a new version incorporating elements of the old in place by 1627. It was Giovanni Fontana who set about reconstructing the pulpit in wood, which he completed in 1872. But the Franchi cast was not derived from the original fragments, nor was Fontana’s copy, but a version produced by a group of sculptors whose interest had been stimulated by Fontana, which had been completed by 1865. It was from this copy that the plaster cast for the South Kensington Museum was produced, despite the appealing apocryphal narrative that Franchi had been responsible for the rediscovery and reanimation of the complete work. So it might be argued that the plaster cast of Giovanni Pisano’s pulpit is an object more representative of nineteenth-century material culture than fourteenth century. It also disrupts the discourse of authenticity that persists around the reproduction of art, because in a sense, there is no unique original with which to compare the copy, as the pulpit that stands in the Cathedral in Pisa is itself an early twentieth-century reconstruction by Peleo Bacci. This accounts for the disparities between the two: There are nine relief panels in the 1926 version, as opposed to seven in the cast. The panels that form the beginning and end of the narrative protrude from the rear, separated by wooden doors. The staircase is substantially different, because both the 1865 and 1872 versions reused arch-brackets from the pulpit itself, which have been restored to the 1926 version. The order of the columns and figures has also shifted and a circular base added. The pulpit was described by Conway in his book Travels in South Kensington, published in 1882. He wrote that ‘the reproduction has been so perfect – even to the toning of the marble (as it seems to be) by age – that no one could imagine it to be a reproduction. … This noble work justifies the ancient fame of Pisa as the home of sculpture.’22 There was no sense here that the viewer would encounter anything other than a direct transcription of the work of Giovanni Pisano. The illustration that accompanied this description appears to have been based on a stereoscopic photograph taken by Davis Burton in 1868, which misrepresents the conditions of display in the time that the work was published, as the Architectural Courts (later the Cast Courts) had been open since 1873.

110

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Under Henry Cole the South Kensington Museum ordered production of the largest and most ambitious commission of Brucciani’s career. The Pórtico de la Gloria (Portal of Glory) from the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (Figure 5.1). For Malcolm Baker, ‘It illustrates more vividly than any other cast both the prodigious technical skill involved in making such reproductions and the ambitious aims of Henry Cole, John Charles Robinson and others in forming the collection.’23 As Baker noted in his short article published in 1982, the casting of the Pórtico occupies a unique position both in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum and more particularly for the existence of Brucciani’s vivid first-hand account of the journey to Santiago and the process of making the monumental cast written to Cole in February 1867. Brucciani’s journey to Spain aboard the ‘Murillo’ began on 2 July 1866 from the Hermitage Pier in Wapping and was expected to last for six days. It was not without incident: The start of the journey was inauspicious as their vessel collided with a barge, causing damage to one of their lifeboats. On continuing the journey past Gravesend, a severe storm set in and Brucciani’s workmen all succumbed to seasickness, which caused the captain to alter the route and stop at Portland for two nights. Brucciani’s men were already close to mutiny and wanted

Figure 5.1  Isabel Agnes Cowper, ‘Cast of Portico de la Gloria; archivolt of central doorway, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella in Spain’, 1868. Albumen print. 330 × 270 mm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

111

to abandon the trip; it was ‘only by great entreaty and promises’ by Brucciani that they agreed to continue. After a couple of days of smooth sailing, they found that they were hundreds of miles off course for their intended port of A Coruña. A fire in the hold had to be extinguished as they crossed the Bay of Biscay and just as land was sighted, a boat approached informing them that as they were arriving from a country affected by cholera, they were to be quarantined in a lazaretto at Vigo for ten days before they could proceed. Brucciani described the lazaretto as ‘abounding with loathsomeness and wretchedness. In this den of defilement were incarcerated, and compelled to herd with some of the worst specimens of humanity. … Every now and then we were compelled to submit to the very unpleasant process of fumigation which is very debilitating in its effect.’ After a disagreement with the captain of the ‘Murillo’ about the proposed onward route, Brucciani decided to continue from Vigo over land rather than take to the sea again. All their materials were, however, still aboard the vessel, which carried on to A Coruña as planned. ‘Trouble followed trouble’ when the port authorities refused to allow the plaster to be unloaded as it was feared to be combustible, a suspicion Brucciani described as ‘ignorantly puerile’. It took another three days for the material to be tested and declared safe and the team finally reached Santiago on 27 July 1866, three weeks later than scheduled. On his arrival, Brucciani found that permission to commence the casting of the Pórtico had been withdrawn because the architect who was to supervise the work had died. On learning of this latest obstacle, Brucciani wrote that he was ‘almost in despair, feeling assured that I should now have to retrace my way back to England without having fulfilled my important mission’. Brucciani secured a meeting with the archbishop through ‘an influential gentleman at Santiago’. Brucciani explained their methods and purpose, and the archbishop gave his consent for the work to begin, but approval was also needed from the ‘Fabrachiero’ at the Cathedral. After ‘long and tedious explanations’ and another delay of five days, the production of the moulds was finally allowed to proceed. Brucciani had assured the authorities that no harm would come to the Pórtico, as he intended to use a technique that would not require the mould to come into direct contact with the stone. It is likely that Brucciani and his formatori employed a clay-based moulding technique, from which plaster positives were made on site, leaving no plaster piece moulds for reuse. Despite his guarantees, Brucciani and his workmen were held back by constant interference and concern that the cathedral would come to harm. To assuage the concerns of the local population, they decided to exhibit the plaster casts inside the cathedral. Brucciani issued

112

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

the following advertisement on 13 October 1866: ‘By permission of His Grace the Archbishop and the Canons of the Cathedral of Santiago the Public will be admitted to view the copy of the Gloria on this day from 10.30 to 3.30.’ The exhibition proved popular and the numerous visitors ‘shewed their approbation by their repeated exclamations of gratification’. Brucciani oversaw the packing of the casts on their journey to England and understandably decided not to return with his men by sea but over land.24 Although the cast had an overwhelmingly positive reception, a lone sceptical voice emerged in an article published in the English Illustrated Magazine in 1911. The cast was an odd target for the author’s opprobrium; having been made fortyfive years earlier, it was not exactly a topical subject: At the South Kensington Museum there is a complete cast of this work, made at the expense (£2,300) of the British Government by Brucciani in 1868, which by no means conveys the glory of the original. It is simply misleading, and I advise no one to go to see it. How absurd it is to drag out of its surroundings, even in the form of a replica, a piece of architecture the beauty of which so largely depends upon its local association and the old-time sacred atmosphere of its location! At South Kensington it is place with its back to a wall, on the spaces of which, between the arches, are crowded wood carvings of other periods, and the forest of other antiquities in the same room absolutely prevent the Gate being seen except in penny numbers. The people of Santiago complain that when the necessary casts were made much of the colouring of the Gate was removed in the moulds. The model in South Kensington is of a deadly depressing whitewash hue!25

Shortly after Brucciani wrote his account of the casting of the Pórtico de la Gloria in 1867, a scheme that Henry Cole had pursued for the preceding three years was set in motion that would change the relationship between Brucciani and the South Kensington Museum. The development of an encyclopaedic cast collection was dependent on the cooperation of continental institutions, recognized in the annual report of the Department of Science and Art in 1864, which recorded that ‘considerable progress has been made in the arrangements for the systematic interchange of reproductions of works of art with foreign Governments’.26 In 1867, the ‘Convention for promoting universally reproductions of works of art for the benefit of museums of all countries’ was signed by fifteen European princes and noblemen, who had been lobbied by Henry Cole during the International Exhibition in Paris during the same year, at which a second plaster cast of Giovanni Pisano’s pulpit was displayed in the British section alongside



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

113

casts, electrotypes, photographs and chromolithographs, suggesting that it was not the Italian craftsmanship of Pisano through Franchi that was promoted, but the South Kensington model of museum practice. The text of the Convention is worth reproducing in its entirety: Throughout the world every country possesses fine Historical Monuments of Art of its own, which can easily be reproduced by Casts, Electrotypes, Photographs and other processes, without the slightest damage to the originals. a. The knowledge of such monuments is necessary to the progress of Art, and the reproduction of them would be of a high value to all Museums for public instruction. b. The commencement of a system of reproducing Works of Art has been made by the South Kensington Museum, and illustrations of it are now exhibited in the British Section of the Paris Exhibition, where may be seen specimens of French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Swiss, Russian, Hindoo, Celtic and English Art. c. The following outline of operations is suggested: I. Each Country to form its own Commission according to its own views, for obtaining such reproductions as it may desire for its own Museums. II. The Commissions of each Country to correspond with one another and send information of what reproductions each causes to be made, so that every Country, if disposed, may take advantage of the labours of other Countries at a moderate cost. III. Each Country to arrange for making exchanges of objects which it desires. IV. In order to promote the formation of the proposed Commission in each Country and facilitate the making of the reproductions, the undersigned Members of the reigning families throughout Europe, meeting at the Paris Exhibition of 1867 have signified their approval of the plan, and their desire to promote the realisation of it. The following Princes have already signed this Convention: Great Britain and Ireland. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. Prussia. Frederick-William, Crown-Prince of Prussia. Hesse. Louis, Prince of Hesse. Saxony. Albert, Prince royal of Saxony. France. Prince Napoléon (Jérôme).

114

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Belgium. Philippe, Comte de Flandre. Nicolas, Duc de Leuchtenberg. Sweden and Norway. Oscar, Prince of Sweden and Norway. Italy. Humbert, Prince royal of Italy. Amadeus, Duke of Aosta.

One of the implications of the successful initiation of the Convention for the South Kensington Museum was a pressing need for new galleries to accommodate the escalation of the plaster cast collection. The resulting Architectural Courts both allowed the collection to expand and existing monumental casts such as Brucciani’s Pórtico de la Gloria and the reproduction of Trajan’s Column, cast by Monsieur Oudry in Paris in around 1864, to be displayed in their entirety for the first time (albeit in two pieces in the case of the latter).27 The influx of casts made by European formatori diminished Brucciani’s role at the South Kensington Museum, although the associated Department of Science and Art continued to rely on their services to supply plaster casts to regional museums and schools of art for the rest of the century.

The National Portrait Gallery Between the years 1869 to 1885, the National Portrait Gallery was temporarily accommodated in galleries belonging to the Royal Horticultural Society on Exhibition Road in South Kensington. From 1869 into the mid-1870s, Brucciani produced plaster casts for the National Portrait Gallery, which were used to make electrotypes for display by Elkington and Co. of Birmingham.28 Eighteen of these electrotypes remain in the collection and they reproduce tomb effigies of English monarchs.29 The first to be made were taken from the gilt bronze tomb of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York from Westminster Abbey (Figures 5.2 and 5.3). Writing to Director George Scharf in July 1869, Brucciani promised ‘perfect casts’ of the two for the sum of £10 10s.30 A partially written letter, perhaps a draft, from Scharf to the dean requested permission to make moulds from the effigies, which it was noted had been recently cleaned.31 Permission was presumably granted, as Brucciani wrote to the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in November 1869 to report that the plaster casts were ready.32 The Trustees must have been sufficiently pleased with the work as the casts were purchased in December 1869.33 While Elkington were responsible for the production of the final electrotype, Brucciani’s contribution was not erased: The electrotypes



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

115

Figure 5.2  Elkington & Co., cast by Domenico Brucciani, after Pietro Torrigiano, ‘King Henry VII’, 1869. Electrotype. 864 mm high. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Figure 5.3 Elkington & Co., cast by Domenico Brucciani, after Pietro Torrigiano, ‘Elizabeth of York’, 1870. Electrotype. 864 mm high. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

116

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

were marked ‘D. Brucciani/LONDON.//ELKINGTON. & Co. FOUNDERS’. The association between Brucciani and Elkington dated back to at least 1853 with the production of the reduced copies of Theseus noted in Chapter 3, so it is possible that there was a sense of joint endeavour if not outright collaboration between the two firms. As would become the pattern for the majority of the collection of electrotypes, the effigies had not been cast whole, rather they were cropped at the waist. Photographs taken in 1885, shortly before the National Portrait Gallery moved to Bethnal Green, show the truncated electrotypes displayed upright on a low shelves against the walls rather than the horizontal orientation of the effigies from which they were derived. It is possible that this was a strategy design to allow more direct comparison with the painted portraits displayed alongside, treating these objects more as subjects than sculptures. It is equally likely that this was not a curatorial but a practical approach to hide the hollow reverse of the electrotypes and preserve an illusion of solidity. The exceptions, reproduced whole and displayed in their intended orientation, were Robert, Duke of Normandy, King Edward II and Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban. The electrotype of the Duke of Normandy was reproduced from a ‘curious’ wooden effigy in Gloucester Cathedral in 1877 and cost substantially more than the halved reproductions at £25 10s. for Brucciani’s work and £65 10s. for Elkington’s.34 Like the unusual sitting effigy of Bacon, the Duke of Normandy seems to have been chosen as a full-size reproduction because it did not conform to type (Figure  5.4). The surviving correspondence suggests that the various churches and cathedrals that housed the tomb effigies readily gave permission for Brucciani to take moulds, as long as no damage were inflicted by the process and the work was supervised.35 This body of work provides a rare insight into the ways in which Brucciani was able to access the source material for the production of plaster moulds, which is so often absent in the archive.

The Natural History Museum Although Brucciani’s stock-in-trade was the manufacture and supply of plaster casts of sculpture, the firm was also called on to cast objects for the natural history collections that were becoming discrete museums in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Chief among them was the Natural History Museum in London, which remained under the control of the British Museum even after



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

117

Figure 5.4 Elkington & Co., cast by Domenico Brucciani, after unknown artist, ‘Robert, Duke of Normandy’, 1877. Electrotype. 1778 mm long. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

the completion of their geographically separate building in South Kensington, which opened to the public in 1881. In his capacity as official formatore to the British Museum, Brucciani received requests to reproduce objects such as fossils and other geological specimens. Most notably in 1866 the Trustees of the British Museum allowed Brucciani to supply the American naturalist and collector Henry Augustus Ward (1834–1906) with sixteen casts from the natural history collection.36 Brucciani made the moulds at his own expense, which included a lower jaw of a Belodon; the upper and lower jaw of a Pliosaurus; two feet of a rhinoceros; one foot of a hippopotamus and a fossilized bird.37 In 1862, Ward had founded Ward’s Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, to supply museums and educational institutions in the United States with plaster casts. Ward’s Catalogue of Casts of Fossils from the Principal Museums of Europe and America published in 1866 listed the lower jaw of a Belodon for sale at $8.00 and referenced the existence

118

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

of the original at the British Museum, along with numerous other specimens from the same source.38 Ward travelled to Europe several times in the 1860s to make purchases for this purpose and he was in London when Brucciani wrote to Panizzi at the British Museum in March 1866 to request permission to make the casts. There was no mention in the minutes or correspondence that Ward intended to reproduce these casts commercially on his return to the United States and given the extensive legal agreement drawn up between Brucciani and the British Museum in 1857 on his appointment as formatore, it seems unlikely that the Trustees would have agreed to such a scheme without payment of the copyright fees charged to Brucciani when the firm sold reproductions of objects from the British Museum. The moulds and casts of natural history specimens from the collection of the British Museum were ordered to be transferred to the new Natural History Museum building in South Kensington in June 1880, not long after Domenico Brucciani had died, which caused the Trustees to reconsider the accommodation of the entire collection of plaster moulds and casts which had been under Brucciani’s custodianship.39 In 1901, D. Brucciani and Co. received a particularly challenging commission from the Natural History Museum on the instruction of Professor Ray Lankester (1847–1929), the director between 1898 and 1907. The commission was to make a plaster cast of the living body of German strongman Eugen Sandow (1867–1925), who had become famous across Europe and North America for having sculpted his body to resemble the ideal muscular forms of classical statuary. An illustrated account of the process of manufacture and display was published anonymously in the Strand Magazine and the writer of the piece began by stating that they were not surprised that the museum had wanted such an object for their collection.40 The writer continued that the museum was not only correct to have requested the cast, but further that ‘the authorities would have been remiss in not seizing the opportunity of handing down to future generations a permanent record of the most perfect specimen of physical culture of our days – perhaps of any age’.41 The author attempted to deflect criticism of the cast by pointing out the hypocrisy of those who valorized the ideal figures of classical sculpture while looking down on the bodybuilders who sought to replicate their perceived perfection.42 Much like the function of casts in general, the purpose of the reproduction of Sandow’s body was didactic. It was to represent ‘a perfect type of a European man’ as an anthropological type of specimen and also to serve as an object lesson for ‘what can be done in the



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

119

way of perfecting the muscles by simple means’.43 The author of the article in the Strand Magazine also suggested that the cast of Sandow offered the material evidence that the muscular forms of classical sculpture were not imagined but observed from nature.44 The argument here continued the trope of the plaster cast as irrefutable document, that the mould was derived from direct contact with Sandow’s living body invested the object with truth value. As with all casts, whether taken from static sculpture or from life, there is mediation – often a number of layers. The Sandow cast was presented as unique not only because only one positive cast was prepared for the Natural History Museum (it was not sold by Brucciani to other institutions, nor to the public), but also because the process of its manufacture was singular. The piece mould was produced in the usual way by subdividing the figure; what was peculiar was that each section of Sandow’s body was cast with the muscle tensed to illustrate the maximum dimensions of his form (Figures 5.5–5.13). The process was a feat of strength and endurance for Sandow and the team of formatori, with the painstaking work having taken more than a month to complete.45 The journalist for the Strand Magazine emphasized the singularity of this feat, with the stamina involved in the process marking Sandow out from other men in much the same way as his physique set his apart: No one but Sandow could possibly have ‘sat’ for such a work of art. Fancy, you young men who are fond of baring your right arm and displaying that little lump of biceps you refer to as your ‘muscle’; fancy setting your teeth and keeping that muscle ‘up’ for a quarter of an hour! And without moving it more than the proverbial hair’s breadth!46

Despite the author’s effusive descriptions, they did recognize the limitations of the process and in turn, the shortcomings of the plaster cast. They concluded that the cast was ‘certainly not flattering’ and ‘here and there is deficient in those fine lines, those little shades of muscle which soften the massiveness of the build and cause even his herculean figure to look shapely and graceful’.47 Furthermore, the ‘dead plaster’ could not express the living, mobile musculature that made Sandow’s figure so compelling for contemporary audiences.48 The shrinkage of the plaster as it set also meant that the measurements of the cast failed to match the measurements of Sandow’s body. That his form was diminished in some ways negated the indexical quality of the cast, but this was explained not in relation to the inherent qualities of plaster of Paris but to the difference in the pose and the level and duration of Sandow’s exertion in the manufacture of the mould.49

120

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 5.5  Arthur Weston, ‘Rough paper outline from which the “shells” are made’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 461. Photograph. Collection of the author.

Figure 5.6  Arthur Weston, ‘Posing figure – The support for right arm will be noticed’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 463. Photograph. Collection of the author.



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

121

Figure 5.7 Arthur Weston, ‘Moulding upper portion of back and neck’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 465. Photograph. Collection of the author.

Figure 5.8 Arthur Weston, ‘Taking mould of back and shoulders – The slightest movement of arm would disturb “deltoid” and “latissimus dorsi” muscles’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 464. Photograph. Collection of the author.

122

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 5.9  Arthur Weston, ‘Here is the mould of back just taken off ’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 464. Photograph. Collection of the author.

Figure 5.10  Arthur Weston, ‘Making ready to take face – Hair, neck, and moustache covered with cloths’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 466. Photograph. Collection of the author.



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

123

Figure 5.11  Arthur Weston, ‘A very trying ten minutes’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 466. Photograph. Collection of the author.

Figure 5.12  Arthur Weston, ‘A sigh relief – The mask is finished’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 467. Photograph. Collection of the author.

124

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 5.13  Arthur Weston, ‘The cast, which you should go to South Kensington to see’, Strand Magazine (October 1901), 468. Photograph. Collection of the author.

Plasters in ‘provincial’ museums: Leeds Art Gallery When Leeds Art Gallery opened to the public on 3 October 1888, the first gallery entered by the visitor was devoted to sculpture. It contained the nucleus of a plaster cast collection, with the Apollo Belvedere, Venus de Milo, Venus de Medici, Laocoön, Antinous, Discobolus, Diana, Borghese Gladiator and Dying Gaul on display in what had been the newsroom of the Free Public Library.50 The Dying Gaul, Laocoön and Antinous were recorded as purchases in 1888, most probably from Brucciani, with the majority of the rest having been presented by ‘the late Yorkshire Fine Art Society’.51 The Society was founded in 1879 after first having been proposed in 1876 as a mechanism for the establishment of a permanent art gallery in the borough. The Society leased two floors in the new Athenaeum Building in Park Lane for the purpose of holding biannual exhibitions.52 After nine exhibitions and increasing financial losses, the Society was wound up in 1883.53 It has not been possible to determine the origin of their small plaster cast collection, although all the casts the Society donated to Leeds Art Gallery were of course available from Brucciani. As detailed in Chapter 2, Leeds received its first cast collection from Brucciani in 1846 in preparation for



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

125

the opening of the Leeds School of Design in 1847, although it seems unlikely that the school would lend such canonical examples from their collection, especially as they remained a crucial component of the curriculum. In 1899, the first catalogue and handbook of casts and sculptures in the permanent collection was published, written by the curator George Birkett.54 The publication of the catalogue was no doubt prompted by the tranche of plaster casts purchased for the Gallery through a grant from the Board of Education at South Kensington, a scheme which began in 1881 to aid local museums (Figure 5.14). In 1897, the Gallery received thirty-five plaster casts from Brucciani, including the only cast to survive from this period – the Pitti Tondo by Michelangelo displayed in the Central Court (Figure 5.15). It was listed in the first volume of the Board of Education’s record of aid to provincial museums as Relief of Madonna & Child with the catalogue number 2275 at a cost of 3s. 6d., which corresponds with Brucciani’s Catalogue of Casts for Schools, Approved by the Science and Art Department published in 1889.55 The 1899 Leeds catalogue recorded the relief as Madonna and Child by Michael Angelo alongside the crucial detail that original was held by the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, which identifies the sculpture as the Pitti Tondo, a slightly oval marble relief depicting the Madonna and Jesus, with the infant John the Baptist in the background.

Figure 5.14  W. & T. Gaines, ‘Leeds City Art Gallery’, 1904. Photographic postcard. Leeds Museums and Galleries (Discovery Centre) / Donated by Robert Keys Esq. / Bridgeman Images.

126

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 5.15  ‘Central Court, City Art Gallery, Leeds’, 1911. Photographic postcard. Collection of the author.

The following year, 1898, brought three more plaster casts by Brucciani to Leeds Art Gallery: the Dancing Faun, Discobolus of Myron and Hermes and the Infant Dionysus.56 Nine more plaster casts followed between 1899 and 1900, including Theseus from the British Museum and the Aphrodite of Knidos from the Vatican.57 The final three casts to enter the collection were the Venus de’ Medici, Youth Suppliant [the Praying Boy] and the Lansdowne Heracles between 1904 and 1905.58 The cast collection remained on display until the Second World War, when the contents of the Art Gallery were evacuated to Temple Newsam House to the east of the city.59 The casts appear not to have returned after the end of the war and the former sculpture gallery was converted into the Library of Commerce, Science and Technology in 1955. With the exception of Brucciani’s Pitti Tondo, the cast collection of Leeds Art Gallery did not survive into the second half of the twentieth century and in this respect, its fate was typical of so many regional and national cast collections as the prescriptive Victorian didacticism they represented was rejected.

Australasia Beyond Great Britain, present and former colonies emerged as a new market for plaster cast collections in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ian Cooke



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

127

has argued that these collections were intended to operate as a surrogate for a missing ‘European artistic heritage’, where ‘the classical tradition served as a touchstone of “high” culture and as a reference for long-established standards in artistic excellence’.60 One of the earliest collections in Australia was opened at the Melbourne Public Library on 24 May 1861 as a Museum of Art (the National Gallery of Victoria from 1864) on the ground floor, later joined by a School of Design and School of Painting.61 The Committee charged with selecting the casts were based in London and deliberately chose Brucciani above other formatori.62 Two large shipments were sent to Melbourne in 1860 at the considerable cost of £802 9s. 2d., with their transport halfway across the earth accounting for the greater part of the expense.63 It was reported that Brucciani had provided a discount on the casts ‘on being informed that they were intended for public instruction in Victoria’ and further, that he had packed them at his own expense.64 But however carefully and robustly the casts had been packed, it was not sufficient to withstand the journey, and few of the casts reached Melbourne intact. The majority had to be extensively repaired at their destination before they could be displayed.65

Figure 5.16  D. Brucciani, Apollo Belvedere, before 1878. Plaster. 1400 × 1000 × 720 mm. Courtesy Auckland War Memorial Museum.

128

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Even further from London, Brucciani was tasked with supplying a collection of plaster casts to the Auckland Institute in New Zealand in 1878. Donated by the Irish-born lawyer and politician Thomas Russell and mediated by the Scottish-born businessman and politician John Logan Campbell, the collection of twenty-two statues and eleven busts were intended to cultivate a European conception of correct taste and to instigate a school of art.66 Having met the cost of their installation, Campbell was given permission to curate the collection. As Cooke has noted, Campbell’s arrangement of the casts was highly considered and informed by his travels in Europe. He chose, for instance, to reunite the Apollo Belvedere and Diana à la Biche with reference to their short time displayed together in Paris under Napoleon and their formal similarities as a pair in mirror-image (Figures 5.16 and 5.17).67 After a number of redisplays and relegations – first to margins of the galleries and then into storage – the Auckland War Memorial Museum now displays the conserved Discobolus, Dying Gaul and Laocoön.68

Figure 5.17  D. Brucciani, Diana à la Biche, before 1878. Plaster. 1420 × 1050 × 600 mm. Courtesy Auckland War Memorial Museum.



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

129

North America Just as cast culture began to emerge during the eighteenth century in Britain, so a taste for reproductions of antique sculpture travelled across the Atlantic during the same period. As Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny observed, plaster casts were brought over in small numbers in the early eighteenth century and in increasing numbers at the turn into the nineteenth century.69 Although the context and availability were different, like Britain, America too saw a proliferation in demand for cast collections to populate the public art museums established in the last third of the nineteenth century. In his essay ‘The American Cast Museum: An Episode in the History of the Institutional Definition of Art’, Alan Wallach deftly analysed the place of plaster casts in the emerging museum culture of the United States to the beginning of the First World War.70 Wallach argued that the presence of reproductions in the founding collections of North American art museums was unremarkable to contemporary visitors and that ‘it was only through the institutionalization of the polarity between original and copy, authentic and fake, that art became irrevocably associated with notions of originality and authenticity’.71 He described the taste-making and civilizing imperatives behind these collections in terms that were comparable with the ways in which they had been put to use in Britain and noted that reproductions of objects from the South Kensington Museum had also circulated across the Atlantic in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.72 Until the establishment of P. P. Caproni and Brother in Boston in 1892, D. Brucciani and Co. were in a strong position to supply plaster casts to North American museums and educational institutions. Pietro Paolo Caproni (1862– 1928) and Emilio Caproni came from another branch of the same family that included Joseph Louis Caproni, who maintained the Brucciani business after the death of Domenico in 1880.73 The Caproni brothers emigrated to the United States from Barga in the 1870s.74 In 1874, the American botanist and geologist William Tufts Brigham (1841–1926) published a Cast Catalogue of Antique Sculpture as a compendium of sources of plaster casts, along with information about the ‘original’ sculpture and the cost and size of the casts available – he warned prospective buyers to expect the cost of packing and transport to be between 50 and 150 per cent of the cost of the cast. In the preface, Brigham wrote that he had compiled the information ‘for his own convenience, with no view to publication, but to supply those in the State interested in the art education of the people … and help in the selection of casts for the various art museums

130

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

now being founded in this country’. A number of European firms were listed, including the Bureau du Moulage and Barbedienne in Paris, and Malpieri and Gherardi in Rome, but it was Brucciani who was most comprehensively represented in this guide.75 In 1891, the Metropolitan Museum of Art published a ‘tentative list of objects desirable for a collection of casts, sculptural and architectural, intended to illustrate the history of plastic art’ intended for private circulation to a group selected to give advice to the Special Committee on Casts.76 The Committee was tasked with preparing an ideal list of plaster casts for the museum to augment their small existing collection, freed from having to consider restrictions of space or whether an existing cast might be available, from which casts could be selected as and when adequate space and funding could be found. The range of formatori listed in this publication was far wider than Brigham’s, to include firms in Berlin, Dresden, Cologne, Hanover, Munich, Vienna, Florence, Milan, Naples, Venice, Paris, Rome, Copenhagen, Norway, Cairo, Athens and of course, Brucciani in London. The results of the Committee’s work are apparent in the Catalogue of the Collection of Casts published in 1908, which listed 2,607 objects. While the collection of plaster casts had been augmented, there was insufficient space to display them together in a systematic order. The preface to the catalogue warned that the visitor ‘will occasionally be subjected to the annoyance of finding casts that are described in connection with one another separated by considerable intervals, and sometimes even by several rooms’, although a number were prominently displayed in what is now the Great Hall (Figure 5.18). The preface also articulated the origins of the cast collection, beginning with the bequest left by Levi Hale Willard in 1883, for ‘the purchase of a collection of models, casts, photographs, and other objects illustrative of the art and science of architecture’.77 This architectural collection was acquired over the course of the next eleven years, while casts of sculptures were not brought into the collection until 1886, when Henry G. Marquand donated funds for the purchase of Greek and Roman statuary. The Special Committee on Casts raised a public subscription for the further development of the collection and, aided by further legacies and bequests, made substantial purchases in the four years to 1895.78 The sources of many of the casts were not recorded in the catalogue, and Brucciani was only named as having supplied two: an unidentified ‘fragment of a large capital’ in the English Romanesque section and ‘portion of a panel of the door, with scrolls and flowers’ from the Madeleine Church in Paris.79



Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts

131

Figure 5.18  Detroit Publishing Company, ‘Statuary hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York’, 1907. Photographic postcard. Courtesy The New York Public Library.

To conclude, the development of museum collections of plaster casts provided a second major boon to Brucciani’s business, alongside the continuing educational market. Brucciani’s relationship with the British Museum was the most formalized through their agreement of 1857. That Brucciani could advertise the business as the official formatori to the British Museum lent prestige to their operation and provided access to some of the most celebrated canonical classical sculpture in the world, most notably the Elgin Marbles. Brucciani’s association with the South Kensington Museum and its antecedents and descendants was the most enduring and significant, as we will see in the next chapter. It resulted in the largest and most impressive commission of Brucciani’s career in the form of the cast of the Pórtico de la Gloria. The National Portrait Gallery provided Brucciani with the opportunity to revisit his collaboration with Elkington in the production of electrotypes. At the Natural History Museum, Brucciani was engaged in the production of reproductions beyond sculpture and architectural ornament, providing plaster casts of animal, vegetable and mineral specimens. After Domenico’s death, the Natural History Museum commissioned one of the most singular casts to be produced by the firm in the form of human type specimen, Eugen Sandow. Brucciani’s casts circulated beyond the national museums of Britain through the Board of Education’s grants to regional museums. Between 1881 and 1901, Brucciani’s casts were bought by thirty-four museums

132

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

from Belfast to Yarmouth, covering towns and cities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In many places, like Leeds, these collections duplicated the sets of plaster casts that had been sent on the establishment of a school of design during the middle years of the nineteenth century. Despite their almost identical composition, the museum collections of casts were not intended to instruct prospective industrial designers, but to inform the taste and values of a much broader public. As ready-made collections, they furnished new museums and art galleries with an instant shorthand for cultural status and classical attainments; they defined the space in which they were displayed as ‘museum’ or ‘art gallery’. It was these qualities that were sought beyond Britain too, with Australasia and North America following the British model most closely, alongside the South Kensington System of art and design education.

6

Casting Aside

The death of Domenico Brucciani Domenico Brucciani died on 8 April 1880 at the age of sixty-five.1 The following short obituary was published in the Builder: We are sorry to hear of the death of Domenico Brucciani. He was born at Lucca, in Italy, in 1815, and coming to England at an early age, started in business, fifty years ago, as a modeller and dealer in plaster-casts, in Russell-street, Coventgarden, where he has gathered together a remarkable collection of casts from ancient and modern works. He was long employed in the British Museum in producing casts from the marbles there. Although chiefly a plasterman in calling, he was an artist at heart. He lately presented to the Elgin-room, for the purposes of study, a cast of the Venus of Melos.2

In the month following the death of Brucciani, the business appeared for sale in the Standard and The Times: For Sale.—In consequence of the death of Signor Brucciani, the valuable business of a fine-art modeller, carried on by him at No. 40, Russell-street, Coventgarden, and elsewhere, for many years past (under Royal and distinguished patronage, and also under the patronage of the various Government Schools of Art), to be sold, together with the whole of the valuable Stock, Moulds, and Store Casts. Apply at 40, Russell-street, Covent-garden.3

Despite the advertisements, there does not appear to have been any discernible change in the operation of the business in the years following Domenico Bruccciani’s death. Almost exactly a year later, the Morning Post reported that ‘Messrs. Brucciani, of Russell-street, Covent-garden’ had made a cast of Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, which had been discovered at Olympia in 1877.4 The Brucciani name had been retained, whether through the persistence of popular use or deliberate continuation of what had effectively become a brand

134

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

synonymous with the production of plaster casts in Britain. It was not until 1891 that the new owner of the business was reported, when Joseph Louis Caproni (c. 1846–1900) – trading as D. Brucciani – took legal action against another formatore by the name of Alberti trading in Manchester, who was charged with copying botanical casts of the same type that had earned Brucciani prizes at the International Exhibition of 1862. The case rested on the question of whether the casts qualified as original designs, as they had not been registered under the Copyright or Patents Acts. Thomas Armstrong, Art Director of the South Kensington Museum, was called to give evidence in support of the original qualities of the Brucciani casts. His assessment was that artistic taste and judgment were shown in the selection of the spray to be mounted, and the means taken to support the leaves on the ground showed skill. They were meritorious casts of the natural fruit and leaves, and were good models for drawing in schools and art classes. The casts were new and original when they were respectively first made and published by the plaintiffs.5

As a result of this testimony, Caproni was successful in obtaining an injunction against Alberti, the judge having ruled that the casts were ‘of artistic taste and novel design’ making them eligible for protection under the law. Ultimately it was the perception of an artistic imagination, the operation of judgement, intentionality and technical facility that allowed plaster reproductions to occupy the territory of originality as it was understood in the nineteenth century. In short, it was the designation of the labour as artistic that elevated the casts above the inauthentic copies pirated by Alberti, who had attempted to erase their authorship. Although the business continued in much the same form after Domenico Brucciani’s death in 1880, the relationship with the British Museum underwent significant changes. Brucciani had been the official formatore to the British Museum for the twenty-three years between 1857 and 1880 and towards the end of his life, he had requested an increase in the £130 allowance paid to the business for the storage of the Museum’s moulds and casts at 196 High Holborn after an increase in rent. The Trustees refused this request but did suggest that the basement and ground floor of 6 Bedford Square – a smart but dilapidated Georgian townhouse adjacent to the Museum – could be used for storage, with the first floor set up for art students to draw from the casts.6 The question of the storage and maintenance of the moulds and casts became more urgent after Brucciani’s death and the Principal Librarian of the British Museum,



Casting Aside

135

Edward Augustus Bond (1815–98), quickly compiled a report on the possibility of obtaining a lease on 6 Bedford Square. He noted that Brucciani’s premises at Holborn were not protected from fire and were too small to contain the whole stock of the Museum’s moulds and casts.7 The cost of the scheme was estimated at £1,000 for repairs and fittings, with the lease set to cost £250 per year.8 The Treasury initially refused the proposal on the grounds that it was too expensive and the casts should be accommodated in the White Wing of the Museum once it had been built, but after a petition by the Trustees it was agreed that the plan could be pursued.9 The proposal was quickly thwarted, however, by an arrangement between the Duke of Bedford and the current leaseholder to split the building into two separate dwellings.10 The casts and moulds were instead transferred to the basement of the British Museum and the Trustees set about the task of appointing a new formatore. The connection with Brucciani was maintained with the appointment of Saverio Biagiotti (1838–1901), who had been a foreman for Brucciani.11 The Trustees agreed to the appointment and on 28 March 1881 Biagiotti began his new role with a starting salary of 42 shillings per week.12 His son, Albert Henry Biagiotti (1876–1953), took over the position in 1905.

D. Brucciani and Company Limited D. Brucciani and Company was incorporated as a limited company in 1905 under the directorship of Paul Joseph Ryan (1867–1954).13 Ryan described himself as an ‘art modeller’ and was responsible for relocating the workshop and showroom to 254–8 Goswell Road in 1901 (Figure 6.1).14 Towards the end of Ryan’s career, the Victoria and Albert Museum recorded that he had ‘served part-time in the workshops for some years in his youth’ and had no doubt worked under Domenico Brucciani.15 The Memorandum of Association registered on 27 June 1905 recorded the objects of the company: To acquire, and take over as a going concern and carry on the business of modellers, and manufacturers of art casts, and formatori, now carried on by the firm of Messrs. D. Brucciani and Co., and all or any of their assets and liabilities in relation to that business and with a view thereto to execute and carry into effect either with or without modification an agreement which has already been prepared and is expressed to be made between Paul Joseph Ryan, Monica Mary Brucciani Ryan, Dominic Wilfred Ryan, Gertrude Mary Brucciani

136

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 6.1  254–258 Goswell Road, from D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Catalogue of Casts for Schools (London, 1914), 52. Private collection. Photograph courtesy Andrea Felice. Cuddeford, Anne Mary Brucciani Forbes, and Austin Brucciani Ryan (trading as D. Brucciani and Co.) of the first part the said Paul Joseph Ryan of the second part, and the Company of the third part, a copy whereof has for the purposes of identification been endorsed with the signature of Paul Joseph Ryan one of the Subscribers hereto.16

The relationship between the Ryans and the Bruccianis appears to have begun in 1866, when Arthur Compton Ryan – a solicitor of Lincoln’s Inn Fields – married Mary S. Brucciani (the adopted daughter of Domenico and Eliza Brucciani) on 12 May 1866 at St Peter’s Italian Church in Holborn.17 The Memorandum went on to record that, in addition to the activities listed, the business would also involve ‘workers in marble and other stone, and in plasters, metals and metallic substances of all kinds’ and further, that the company was also in business as ‘publishers, printers, booksellers, stationers, designers, engineers, iron and metal founders, warehousemen, packing case makers, packers, general agents, factors,



Casting Aside

137

dealers in statuary, works of art and curios and manufacturers of and dealers in all classes of educational requisites, photographical, surgical, and scientific apparatus and materials’.18 The people previously listed were also the vendors of the D. Brucciani and Company and had been involved in its previous incarnation at 40 Russell Street in Covent Garden. What they were trading were the leasehold of 254–258 Goswell Road, trademarks, contracts and engagement rights, and the tools, stock, moulds, furniture and fixtures associated with the business (Figures 6.2 and 6.3). The whole operation was ostensibly ‘sold’ for £4,000, although in practice the seven shareholders purchased one share at £1 each, leaving 3,993 shares available.19 The annual return for 1906 showed that the 4,000 shares had been distributed as follows: Paul Ryan, Managing Director, 31 Benham Lane, Croydon, 1374 shares. Arthur Cleveland, Incorporated Accountant, St Michael’s House, Basinghall Street, 400 shares. Monica [Mary Brucciani] Ryan, Spinster, 104 Boundaries Road, Balham, 438 shares. Gertrude M. B. [Mary Brucciani] Cuddeford, Married Woman, 104 Boundaries Road, Balham, 438 shares.

Figure 6.2  ‘A view of the workroom at Brucciani’s’, Graphic (19 November 1910), 807. Photograph. Collection of the author.

138

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 6.3  ‘Statues and anatomical castings in the drying-room at Brucciani’s’, Graphic (19 November 1910), 807. Photograph. Collection of the author.

Anne Mary Forbes, Married Woman, 56 Elgin Mansions, Maida Vale, 438 shares. Augustus H. Forbes, Surgeon Dentist, 56 Elgin Mansions, Maida Vale, 1 share. Edgar P. Cuddeford, Clerk, 104 Boundaries Road, Balham, 1 share. William P. Cox, Gentleman, 19 Craven Hill, Hyde Park, 36 shares. Dominic [Wilfred] Ryan, Farmer, Tantallon, Canada, 437 shares. Austin [Brucciani] Ryan, Farmer, Tantallon, Canada, 437 shares.20

The first rescue mission D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd. continued relatively quietly for a decade after the incorporation of the business, but on 14 August 1916 a special resolution was passed at an extraordinary general meeting, that Sir Edward Poyner and Sir Thomas Brock would join Paul Ryan and Arthur Cleveland as unsalaried directors of D. Brucciani and Company Limited.21 In October 1915, the sculptor Sir Thomas Brock (1847–1922) and Arthur Smith (1860–1941), Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum, visited the Victoria and



Casting Aside

139

Albert Museum to meet the director, Cecil Harcourt-Smith (1859–1944). The purpose of their visit was to discuss the ‘the possibility of some form of Government intervention on behalf of the business of Brucciani, which is in imminent danger of bankruptcy owing to the loss of trade due to the war’.22 All agreed that the business should be saved for the valuable stock of moulds and casts, the skilled staff and the mechanisms of storage and distribution. All agreed further that the priority was to maintain the supply of plaster casts for art schools; the British Museum could call in its collection of moulds from Brucciani and the Victoria and Albert Museum tended to use either their own staff or the formatore Enrico Cantoni (c. 1859–1923) after Domenico Brucciani’s death in 1880. Paul Ryan was called into the meeting and reported that the business turned an average of 3 per cent profit on the capital of £4,500 and the stock of moulds and type casts was insured for £5,000–£6,000, but could not be replaced for less than £15,000. Ryan pointed out that some of the individual moulds and casts were particularly valuable, including ‘the second cast from the original mould of the “Venus of Melos”, the first being the property of the French Government’. There was also value to be extracted from the Goswell Road premises: The lease was still valid for fifty years and part of the top floor was already sublet. After Ryan departed, it was agreed that the best solution would be for the government to purchase and subsidize the business and retain its present staff.23 A memorial signed by Herbert Austen Hall (President of the Architectural Association), Sir Thomas Brock, RA (President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors), Sir Cecil Harcourt-Smith (Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum), Sir Frederic Kenyon (Director of the British Museum), Ernest Newton, ARA (President of the Royal Institute of British Architects), Sir Edward Poynter (President of the Royal Academy) and Sir Isidore Spielmann (Honorary Director for Art, Board of Trade, Exhibitions Branch) was sent to Prime Minister Asquith on 16 December 1915, alongside a handwritten note from Poyner, who appealed to Asquith to consider the importance of the Brucciani moulds to museums and schools of fine and industrial arts.24 The signatories argued that not only was the collection of moulds in imminent danger or dispersal or destruction, but worse, they were under threat of ‘being acquired by some other country’. The group constructed a figure of Brucciani as an altruist, having thanklessly continued ‘the work which in other countries is usually carried on under government control’ since 1837. Brucciani’s work with the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum and Natural History Museum was then set out as a means to further legitimize the business through their cultural prestige and status as

140

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

arbiters of quality. Finally, the petition appealed to a late imperial sensibility by drawing attention to the crucial role Brucciani played in the supply of casts to the colonies for the purpose of art education.25 Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850–1916) had also been asked to add his signature to the memorial in support of the Brucciani business. A letter from the War Office recorded, however, ‘that it would be scarcely correct for him to sign a petition addressed to the Prime Minister. Besides, all that he can say is that Messrs Brucciani (on behalf of the British Museum) have done a very excellent piece of work for him. Of course, Lord Kitchener, like everyone else, would be very glad if their collection could be retained and not dispersed.’26 The piece of work referred to was a bronze statue of Pan for Kitchener’s garden at Broome Park in Canterbury, a seventeenth-century country house and estate he had purchased in 1911. Despite these endorsements, the appeal was not successful. A letter from Thomas Little Heath (Permanent Secretary to the Treasury) to Poynter delivered the verdict that ‘even apart from financial considerations which at this juncture would be decisive against the adoption of the proposal, They [sic] could not contemplate sanctioning the undertaking by any Government Department of a business such a that conducted by Messrs Brucciani, although They [sic] realise its high artistic interest and importance.’27 By April 1916, Ryan had not taken a salary for six months and in a letter to Cecil Harcourt-Smith, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, he wrote with black humour: ‘I am glad to be able to inform you that everything in regard to my firm is going forward splendidly, there is however one exception – we have no money.’28 In December 1916, The Times reported that the shipowner Sir William Petersen had stepped in to keep the business afloat during the war, with plans to raise enough money for the Royal Academy to take over the business.29 Legal and auditing costs were met by the Goldsmith’s Company, the Clothworkers’ Company and Sir William Lever.30 For the time being the business could operate with this temporary reprieve that was sufficient to limp through the rest of the war.

The second rescue mission By 1919, the funding supplied by Petersen had come to an end and D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd. was once again close to being sold. Cecil Harcourt-Smith issued a memorandum on 30 January 1919 in which he laid out the case for the government to purchase the Brucciani business. His argument was firmly



Casting Aside

141

grounded in the educational merit of the casts supplied by the business, the diminished opportunities for studying comprehensive collections of casts and the precedents set by other European countries in the state manufacture and supply of reproductions: If a London student wishes to study classical sculpture (other than the originals in the British Museum), he is practically compelled to go to Oxford, Cambridge or Birmingham, where some attempt has been made to provide a good teaching series. … Until recently he 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.31

Harcourt-Smith observed that the Brucciani casts could also form the nucleus of a collection on the model of the palais du Trocadéro in Paris, which housed the Musée national des Monuments Français and Musée de la Sculpture comparée.32 He went on to argue that if the business were sold on as a private enterprise, the less popular – but more instructive – casts would be neglected in favour of the most profitable, with the stock in danger of being reduced to ‘the hackneyed choice of subject’.33 The memorandum had been approved by Sir Sidney Colvin and Arthur Hamilton Smith, Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum. Harcourt-Smith understood privately that if the government agreed to the plan outlined in his memorandum, the cost might be met by private subscription rather than through public funds.34 Sir Lionel Earle (1866–1948), Permanent Secretary of Her Majesty’s Office of Works, wrote to Sir Amherst Selby-Bigge (1860–1951), Permanent Secretary to the Board of Education, on 13 February 1919, to express his view that it would be impossible for his department to run a commercial casting business and that the Treasury would never approve the proposal. Earle thought it best that another private business step in to supply the casts requested by the Board of Education and that they be paid a rate based on the difficulty of each cast. According to this plan, the government would agree to purchase all the casts from the business and grant them a monopoly for the manufacture of casts from the national collections.35 Harcourt-Smith rejected Earle’s argument and pressed ahead to suggest a committee be formed of the following supporters: Thomas Brock Sidney Colvin Lionel Earle

142

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Frederick Kenyon Eric Maclagan Cecil Harcourt-Smith Arthur Hamilton Smith Aston Webb Frank Morley Fletcher.36

In April 1919, Sir Sidney Colvin, former Slade Professor of Fine Art and director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, wrote an article for the Observer titled ‘National Education in Art: A Collection in Peril’, in which he outlined the necessity of reproductions of sculpture for art education, comparative museum collections and archaeology. He argued that this practice was supported by government in France and Germany, but in Britain manufacture and supply relied almost completely on a private company. Colvin noted that the war had caused difficulties for the business and the stock of moulds and casts amassed over eighty years was in immediate danger of being sold and dispersed, which he concluded would be ‘disastrous to the interests of archaeological and art study throughout the Empire’. He articulated their unsuccessful efforts to lobby the government to nationalize the business in 1915 and 1916 and went on to describe the new plan to purchase the business by public and private subscription, to be handed over to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Board of Education. Colvin ended the article with a plea to the readers of the Observer to donate funds for this purpose.37 Meanwhile Aston Webb wrote to the President of the Board of Education, Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher (1865–1940), on 8 May 1919 to request a short meeting alongside Brock, Colvin, Kenyon and George Macmillan.38 A meeting was arranged for the morning of 14 May 1919 and Webb read a memorandum which reported that the Brucciani business ‘used to produce Casts of first rate quality’ but that the low price at which they were sold did not allow this level of quality to be maintained. He noted that nineteen workmen were currently employed by the business and paid approximately £3 per week. Webb suggested the cost of running the business might be reduced by either transferring the premises to ‘an outlying district’ or absorbing it into the Victoria and Albert Museum or the British Museum. Fisher was sympathetic to their cause, but expressed reservations about the likelihood of the Treasury taking over a business as a state concern. The advocates of the scheme attempted to argue that the government would profit from taking over the business, stressing the ready markets and longevity of the firm, while also describing the business as



Casting Aside

143

essentially failing and producing low quality casts. The question that had to be resolved was, If D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd. was such an attractive business proposition, why could no private buyer be found? Fisher asked the group to provide detailed figures to enable the Treasury to project the cost of the scheme.39 Webb followed the meeting with a memorandum to the Treasury, which essentially reiterated the arguments that had been presented by Poynter in 1915. Despite following broadly the same points, Webb’s text was more urgent and alarmist. Instead of vaguely suggesting the collection might be lost to ‘some other country’ as Poynter had warned, Webb wrote of ‘grave reason to fear that the collection … would go en bloc to America [emphasis in original]’. To lose the collection to the United States was positioned in some ways as the worst possible outcome: a continuation of the plundering of European cultural heritage by gilded age robber barons taking advantage of Britain when she was down. Webb’s committee proposed that should they be successful in raising enough money to purchase the collection, it should be taken on and continued by the Board of Education. As Fisher had requested in their meeting on 14 May, the memorandum included a financial breakdown of the business. Webb noted a profit of £1,518 11s. 2d. for the years 1911–14 and a loss of £2,538 19s. 1d. for the years 1915–18, but that the situation had improved in 1918 with a net deficit of £250 ‘and there would appear to be no reason why with the return of peace the work should not be resumed on an improved basis and be made to pay its way’. In a lengthy ‘PS’, Aston Webb sought to reinforce the statements made in the memorandum. He wrote, ‘It is obvious that for educational and other purposes the demand for casts in this country is bound to continue. If Messrs. Brucciani’s business collapses, their stock will almost certainly go to America, and unless a new supply is ensured … we shall be forced to buy our casts from French, German or other foreign sources.’ These were strong words in the wake of the first total war in Europe and a clear appeal to national pride.40 The Secretary of the Board of Education wrote to the Treasury on 23 July 1919 to set out the reasons for rescuing D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd. He articulated the difference between the scheme proposed in 1915 and the present plan: whereas in 1915 it was proposed that the government should purchase the collection outright, now it was suggested that the business be purchased by private subscription on the understanding that it be continued under the Board of Education.41 One week later, Orange wrote to the Treasury again to relay the news that the funds needed to purchase the collection had now been promised, on the condition that the government agree to continue the

144

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

operation of the business.42 Sir William Petersen had again agreed to provide the necessary funds: £2,610 to write off the loan he had advanced the business in 1916, £3,390 to purchase all the shares and £500 to keep the business going until 1 April 1920.43 Aston Webb, who had supported the purchase of the business by the state since the first rescue mission during the First World War, wrote a letter to Thomas Brock on 4 October 1919 to be forwarded to the President of the Board of Education. Webb was concerned that Petersen’s funds would be used only to subsidize the operation of the business without it being taken over by the government. He argued that the survival of the business as a private enterprise would not secure the future supply of high quality plaster casts for art education, because the profit motive worked against the production of new moulds when existing moulds became too worn ‘to translate with absolute fidelity the fine artistic qualities of the originals’. According to the rule of supply and demand, the available stock tended to be restricted to only the most popular and commercially successful objects and Webb feared that some of the most educative works were not being produced for this reason. He felt too that professors of art would be much more inclined to advise the state than a business, and the concern that operating the business under government control would create a monopoly was unfounded, because D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd. had been a de facto monopoly for at least seventy years by this point. Webb noted that what appeared to separate plaster casting operations were in fact supplied by Brucciani and therefore retailers rather than manufacturers.44 The Treasury maintained ‘serious objections’ to the plan for the Board of Education to place D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd. under its control, unless ‘it were conclusively shewn [sic] that the supply of casts for Museums, Schools of Arts etc. would fail unless the course proposed were adopted’. It was their view that there was no reason to reverse the decision they had reached at the end of 1915 and since the war had ended, they saw no barriers to the firm resuming business as usual. At most they would consider providing a loan in the short term.45 The Board of Education wrote back to the Treasury on 25 October 1919 to concede that a limited selection of plaster casts were available from two other firms in London: one a book publisher and the other an artists’ moulder. The Board of Education pointed that neither could ‘compare with Messrs. Brucciani either in experience or reputation, nor – what is more important still – have they anything approaching the comprehensive Brucciani collection of moulds’. Since the Board of Education relied so heavily on Brucciani to supply plaster casts as part of their



Casting Aside

145

grant-in-aid scheme for regional museums, they complained that the loss of their connection would result in the collapse of the scheme. The letter reiterated many of Webb’s arguments about the quality and extent of the stock being better served by the state than by private enterprise and again noted that in France and Germany the manufacture and supply of casts was under government control. The Board of Education sought to use the situation as leverage to suggest that Britain faced the potentially humiliating prospect of relying on the continent for their plaster casts if Brucciani was lost. A statement of the accounts of the business was enclosed with the letter alongside suggestions for how the existing employees could be retained and how much they should be paid. They advised that the manager should earn between £500 and £650 per annum, an assistant manager £300 and seven workmen at their current rates.46 In November 1919, the Treasury reversed their decision and offered their approval to the Board of Education, provided that the Trustees of the British Museum agreed to the work conducted by Brucciani for the Museum be transferred to the Board of Education and that the business be handed over without any liability, apart from the rent for the Goswell Road workshop and showroom. The Treasury reiterated the need for the business to run on a commercial basis with no subsidy. The path was now apparently clear for D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd. to begin its next iteration on 1 April 1920.47 The Treasury proposed that the manager be paid £500 per annum and the assistant manager £250 and that they be appointed on a temporary basis in the first instant, subject to three months’ notice.48 The Board of Education accepted the conditions laid out by the Treasury and communicated to them that the British Museum had agreed that their work previously undertaken on their behalf by Brucciani would be transferred to the Board of Education. The Board sought to manage the expectations of the Treasury regarding the practicability of substantially increasing the price of casts to ensure a profit and noted that it would take some time for the operation to settle into its new arrangement.49 As 1 April 1920 approached, Webb expressed his fear that if the new iteration of the firm failed to make a profit, the government would sell it. He was concerned that this condition would spook Petersen too and that the whole campaign could collapse.50 Selby-Bigge wrote to the Treasury to clarify the matter and the Treasury confirmed that the operation would be given sufficient time to establish itself.51 At an extraordinary general meeting at the Victoria and Albert Museum on 21 March 1921, a resolution was passed that D. Brucciani and Company Limited would be voluntarily wound up with Paul Ryan, the appointed liquidator.52 A final winding-up meeting was held on

146

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

18  August 1921 and the formal transfer of the business to the control of the Board of Education took place on 19 August 1921.53

The Department for the Sale of Casts For the first year of the new arrangement, business continued at Goswell Road and the following staff were retained: 1 manager at £400 per annum [non-pensionable and terminable at one months’ notice] 1 clerk at £3 10s. per week. 2 workmen at 2s. per hour. 1 workman at 1s. 10d. per hour. 2 workmen at 1s. 8d. per hour. 1 workman at 1s. 6d. per hour. 1 workman at 30s. per week of 48 hours.54 The workmen were dissatisfied with these terms and Ryan petitioned for new terms for five of the men, based on a forty-four-hour working week.55 Although Ryan’s appeal was initially granted, by April 1922 the Board of Education recommended a reduction in wages for five of the workmen, with the wages of the three lowest paid to remain the same. The reasons for the reduction were that the composition of staff had changed from one manager, one clerk and seven workmen, to one manager (who took on the work of the departed clerk) and eight workmen and that their work was still in arrears.56 Just over a year later, the Treasury chastised the Board of Education for slightly increasing the pay of one of the workmen, taking on an additional workman without consultation and maintaining the level of the manager’s salary at £400 per annum, which they recommended be reduced to £370.57 The Board of Education justified their position by noting that the increase in wages for the workman was because he had been taken on as an ‘improver’ and was now a ‘competent Caster [sic]’. The Board pointed out that there was no standard rate for plaster workers and that their remuneration depended on their individual level of skill. They had appointed an additional workman to cover an increase in demand, although the Board conceded that their current workload was ‘relatively slack’. Despite this, the Board argued that they should be allowed to retain the present numbers of workmen in case work increased, because it was very difficult to find competent



Casting Aside

147

formatori. On the point of the manager’s salary, the Board noted that originally it had been proposed to pay him £500 per annum, so the current salary already represented a significant saving. The only concession the Board was willing to make was that all salaries would be reviewed the following September and the staff had been warned to expect reductions.58 The subsequent review of wages provides the first insight into the individual workmen employed at the Department for the Sale of Casts (later renamed the Department for the Supply of Casts), the majority of whom had been transferred from D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd. The men were named Beck, Godon, Pieri, Lock, J. Prescott, A. H. Prescott, H. M. Murphy, H. Murphy and Schaub, H. Murphy and Schaub were paid the least and Cecil Harcourt-Smith thought it was imperative that their wages rise as Smith thought they ‘could hardly defend payments of 11d. an hour and 9d. an hour for adult men in a skilled trade’. H. Murphy was the workman previously mentioned, who had been employed as an ‘improver’ and improved so much that he was considered ‘competent to undertake most of the ordinary run of work, and as a promising workman is certainly worth more than 11d. an hour’. Similarly, it was recommended that Schaub be promoted from an ‘improver’ to an ‘assistant’. Godon and Beck were the two highest paid, with Godon acting as the foreman under Ryan, the manager, while Beck was the foreman based at the British Museum. Anticipating criticism from the Treasury, Smith concluded that the wages ‘can hardly be deemed excessive in view of the special character of the work; there are in fact very few skilled formatori in London, and it is therefore difficult to obtain a parallel’.59 By the end of 1923, the Department for the Sale of Casts was beginning to establish a healthy turnover, but the heavy expenses imposed on the operation for rent and rates, lighting heating and cleaning, water, telephone charges, fire insurance, postal charges, printing and stationary, administration and audit fees threatened to cause an overall loss and undermine the case for continuing the work as a government concern, even though these expenses would be incurred regardless and were described as ‘fictitious’.60 To bolster their case for maintaining the wages of the majority of the staff and increasing the wages of the two lowest paid, the Ministry of Labour was asked to provide data on the rates of pay for four other unnamed firms employing mould and cast makers. The results showed that the wages paid to the workmen in the Department for the Sale of Casts were below average. The Board of Education argued that ‘our men are above the average in the trade as regards experience and efficiency’ and did not deserve to be paid so little, adding that it was likely the unions would be involved

148

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

if the Treasury pressed ahead with a drop in salaries.61 Based on these arguments, the Treasury agreed to the proposal not to reduce the salaries and to increase the wages of two lowest paid workmen. Over the next two years, the Board of Education secured further incremental increases in the salaries of the workmen through the petitions of Paul Ryan. Despite these modest improvements, the men were not yet formally considered employees of the Victoria and Albert Museum and were not granted the same terms and conditions as their colleagues under this indefinite period of probation. The whole enterprise was still considered experimental and seemed liable to be shut down by the Treasury at any time, causing considerable disquiet as to their status and prospects.62 The matter remained unsettled into 1925, when the need for an updated catalogue caused the Victoria and Albert Museum to consider the future of the Department for the Sale of Casts. To issue a new catalogue would involve spending £200 for 4,000 copies and to justify the outlay, the museum needed to be reasonably certain that the operation would continue for at least another ten years. Appointed in 1924, Cecil Harcourt-Smith’s successor as Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Eric Maclagan, thought that they could continue for another year or two, but with the strict terms laid down by the Treasury and without investment, Maclagan warned that the original assets of the business would quickly be exhausted. In addition to the financial difficulties, the unresolved employment status of the workers meant that the museum had limited control over their activities. Maclagan concluded that there were two possible courses of action: ‘to wash our hands of the business altogether’ or, ‘to accept the burden of it and assimilate the staff with our ordinary quasi-permanent manipulative staff, abandoning all separate book-keeping and frankly claiming an annual subsidy, which need not be a very large one, for meeting the educational and, incidentally, the public demand for casts’. A separate trading account was crucial to the future of the Department of the Sale of Casts, although Maclagan was realistic about the slim chance of securing the agreement of the Treasury.63 The Department for the Sale of Casts made losses for its first four years, with the first profit recorded for the financial year 1925–26.64 By 1927–28, the Department was expected to record an exceptional profit of £788, primarily from the reproduction of Brucciani’s plaster cast of Pórtico de la Gloria for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, but also from the production of eight new moulds valued by Ryan at £263. On 1 April 1928, there were seventy orders awaiting completion with a value of £2,400, including a substantial order from the Duke of Marlborough amounting to £878 for unspecified work at Blenheim



Casting Aside

149

Palace.65 The Department for the Sale of Casts seemed finally to be on a secure footing, with all concerned congratulated ‘on the rare spectacle of a paying concern run by a Government Department. Such miracles only come off in the Board of Education and the V. & A.’66 Despite the apparent turnaround in fortune, Ryan’s future was still not secure. In 1929, the Board of Education noted that he was sixty-two years old and assumed he would continue his role only until he reached the age of sixty-five in 1932. It was proposed that a deputy should take over the management of the Department after Ryan’s retirement, but there was no deputy already in place and only three years to recruit and train them to manage the complex operation. Maclagan agreed that an assistant manager should be found – especially as the business had always been intended to operate with this structure – but argued that Ryan should be retained beyond the age of sixty-five.67 The museum noted that Ryan’s knowledge, experience and reputation, developed over fortyfive years, could not easily be reproduced. The new assistant manager would need experience in the manufacture of casts so as ‘to be able to talk sensibly to potential clients’ and to embed himself in the business of costs and prices, materials, outsourcing work in bronze and lead, working with local and foreign agents, packing, transport, installation and insurance. The assistant manager had to be able to meet customers across the social spectrum, ‘from members of the nobility to workmen’ and to be able to work alongside sculptors. The Museum further wanted the assistant manager to actively solicit commissions for the Department and not just fulfil orders that came to them. The Museum recognized that it would be difficult to find a person to fulfil all these qualities, but that to do so was essential for the survival of the business beyond Ryan’s time there.68 Meanwhile the question of the workmen’s employment status rumbled on and they still had not been granted the shorter working hours, holidays and increased wages enjoyed by equivalent craftsmen employed by the Museum. While the Museum recognized that it would be ‘convenient’ to employ the men on the same terms as the craftsmen, they could not see a way of doing so without running the operation at a loss as it was calculated that assimilation would cost £500 per annum. To ameliorate the situation, the formatori were allowed to take on piecework to supplement their income (they were paid onethird of the catalogue price for each piece and expected to work beyond their forty-four-hour working week to do this) and provided with an increase in paid annual leave from six to twelve days.69 Ryan’s prospects had improved too,

150

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

when the Board wrote to the Treasury to request his salary be increased from £300 to £400 per annum (still £100 less that originally forecast) and his annual leave increased from eighteen to twenty-four days. The Board suggested the appointment of an assistant manager to be paid £250 per annum with eighteen days annual leave. The increased costs were justified to the Treasury with the improved financial returns, with a net profit of £270 projected for the year ending 31 March 1929.70 In an informal reply to precede their official response, the Treasury disputed the basis of all these requests, and suggested instead that Ryan’s salary be increased by £50 with no increase in annual leave; that the proposed salary for a new assistant manager be reduced to £200 with fifteen days’ annual leave; and that the formatori receive no increase in annual leave.71 The archive does not record the machinations preceding the official response from the Treasury, but a compromise had clearly been reached as Ryan’s salary was permitted to rise to £450 and his annual leave to twenty-four days, and an assistant manager was permitted to be appointed with a salary of £250 and eighteen days’ annual leave. The formatori however were left with no improvement in their terms and their annual leave was to remain at only six days.72 While Ryan communicated his personal satisfaction, he feared for the low morale of his men. The Board decided to request that the foreman, Godon, have his paid holidays increased by six days as they recognized that ‘the Formatori are a disappointed body of men because all their efforts to secure improved conditions have been resisted, and this little concession to the Foreman might ease matters’.73 This concession was agreed to, although how an improvement for only one formatore could raise the morale of the group and not cause further division can only be imagined.74 Following these discussions, the correspondence held in the archive ceases for almost a year, resuming on December 1930 as a result of the death of A. J. Pieri on 26 November that year. Pieri had been in charge of the branch of their activity at the British Museum as senior formatore, and the Victoria and Albert Museum sent J. Prescott as a replacement, leaving only four men left at the Department for the Supply of Casts. The Museum sought to use this rearrangement to lobby again for more favourable terms for the formatori, who would be required to work harder to compensate for the loss of one of their own. They requested that the Treasury increase the wages of three of the men by one penny an hour, and half a penny for the one of the men to reflect the increased burden. Pieri was replaced by a boy learner, calculated to save over £100 per year on the cost of wages, though diminishing the overall level of experience and expertise.75



Casting Aside

151

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the extent of the saving, the Treasury consented to the plan.76 Running the Department on a commercial basis became much more difficult during these years as the Great Slump that followed the 1929 stock market crash in New York began to take hold in the United Kingdom. When the number of formatori working in the Department was called into question again towards the end of 1931, Ryan made the following petition which reveals some of the strategies that were in place during the Brucciani years: In my opinion, speaking as a business man, we are doing well to keep our heads up at such a period of trade depression as that existing at present. As regards discharging men I may say that never while I was a Brucciani’s (about 35 years) was a man or boy discharged when work was slack. This, of course, made things very difficult at times, but the men were employed on making stock. It has to be remembered that there is no source from which qualified men for our work can be drawn. We have always had to train boys for it. I cannot think that the Board or the Treasury would wish to throw men out of work at the present moment. If we discharged hands and trade improved we should be unable to cope with the work. … Apart from the assets handed over to the Board at the time of the transfer of the business we have since made some hundreds of pounds profit which means that, up to date, the State has benefited through taking over the business. I venture to hope therefore that even if the work slackens at this unprecedented moment of trade depression, the worst I have known except during war time, that such a drastic measure as the discharge of trained or partially trained, hands doing really good work will not be resorted to so long as work can be found for them.77

Ryan’s comments show that, unlike the previous century when Domenico Brucciani was starting out, there was no longer a ready supply of skilled Italian formatori in Britain. The Board of Education supported Ryan’s assessment of the situation and communicated to the Treasury that they would keep one boy learner position unfilled but would not be prepared to lose any men as the Department had £500 worth of orders to fulfil and a steady stream of new orders were being received.78 The Treasury replied that they understood that the total number of formatori employed was fourteen, which included three temporary men taken on during 1928 and up to five working at the British Museum. The Board of Education were instructed to reduce the workforce to eleven by not replacing outgoing men, although they were allowed for this number to rise to twelve without consulting the Treasury if additional assistance was required.79

152

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

All at the Board of Education and Victoria and Albert Museum agreed that they could not accept such a reduction and asked that the Treasury trust their judgement.80 The Treasury capitulated but warned that should the Department fail to show a profit, the matter would be revisited.81 The situation did not improve and in March 1933, the Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Eric Maclagan, wrote a confidential letter to his equivalent at the British Museum, George Francis Hill, which noted ‘continual difficulties’ with the Department, which were ‘naturally becoming more acute with the general falling off of business’. It was becoming clear that the whole operation would have to be rethought and Maclagan’s solution was to suggest that the manufacture and supply of casts be undertaken at the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of their normal activities, without the separate trading account which left them at the mercy of the Treasury. Maclagan also proposed that the British Museum take over the manufacture and supply of casts from object in their collection, rather than maintain the connection with the Department.82 Hill agreed in principle, on the condition that they not be hampered by a separate trading account and find themselves in the same position.83 In connection with these thoughts, the question of Ryan’s retirement was revisited too. The Museum Superintendent J. P. Willcock noted that Ryan would not be eligible for the payment of a gratuity until August 1936 when he would be sixty-nine years old and he recommended that ‘steps be taken to terminate his engagement’, with 30 April 1934 suggested as an appropriate date on which to end his contract. Although they were only obliged to give one month’s notice, it was clear that they would be criticized if they did not give a full year as was the standard for notice of retirement. In the meantime, an assistant manager had been recruited towards the end of 1929, Mr Hagger, who would be given a trial as manager on Ryan’s departure, although he was not considered an entirely worthy replacement.84 Maclagan agreed with Willcock’s assessment and thought it probable that Ryan might ‘again appeal to his influential supporters outside for a further prolongation of service in view of the fact that they have been officially informed that there is no possibility of his being given a pension. … He will, if he is fully aware of the facts, probably press for his retention until the Autumn of 1936, when he will be eligible for a gratuity.’ Maclagan wanted Ryan to receive a gratuity but saw that the Department was in real danger of being closed having recorded losses of £1,760 in the financial year 1932–33.85 In August 1933, it was proposed that the Department for the Sale of Casts be fundamentally reorganized. From 1 April 1934, the maintenance of the



Casting Aside

153

Department as a separate trading concern would be brought to an end – as had long been sought – with a skeleton staff retained to fulfil orders for schools and schools of art, museums and museum visitors only. The reorganization resulted in termination of the employment of both the manager, Ryan, and assistant manager, Hagger, and the transfer of two formatori (the Prescotts) to the British Museum.86 At least for Ryan, his ‘abolition of office’ finally entitled him to receive a small gratuity at the end of his service. A foreman and five craftsmen, learners and boy learners would remain with the Department, although their pay and conditions would be adjusted.87 A catalogue saleswoman would be engaged to work in the casts showroom, but one formatore and two learners were to be redeployed elsewhere in the Museum and at the Royal College of Art.88 The Department for the Supply of Casts was to be brought under the direction of the Department of Architecture and Sculpture and the supply of casts was to be conducted on the same model and the supply of photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In addition to the separation of moulds derived from the collections of the British Museum, the business of supplying casts from moulds from objects at the Natural History Museum was also set to end.89 On 1 April 1936, the Victoria and Albert Museum published a revised catalogue of plaster casts with a notice to inform prospective customers of the changes that had taken place in the composition of the operation. The catalogue omitted the elementaries, fruits, leaves and vegetables, fish, vases, shells, heads, parts of animals and birds in relief that had been celebrated components of the stock for almost a century, but noted that the moulds had been preserved and a separate list was available on request90 (Figure 6.4). In some ways, the absorption of the Department for the Supply of Casts into the normal activities of the Victoria and Albert Museum – without the separate trading account that bound them to the Treasury required the operation to run on a commercial basis and resulted in a demoralized workforce subject to worse pay and conditions than their peers – was the final resolution of the ambitions that had been held by the group that sought to rescue D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd. during the First World War. The educational imperative had returned now that profit was a secondary concern and the remaining formatori were at last to be treated in the same way as regular employees of the Museum. Although the number of workmen and the diversity of their work had diminished, the recalibrated operation appeared to be secure and it was – for a time. It continued through the Second World War but again the problem of financial losses returned.

154

Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Figure 6.4  ‘The cast-making workshop at the Victoria and Albert Museum’, c. 1940s. Photograph. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Unlike the situation during and immediately after the First World War, it was much more difficult to make a strong case to continue their work during a time that saw the widespread destruction and disposal of plaster cast collections in museums in Britain and North America. In art education too the paradigm was shifting towards what would become known as Basic Design – a pedagogy entirely opposed to the South Kensington approach characterized by the copying of plaster casts from the antique.91 In 1951, exactly 100 years after Domenico Brucciani entered the public consciousness with his plaster cast of the Apollo Belvedere displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Department for the Supply of Casts closed and the Brucciani lineage – however distant it was by this time – was broken.92

Conclusion The Tuscan sculptor Giovanni Duprè (1817–82) reminisced about his time with Domenico Brucciani and his family in his memoirs, first published in Italian in 1879 – the year before Brucciani died. Duprè praised Brucciani for having provided him with tools, plaster and assistance with his work, but more than



Casting Aside

155

this practical generosity, Duprè admired the hard-won reputation Brucciani had built as an Italian in Britain. He wrote: He, a stranger in a foreign land, has known how, with his activity, to acquire for himself the esteem of a people who are as tardy in conceding it as they are tenacious in keeping to it when once given. From this he derives his good fortune and enviable position.93

Duprè went on to provide the only existing account of Brucciani’s family life in the 1870s and an insight into his social and economic position during the last decade of his career: When Signor Brucciani fell in with an active and open-hearted compatriot, it brightened him up soul and body, and he often wished to have me with him. His wife and daughter united a certain English stiffness with Italian brio and frankness that they took from their husband and father. One day Brucciani and his family desired to spend the day in the country and dine in Richmond Park. Everything Brucciani did he did well; and I hope he is alive and able to do so still. He brought with him several carriages, with everything that was required for the cuisine and table – furniture, servants, food, and exquisite wines, even ice in which to keep the ices, &c. A viva to him!94

The carriages, servants, furniture, fine foods and wines are indications that the Brucciani family had the means to enjoy a comfortable life, in distinct contrast to the lives of the unnamed ‘wandering Italians’ who made and sold their plaster images on the streets while Brucciani benefited from the ready markets of schools of art, temporary exhibitions and regional, national and international museums and galleries. There is much still to learn about Domenico Brucciani, the objects produced under his name and the contexts in which they were collected and displayed. It seems improbable, for instance, that no photographs of him appear to exist – and few of the workshops and showrooms – given that plaster casts were one of the earliest subjects of early photographic technologies, coupled with Brucciani’s public profile and extensive appearances in the periodical press.95 Although the history of the Brucciani business is far from linear, that it existed in one form or another for over 150 years is exceptional. From Luigi ‘Lewis’ Brucciani’s modest workshop in Covent Garden at the end of the eighteenth century to a department of a national museum, the contribution of these generations of formatori to the material culture of Britain and beyond was prodigious.

156

Notes Preface 1 Hayden White, ‘Interpretation in history’, in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 51–75 (51).

Chapter 1 1 ‘Wandering Italians’, Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 2 February 1833, 42–4 (42). 2 ‘Wandering Italians’. 3 Lucio Sponza, Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-century Britain: Realities and Images (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988), 23, 33. 4 ‘Wandering Italians’, 44. 5 Sponza, Italian Immigrants, 76. 6 Ibid., 6. 7 Ibid., 42. 8 Tom Taylor, ed., Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from his Autobiography and Journals, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853), 47. 9 Williard Bissell Pope, ed., The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–63), 219. 10 Horace Smith, ‘The Italian image-boy’, in The Midsummer Medley. A Series of Comic Tales, Sketches, and Fugitive Vagaries in Prose and Verse, vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), 12–27. 11 Smith, ‘The Italian image-boy’, 12. 12 Ibid., 13. 13 Ibid., 14. 14 Ibid., 15–16. 15 ‘Police intelligence’, Morning Post, 15 May 1843, 7. 16 ‘The Lord Mayor and the Italian image vendor’, Examiner, 4 November 1827, 696. Reprinted from the Morning Chronicle. 17 Sarah Wise, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 1–2.

158 Notes 18 Wise, The Italian Boy, 2–4. 19 The Times, 28 July 1836, 7. 20 ‘Theft from an Italian’, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 22 June 1877, 4. 21 ‘Police Intelligence’, Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 5 January 1878, 5. 22 ‘Gleanings’, Birmingham Daily Post, 27 January 1881, 6. 23 ‘Gleanings’. 24 ‘Gleanings’, Birmingham Daily Post, 27 January 1881, 6; ‘Multum in parvo’, Liverpool Mercury, 27 January 1881, 6; ‘General news’, Edinburgh Evening News, 27 January 1881, 4. ‘News’, Western Gazette, 28 January 1881, 5; ‘Topics & general news’, Hampshire Advertiser, 29 January 1881, 2. 25 Sponza, Italian Immigrants, 232. 26 ‘Frank Weston and the Italian image boy’, Leisure Hour, 26 February 1852, 129–33. 27 ‘Frank Weston and the Italian image boy’, 131. 28 Ibid., 132. 29 Ibid., 133. 30 Sponza, Italian Immigrants, 20. 31 ‘Italy near Leather-Lane’, Telegraph, 4 September 1874, 3. 32 Lionel Lambourne, ‘The image sellers’, in The V&A album 1, edited by Roy Strong et al. (London: Templegate, 1982), 118–23 (121). 33 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (New York: Harper Brothers, 1896), 106–7. 34 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 107. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 108. 37 Ibid., 110. 38 Ibid., 118. 39 Smith, ‘The Italian image-boy’, 14. 40 ‘Sudden death’, Morning Post, 16 January 1833, 3 and Catalogue of the Splendid Collection and Stock in Trade, Fixtures, & c., of Mr. Lewis Brucciani, 5 Little Russell Street, Covent Garden, to be Disposed of on Very Moderate Terms (London: H. Robertson, 1840). 41 Letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 6 June 1838, in The Brownings’ Correspondence, edited by Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson, vol. 4 (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1986), 37–41. 42 ‘The duplication of genius: Where the copies of famous statues are made’, Graphic, 19 November 1910, 806. 43 Jacob Simon, British Bronze Sculpture Founders and Plaster Figure Makers, 18001980, http://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/british-bronze-founders-andplaster-figure-makers-1800-1980-1/british-bronze-founders-and-plaster-figuremakers-1800-1980-b.php#BR

Notes

159

44 Correspondence, 22 October–3 November 1841. MS papers of the Prime Ministers of Great Britain, series two: Sir Robert Peel: part three: additional manuscripts 40485-40521 40493. British Library. Nineteenth century collections online. http:// tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/47kmd0 45 D. Brucciani, Catalogue of Casts for Sale by D. Brucciani, 5, Little Russell Street, Covent Garden, London (London: H Flint, undated but before 1860), 32. See also Catalogue of Reproductions of Antique and Modern Sculpture on Sale at D. Brucciani’s Galleria delle Belle Arti, 40 Russell Street, Covent Garden, London (London: H Flint, 1864), 38. 46 ‘A catalogue of the splendid works contained in the Glyptotheca, or Museum of Sculpture, at the Royal Colosseum, Regent’s Park’ in A Description of the Royal Colosseum: Re-opened M.DCCC.XLV., under the patronage of Her Majesty the Queen & His Royal Highness Prince Albert: re-embellished in 1851 (London: G. Cole, 1853), 9–10. Brucciani’s bust of Wellington was also displayed in the Glyptotheca. 47 Marriages solomnized in the Parish of Saint Giles in the Fields in the County of Middlesex in the Year 1823, 612. 48 John Kenworthy-Browne referred to Domenico Brucciani as ‘David Brucciani’ in his otherwise excellent article on the plaster casts of the Crystal Palace, but this is not a name that Brucciani used professionally. See John Kenworthy-Browne, ‘Plaster casts for the Crystal Palace, Sydenham’, Sculpture Journal, 15.2 (2006): 173–98 (182). Domenico’s name was occasionally misspelt ‘Dominic’ during his lifetime. See, for instance, Reports on the Paris Universal Exhibition, 1867 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1868), 185 and Carl Engel, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Instruments in the South Kensington Museum (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1874), 116. 49 ‘Brucciani’s collection of busts’, Standard, 23 November 1863, 3. 50 ‘Partnerships dissolved’, London Gazette, 20 March 1857, 1074. 51 See Jacob Simon, ‘Plaster figure makers: A short history’, http://www.npg.org.uk/ research/programmes/plaster-figure-makers-history.php and Peter Malone, ‘How the Smiths made a living’ in Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, edited by Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 163–77 (167). 52 ‘Notes and queries’, Blackburn Standard, 6 August 1887, 2. 53 For representative reports on the crime, see ‘Police intelligence. Bow-street’, Morning Post, 5 June 1861, 7; ‘Notes of the week’, Critic, 8 June 1861, 721; ‘Law and police’, Illustrated London News, 6 July 1861, 3; and ‘The robbery from the Royal Academy’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 7 July 1861, 4. 54 Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their Work from Its Foundation in 1769 to 1904, vol. 5 (London: Henry Graves

160 Notes and Co. Ltd. and George Bell and Sons, 1906), 47 and ‘Fine art at the Royal Albert Hall’, Standard, 30 May 1882, 2. 55 ‘The duplication of genius’, 806. 56 See Ian Graham, Alfred Maudslay and the Maya: A Biography (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 110 and Jacob Simon, ‘Lorenzo Giuntini’, British Bronze Sculpture Founders and Plaster Figure Makers, 1800-1980, http://www. npg.org.uk/research/programmes/british-bronze-founders-and-plaster-figuremakers-1800-1980-1/british-bronze-founders-and-plaster-figure-makers-18001980-g.php 57 Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts, 245. 58 Aileen Dawson, Portrait Sculpture: A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection, c. 1675-1975 (London: British Museum Press, 1999), 137–40. 59 ‘Casts from sculptures at Persepolis’, The Times, 9 September 1892, 5. 60 Ibid. See also Shelley E. Garrigan, Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of National Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 76. 61 Society of Friends of Foreigners in Distress, An Account of the Society. For the Year 1883 (London: Printed by Wertheimer, Lea and Co., 1883), 126. 62 ‘The Italian Benevolent Society’, Standard, 4 February 1869, 6. 63 ‘Mills v. Finili’, Standard, 30 May 1892, 3. 64 ‘Dead men’s faces: A visit to Mr. Finili’, Pall Mall Gazette, 6 January 1892, 3. 65 See Chapter 6. 66 Sponza, Italian Immigrants, 119.

Chapter 2 1 Anthony Burton, ‘The uses of the South Kensington art collections’, Journal of the History of Collections, 14 (2002): 79–95 (89). 2 See William Ewart, Report from Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures: Together with the Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix (London: House of Commons Papers, 1835) and William Ewart, Report from the Select Committee on Arts and their Connexion with Manufactures; with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index (London: House of Commons Papers, 1836). Two canonical secondary accounts of the Schools of Design are Quentin Bell, The Schools of Design (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963) and Stuart Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education (London: University of London Press, 1970). The economic determinism of these two accounts has been questioned by Peter Cunningham’s ‘The formation of the schools of design, 1830–50, with special reference to

Notes

161

Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leeds, 1979) and further extended by Mervyn Romans’, ‘Political, economic, social and cultural determinants in the history of early to mid-nineteenth-century art and design education in Britain’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Central England, 1998). Romans argued that a more compelling motivation for the establishment of a general system of art and design education was the diffusion of ‘correct’ taste. Malcolm Quinn welcomed the revisionism of Cunningham and Romans, though emphasized the importance of understanding the meaning of ‘economic necessity’ in the context of the politics of the period. See Malcolm Quinn, ‘The political economic necessity of the art school 1835-52’, International Journal of Art & Design Education, 30.1 (2011): 62–70. In contrast, Thomas Gretton subjected the minutes and reports of the Select Committee to semiotic scrutiny to argue against their position as a straightforward foundation for the Schools of Design. See Thomas Gretton, ‘ “Art is cheaper and goes lower in France”. The language of the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Arts and Principles of Design of 1835-1836’, in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790-1850, edited by Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 84–100. 3 Ewart, Report from Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures, 21. 4 Ibid., 41. 5 Ewart, Report from the Select Committee on Arts and their Connexion with Manufactures, v. 6 Henry Cole, ‘An introductory lecture on the facilities afforded to all classes of the community for obtaining education in art’, in Address of the Superintendent of the Department of Practical Art: Delivered in the Theatre at Marlborough House, edited by Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave (London: Chapman & Hall, 1853), 4–38 (25). 7 Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 170–1. 8 First report of the Department of Practical Art (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1853), 383. The classes were divided into three courses across each academic year. The first two were composed of twelve demonstrations each, costing 6d. each or 5s. for the course. The third, on moulding and casting from nature, was composed of sixteen demonstrations at 7s. for the course or 6d. for each demonstration. The fee for the whole set of classes was 12s. Brucciani was also engaged to deliver an annual lecture ‘on Moulding, &c’. The fee per lecture was 6d; the same as a practical demonstration. 9 Ibid., 334. 10 D. Brucciani, Catalogue of Casts for Sale by D. Brucciani, 3. 11 D. Brucciani and Co., Catalogue of Casts for Schools, Approved with the Science and Art Department (London: C. Stutter, 1889), 32.

162 Notes 12 D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Catalogue of Casts for Schools Which the Board of Education Considers Suitable for Schools and Classes Receiving Grants from it (London: Hudson & Kearns, 1906). 13 Letter from solicitors Fielder and Sumner to Major General John Donnelly, secretary Department of Science and Art, dated 23 April 1894. Nominal file for D. Brucciani & Co. Ltd. 1868–1994, MA/1/B3087, 33755-94, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive. 14 See Bell, The Schools of Design, 74; Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 30–1 and Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 81. 15 Henry Sass in response to question 234: ‘Do you consider this [anatomical truth] particularly manifest in the remains of antiquity?’ Ewart, Report from the Select Committee on Arts and Their Connexion with Manufactures, 23. 16 Bell, The Schools of Design, 35. 17 Paul Wood, ‘Between god and the saucepan: Some aspects of art education in England from the mid-nineteenth century until today’, in The History of British art: 1870-now, edited by Chris Stephens, vol. 3 (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 164–87 (169). 18 David Ramsey Hay in response to question number 429: ‘What do you consider the best line of study for persons intended for a profession like your own, or best adapted to improve the taste of the working class generally?’ Report from the Select Committee on Arts and their Connexion with Manufactures, 39. 19 Hay in response to Ewart, Report from the Select Committee on Arts and Their Connexion with Manufactures, 43. 20 Rafael Cardoso Denis, ‘Hay, David Ramsay (1798–1866)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). http://0-www.oxforddnb.com. wam.leeds.ac.uk/view/article/12712, accessed 27 February 2012 21 Council of the school of design, Third Report of the Council of the School of Design, for the Year 1843-44 (London: printed by William Clowes and Sons for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1844), 9. 22 Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 89. 23 The naming of this episode appears to have been a deliberate allusion to the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. 24 George Fairfull Smith, ‘Wilson, Charles Heath (1809–1882)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/29644 25 Barbara Coffey Bryant, ‘Herbert, John Rogers (1810–1890)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, May 2008. http://0www.oxforddnb.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk/view/article/13038 26 ‘The school of bad designs’, Punch, 9 August 1845, 70.

Notes

163

27 ‘The school of design’, Punch, 5 July 1845, 21. 28 ‘The school of design’, 21. 29 Council of the school of design, Fourth Report of the Council of the School of Design, for the Year 1844-45 (London: printed by William Clowes and Sons for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1845), 8. 30 Council of the school of design, 8. 31 ‘Our weekly gossip’, Athenæum, 916 (1845), 490. As noted by Quentin Bell, the Spectator and the Builder supported the cause of the students. 32 For further discussion of the ‘rebellion of forty-five’, see Bell, The Schools of Design, 154–74; Frayling, The Royal College of Art, 23–8; Kriegel, Grand Designs, 39–43 and Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 96–8. 33 The correspondence of the students was published as a pamphlet, ‘Letters and depositions of the students of the school of design’ (London, 1845). 34 Bell, The Schools of Design, 73. 35 Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 74. 36 Ibid., 195. 37 Charles Eastlake, Daniel Maclise and Richard Redgrave, Reports on the Works Sent from Various Schools of Ornamental Art, and Exhibited at Marlborough House in May 1852 (London: printed by George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1852), 17–8. These comments were made by the external examiners responsible for the assessment of the work sent from across the national network of Schools of Design, which were briefly renamed Schools of Ornamental Art under the Department of Practical Art in 1852. All three were deeply embedded in the traditions and activities of the Royal Academy. Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793–1865) had been elected president of the Royal Academy in 1850, the history painter Daniel Maclise (bap. 1806- d. 1870) studied at the Royal Academy Schools and taught there during the 1850s and Richard Redgrave (1804– 88) was also educated and exhibited under this system and an elected Academician from 1851. This disparity echoes the situation during the early years of the Schools of Design discussed in the previous section. 38 Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 244–9. 39 Marcia Pointon, William Dyce 1806-1864: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Frayling, ‘A grand tour’ and ‘Dyce at Somerset House’, 17–21; Macdonald, ‘The Philosophies of Haydon, Dyce, and Wilson’, 116–28 and Bell, ‘The Dyce experiment’, 77–98. 40 Kriegel, Grand Designs, 34. 41 Frayling, The Royal College of Art, 22. 42 Rafael Cardoso Denis, ‘A preliminary survey of drawing manuals in Britain c. 18251875’, in Histories of Art and Design Education, edited by Mervyn Romans (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 19–32 (24).

164 Notes 43 Richard Carline, Draw They Must: A History of the Teaching and Examining of Art (London: Arnold, 1968), 78. 44 Minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), committee meeting 12 October 1846, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23. 45 Ralph N. Wornum, Analysis of Ornament. The Characteristics of Styles: An Introduction to the Study of the History of Ornamental Art (London: Chapman and Hall, 1856), 15. 46 Mitchell, Address to the Subscribers and Students, 8–9. 47 ‘Schools of design’, Leeds Mercury, 19 April 1845, 7. 48 Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society minute book (1841–46), Mr Thurnell’s reply to the mayor, 24 August 1841, 2–3, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/1. 49 Several authors have commented on the similarity between the existing provision of drawing classes at mechanics’ institutions and the schools of design. See Bell, The Schools of Design, 48–9; Adrian Rifkin, ‘Success disavowed: The schools of design in mid-nineteenth-century Britain (an allegory)’, Journal of Design History, 1.2 (1988): 89–102 (91) and Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 37–8 and 75. 50 Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society minute book (1841–46), Mr. Thurnell’s reply to the mayor, 24 August 1841, 2–3, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/1. 51 Council of the school of design, Report of the Council of the School of Design, 1842-3 (London: printed by William Clowes and Sons for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1843), 16. See also Bell, The Schools of Design, 65 and Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 70. 52 Council of the school of design, 16. 53 During the debates on the necessity of drawing from the figure, the Council of the Schools of Design had decided that ‘for many – such as designers of patterns for silk, cotton, and woollen manufactures, paper hanging, &c. – the study of the Figure is not required’. See The Third Report of the Council of the School of Design, for the Year 1843-44 (London: printed by William Clowes and Sons for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1844) 9–10. 54 Bell, The Schools of Design, 125 and Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 103. 55 See Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave, Address of the Superintendent of the Department of Practical Art: Delivered in the Theatre at Marlborough House (London: Chapman and Hall, 1853). 56 Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society minute book (1846–47), committee meeting 4 August 1846, 112, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/2.

Notes

165

57 Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society minute book (1846–47), special meeting of the committee, 6 April 1846, 34–6, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/2. 58 Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society minute book (1846–47), special committee meeting 6 April 1846, 34, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/2. 59 Regulation three of the general conditions enjoined by the council relative to the establishment, maintenance, and management of, provincial schools. 60 ‘Leeds school of design’, Leeds Mercury, 11 April 1846, 5. 61 Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society minute book (1846–47), special meeting of the committee, 6 April 1846, 35–6, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/2. 62 Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society minute book (1846–47), special meeting of the committee, 29 August 1846, 106, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/2. 63 Minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), committee meeting 12 October 1846, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23. 64 The cost of these supplementary plaster casts were as follows: Fighting Gladiator: £5 5s., Venus Milos: £5 5s., Germanicus: £6 6s., Venus de Medici: £4 4s., Discobolus: £5 5s., Parts of Figures: £4, Total: £30 10s. Minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), committee meeting 2 November 1846, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23. 65 Minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), committee meeting 27 November 1846, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23. 66 Minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), committee meeting 9 January 1847, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23. See also Anne L. Poulet et al., Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment (Washington: National Gallery of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2003), 63–6. The ‘Collection of casts for use in drawing schools’ supplied by the firm of Domenico Brucciani lists an ‘Anatomical Statue, by Houdon’ for sale at £6 6s., see Department of Practical Art, First Report of the Department of Practical Art (London: printed by George E. Eyre & William Spottiswoode for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1853), 73. 67 The Leeds School of Design was originally intended to open on 30 November 1846, but actually opened on 11 January 1847. See minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), committee meetings 16 November 1846 and 4 January 1847, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23. 68 Minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), committee meeting 2 November 1846, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23.

166 Notes 69 Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society minute book (1846–47), committee meeting 2 February 1847, 208. West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/2. 70 ‘The Casts presented by Mr. TW Green consist of 1,2,3,4,5,6 Casts of Poppy Heads from the Choir of Lincoln Cathedral – circa 1400 early perpendicular. 7 Casts of Poppy Head from the Church of West Ardsley near Wakefield – late perpendicular 15 Century. 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 Casts of the Ellbows [sic] of Stalls from the Choir of Lincoln Cathedral – circa 1400’, minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), committee meeting 14 June 1847, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23. An advert dated 11 July 1844 listed the stock of TW Green as ‘to be disposed of ’ in Bent’s Monthly Literary Advertiser, no. 482 (10 August 1844), 122. 71 By the 1850s the teaching collections were beginning to include objects beyond antiquity or modern manufactures. Clive Wainwright noted that Pugin was a catalyst for the collection of medieval and gothic objects at the Museum of Ornamental Art between 1853 and 1854, which was substantially augmented by the acquisition of objects from the Soulages and Bernal collections between 1855 and 1857. See Clive Wainwright, ‘Principles true and false: Pugin and the foundation of the Museum of Manufactures’, The Burlington Magazine, 136 (1994): 357–64 (364). 72 ‘Leeds school of design’, Leeds Mercury, 19 June 1847, 5. 73 Minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), committee meeting 16 March 1849, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23 and Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society minute book (1848–51), special committee meeting 17 March 1849, 120. West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/3. 74 Timothy Stevens and Peter Trippi, ‘An encyclopedia of treasures: The idea of the great collection’ in A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum, edited by Malcolm Baker and Brenda Richardson (London: V&A Publications, 1997), 149–60 (150). 75 Ewart, Report from Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures, 5. 76 Minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), committee meeting 2 October 1847, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23. 77 Alex Tyrrell, ‘Sturge, Joseph (1793–1859)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, May 2009. http://0-www.oxforddnb. com.wam.leeds.ac.uk/view/article/26746. This donation was noted on 2 October 1847, the year in which Sturge unsuccessfully contested a parliamentary election at Leeds. 78 A. C. Bickley, ‘Harvey, Thomas (1812–1884)’, rev. Alex Tyrrell, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). http://0-www.oxforddnb.com. wam.leeds.ac.uk/view/article/12529

Notes

167

79 Bell, The Schools of Design, 103, 167; Frayling, 24 and Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 93, 102. 80 Minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), com­ mittee meeting 24 November 1847, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23. 81 Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society, Annual Report of the Committee of the Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society (Leeds: Webb, Millington & Co., 1848), 6. 82 Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society, 8–9. 83 Minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), school of design committee 29 April 1850, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23. 84 Bell, The Schools of Design, 65. 85 The class for training masters for schools of art was established at Somerset House in 1852 and transferred to Marlborough House in 1853. See Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 163. 86 ‘Leeds school of design’, Leeds Mercury, 12 December 1846, 8. 87 Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 110. See also Hamish Miles, ‘Nursey, Perry (bap. 1771, d. 1840)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.wam.leeds.ac.uk/ view/article/58314, accessed 25 June 2012 88 ‘School of Design’, Leeds Mercury, 3 October 1846, 8. 89 Minutes of the subcommittee of the Leeds school of design (1844–54), committee meeting 24 March 1848, West Yorkshire Archive Service Leeds, WYL368/23. Nursey went on to teach at the Belfast and Norwich Schools of Design and was replaced by Thomas Gaunt, described as ‘a gentleman of considerable experience in the plan of instruction sanctioned by the Government’ in the ‘Report of the Committee of the Government School of Design, Leeds; for the year ending December, 1849’, Annual Report of the Committee of the Leeds Mechanics’ Institution and Literary Society (Leeds: printed by John Mills, 1850), 3. 90 ‘Leeds School of Design’, Leeds Mercury, 12 December 1846, 8.

Chapter 3 1 ‘The duplication of genius’, 806. 2 For a foundation in the vast and varied literature on the Great Exhibition, see, for instance, Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999); Louise Purbrick, ed.,

168 Notes The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) and Michael Leapman, The World for a Shilling: How the Great Exhibition of 1851 Shaped a Nation (London: Review, 2002). For the most comprehensive account of the place of classical sculpture at the second incarnation of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, see Kate Nichols, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854-1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For Brucciani’s contribution to the displays at the Crystal Palace, see Kenworthy-Browne, ‘Plaster casts for the Crystal Palace, Sydenham’, 173–98 and Rebecca Wade, ‘The production and display of Domenico Brucciani’s plaster cast of Hubert Le Sueur’s equestrian statue of Charles I’, Sculpture Journal, 23.2 (2014): 250–5. 3 See Lyn Pykett, ‘Reading the periodical press: text and context’, in Investigating Victorian journalism, edited by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones and Lionel Madden (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 3–18 (7). 4 Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny noted that ‘even as late as 1850 the Apollo Belvedere was certainly still widely considered to be among the half dozen greatest works of art in the world’. See Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the antique (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1981), 150. 5 ‘The Great Exhibition. Sculpture, &c.’, Standard, 5 May 1851, 1. 6 ‘Brucciani’s studio’, Sunday Times, 10 August 1851, 5. 7 Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760-1800 (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 131. 8 International Exhibition 1862, Official catalogue of the Industrial Department (London: printed for Her Majesty’s Commissioners by Truscott, Son and Simmons, 1862), 83. 9 ‘The International Exhibition’, Supplement to the Daily News, 17 June 1862, 3. 10 Robert Hunt, Handbook to the Industrial Department of the International Exhibition, 1862, vol. 1 (London: Edward Stanford, 1862), 334. Robert Hunt (1807–87) was a scientist and photographer who was appointed Keeper of the Mining Record Office at the Museum of Practical Geology in 1845 and Professor of the School of Mines in 1851. 11 ‘Brucciani’s gallery of antique and modern statuary, Russell-street, Covent-garden’, Era, 24 July 1864, 12. 12 ‘Brucciani’s Galleria delle Belle Arti’, Art-Journal, 1 November 1864, 330. 13 Hunt, Handbook to the Industrial Department, p. xxvi. 14 Alison Yarrington, ‘Made in Italy: sculpture and the staging of national identities at the International Exhibition of 1862’, in Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions, edited by Manfred Pfister and Ralf Hertel (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2008), 75–99 (88). 15 For a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave was displayed, consumed and reproduced, see Martina Droth, Jason Edwards and

Notes

16 17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

169

Michael Hatt, eds, Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837-1901 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 308–27. ‘Cast of the Greek Slave’, Morning Chronicle, 19 March 1852, 5. Maureen Batkin and Martin Greenwood, ‘Copeland’, in The Parian phenomenon: a survey of Victorian Parian porcelain statuary & busts ed. by Paul Atterbury (Shepton Beauchamp: Richard Dennis, 1989), 130–98 (132). Malcolm Baker, ‘The reproductive continuum: plaster casts, paper mosaics and photographs as complementary modes of reproduction in the nineteenth-century museum’ in Plaster casts: making, collecting and displaying from classical antiquity to the present ed. by Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 485–500. ‘Cast of Powers’s Greek Slave’, John Bull, 20 March 1852, 187. ‘Mr. Cheverton’s reduction of the “Theseus” ’, Journal of Design and Manufactures, v (March–August 1851), 117. ‘Mr. Cheverton’s reduction of the “Theseus”’. ‘The Great Exhibition’, Daily News, 29 April 1851, 5. John Sproule, ed., The Irish Industrial Exhibition of 1853 (Dublin: James McGlashan, 1854), 379. ‘Arundel Society’, Athenæum, 19 March 1853, 337. ‘New photographic work of the Arundel Society’, Art-Journal, 31 January 1869, 26. Matthew Digby Wyatt, An Address Delivered in the Crystal Palace on November 3, 1855 (London: Bell and Daldy, 1855), 22. Frederic W. Maynard, Descriptive Notice of the Drawings and Publications of the Arundel Society (London: J B Nichols and Sons, 1869), 23. See Chapter 5. Catalogue of Plaster Casts (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1936), 4–5. The cost of the plaster casts of Ilissos and Theseus was £2 each, with the height recorded at 1’3” and 1’7” respectively, which correlates with the one-third scale reductions made by Cheverton and Brucciani. Advertisements & notices, Liverpool Mercury, 16 November 1852, 1. The advertisement was directed towards ‘the Nobility, Gentry, and Public generally’. Local intelligence, Liverpool Mercury, 16 November 1852, 5. Local intelligence, Liverpool Mercury, 7 December 1852, 4. ‘Cosmorama. Free-Trade Hall’, Manchester Times, 19 June 1850, 1. ‘Cosmorama. Free-Trade Hall’. Advertisements & notices, Liverpool Mercury, 29 December 1858, 1. Advertisements & notices. The models of Sayers and Heenan were reported to be ‘a spectacle which is creating some excitement in the north’, see ‘Busts of Sayers and Heenan’, Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 20 May 1860, 6.

170 Notes 38 Peter Bailey, Leisure and class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830-1885 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 25. 39 Advertisements & notices, Liverpool Mercury, 29 December 1858, 1. 40 ‘Busts of Sayers and Heenan’, Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 20 May 1860, 6. 41 ‘Brucciani’s Galleria delle Belle Arti’, Morning Post, 24 June 1864, 8. 42 ‘Mr. Brucciani’s new gallery of sculpture’, Morning Post, 25 July 1864, 5. 43 ‘Brucciani’s gallery of antique and modern statuary, Russell-street, Coventgarden’, 12. 44 Ibid. 45 ‘Mr. Brucciani’s new gallery of sculpture’, 5. 46 Ibid. 47 ‘Brucciani’s Galleria delle Belle Arti’, Art-Journal, 1 November 1864, 330. 48 For a discussion of the trajectory of the cast collection at what would become the Victoria and Albert Museum, see Diane Bilbey and Marjorie Trusted, ‘“The question of casts” – collecting and later reassessment of the cast collections at South Kensington’, in Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, edited by Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 465–83. 49 Mary Beard, ‘Casts and cast-offs: The origins of the Museum of Classical Archaeology’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 39 (1993): 1–29. 50 Rune Frederiksen and R. R. R. Smith, The Cast Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum: Catalogue of Plaster Casts of Greek and Roman Sculpture (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2011), 1. See also: Donna Carol Kurtz, The Reception of Classical Art in Britain: An Oxford Story of Plaster Casts from the Antique (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2000). 51 See, for instance, Ian Jenkins, ‘Acquisition and supply of casts of the Parthenon sculptures by the British Museum, 1835-1939’, Annual of the British School at Athens, 85 (1990): 89–114. 52 ‘Brucciani’s gallery of antique and modern statuary, Russell-street, Covent-garden’, 12. 53 ‘Galleria delle Belle Arti, Russell-street, Covent-garden’, Standard, 26 July 1864, 5. 54 Charles Dickens, ‘The uncommercial traveller’, All the Year Round, 21 July 1860, 351. 55 Quoted in Peter Malone, ‘How the Smiths made a living’, 163–77 (165). 56 ‘Brucciani’s Galleria delle Belle Arti’, Art-Journal, 1 November 1864, 330. 57 Ibid. 58 ‘Cast exhibition’, Observer, 24 July 1864, 6. 59 ‘The duplication of genius’, 806. 60 Hazel Conway, People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 33.

Notes

171

61 ‘Fete at the Horticultural Gardens’, The Times, 24 June 1864, 14. 62 Brent Elliott, The Royal Horticultural Society: A History, 1804-2004 (Chichester: Phillimore and Co Ltd., 2004), 25–6. 63 ‘International horticultural show’, Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 24 May 1866. 64 ‘Apsley-House’, The Times, 26 July 1864, 9. 65 ‘Apsley-House’. 66 Ethel Mary Hogg Wood, A History of the Polytechnic (London: Macdonald, 1965), 21–2. See also, Professor Pepper, The True History of the Ghost; and All About Metempsychosis (London: Cassell & Company, 1890). 67 See Gavin Weightman, Children of Light: How Electricity Changed Britain Forever (London: Atlantic Books, 2011), 8. 68 ‘The duplication of genius’, 806. 69 ‘The Blackpool Winter Gardens’, Illustrated London News, 20 July 1878, 66. The Brucciani catalogue lists a number of plaster casts after Canova, including Cupid and Psyche, Cupid and Psyche with Butterfly, Danzatrice, Three Graces, Hebe, Terpsichore, Venus from Florence and Venus and Mars. The following were listed after Gibson: Psyche supported by Zephyrs and Venus and statuettes of Ganymede with Eagle and Mercury. See D. Brucciani, Catalogue of Reproductions of Antique and Modern Sculpture. 70 Clare Hartwell and Nikolaus Pevsner, Lancashire: North (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2009), 145. 71 Hartwell and Pevsner, Lancashire, 144. 72 ‘Brucciani’s gallery of ancient and modern statuary’, Standard, 14 June 1860, 6. 73 D. Brucciani, Catalogue of Reproductions of Antique and Modern Sculpture. 74 Select Specimens of Austin & Seeley’s Works in Artificial Stone (London: Austin and Seeley, 1841), 1. 75 Fran Lloyd, Helen Potkin and Davina Thackara, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 283–4 and 294. 76 ‘The royal procession at the triumphal arch, London Bridge’, Illustrated London News, 21 March 1863, 321. 77 ‘Windsor and London decked and illuminated’, Builder, 14 March 1863, 182. 78 ‘Windsor and London decked and illuminated’. 79 ‘Reception of the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh’, Morning Post, 7 March 1874, 5. 80 ‘State entry into London of Her Majesty the Queen and their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh’, Graphic, 21 March 1874, 270. 81 ‘Brucciani’s collection of busts’, 3. 82 Lord Edward Gleichen, London’s Open-air Statuary (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), 158–9. The pedestal reads: ‘This enclosure was purchased, laid out

172 Notes

83 84 85

86

87

88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

and decorated as a garden by Albert Grant, Esqre M.P. and conveyed by him on the 2nd July 1874 to the Metropolitan Board of Works to be preserved for ever for the free use and enjoyment of the public.’ York Herald, 16 June 1874, 6; Orchestra, 26 June 1874, 201; ‘Painting and sculpture’, British Architect, 3 July 1874, 8 and ‘Miscellaneous’, London Reader, 11 July 1874, 263. ‘Leicester-Square garden’, Illustrated London News, 4 July 1874, 6. The nearest corroboration of Brucciani’s involvement in the Leicester Square scheme comes from a vague and unattributed reference to ‘a reliable Italian craftsman’ in John Blackwood, London’s immortals: the complete outdoor commemorative statues (London: Savoy Press, 1989), 120. International Exhibition 1862, Official Catalogue of the Fine Art Department (London: printed for Her Majesty’s Commissioners by Truscott, Son and Simmons, 1862), 143. Fontana exhibited twenty two works in seventeen exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts. See ‘Giovanni Fontana’, Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011. http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person. php?id=msib3_1215437143 ‘It will be seen by the advertisement that D. Brucciani, of London, has opened premises in Bold-street, where he has on sale an assortment of statues, statuettes, bust, &c., in marble, plaster, and alabaster.’ Local intelligence, Liverpool Mercury, 16 November 1852, 5. ‘Return of the Prince of Wales’, York Herald, 13 May 1876, 5. ‘The Return of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales’, Graphic, 20 May 1876, 482–3. ‘Alexandra Palace’, Musical World, 7 June 1873, 376. ‘Opening of the Alexandra Palace’, Le Follet: Journal du Grand Monde, Fashion, Polite Literature, Beaux Arts &c. &c., 1 June 1873, 48. ‘Alexandra Palace’, Musical World, 7 June 1873, 376. ‘Opening of the Alexandra Palace: Contents of the Palace’, Observer, 25 May 1873, 3. ‘The Alexandra Palace’, The Times, 11 March 1875, 4. ‘The new Alexandra Palace’, Morning Post, 11 March 1875, 3. ‘Opening of the Alexandra Palace’, Morning Post, 3 May 1875, 6.

Chapter 4 1 ‘Sudden death’, 3. 2 Matthew Mackintosh, Stage Reminiscences: Being Recollections, Chiefly Personal, of Celebrated Theatrical & Musical Performers During the Last Forty Years. By an Old Stager (Glasgow: J Hedderwick & son, 1866), 227.

Notes

173

3 Peter Thomson, ‘Kean, Edmund (1787–1833)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2015. http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/15204 4 Laurence Hutton and Isabel Moore, Talks in a Library with Laurence Hutton, Recorded by Isabel Moore (New York; London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1905), 206–7. 5 Laurence Hutton, Portraits in Plaster, from the Collection of Laurence Hutton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), 23–4. 6 ‘Dr. Elliotson on the phrenological development and character of Good, the murderer. To the Editor of the Medical Times’, Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 11 June 1842, 5. Elliotson had established the London Phrenological Society in 1823 and was its first President. See also Sarah Wise, ‘The Use of the Dead to the Living’, in The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London (London: Pimlico, 2005), 235–51. 7 Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 52. 8 The 1851, Census for England and Wales gave Casci’s age as forty. It recorded his place of birth as Italy and current residence as 3 Harford Place, Strand, alongside his thirty-eight-year-old Irish-born wife Margaret and thirteen-year-old daughter Mary Ann. 9 Only two anonymous death masks appear in a later Brucciani catalogue, referred to as ‘2848 Female, from death’ (priced at 4s.) and ‘2934 Male, with neck, from death’ (priced at 7s. 6d.). See ‘Masks & sections of the face, feet, hands, arms, legs, &c.’ in D. Brucciani & Co., Ltd., Catalogue of Casts for Schools (London: Board of Education, 1906), 11. The female mask is illustrated on p. 10 and is clearly a reproduction of the famous L’Inconnue de la Seine (Unknown Woman of the Seine) associated with the Franco-Italian Lorenzi firm of cast makers based in Paris. The cast enjoyed popularity in artistic and literary circles in the last decade of the nineteenth century and into the first quarter of the twentieth century. For an account of the cultural significance and mythologies of this object, see AnneGaëlle Saliot, The Drowned Muse: Casting the Unknown Woman across the Tides of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 10 For a representative article on the gruesome details of the crime, see ‘Horrible murder and mutilation of a female’, Morning Post, 8 April 1842, 7. 11 ‘Examination of Good, the murderer’, Standard, 18 April 1842, 2. The reference to Greenacre was James Greenacre, who was executed for the murder of his fiancée Hannah Brown in 1837. 12 Ibid. 13 ‘Execution of Daniel Good’, Illustrated London News, 21 May 1842, 32.

174 Notes 14 Nicole Rafter, The Criminal Brain: Understanding Biological Theories of Crime (New York: NYU Press, 2008), 44. 15 Marcia Pointon, ‘Casts, imprints, and the deathliness of things: Artifacts at the edge’, Art Bulletin, 96.2 (2014): 170–95 (188). 16 ‘Intelligence’, Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science, vol. xvi (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart & Co., 1843), 89. 17 James P. Browne, ‘Memoir of the late Mr James De Ville’, Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science, vol. xix (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart & Co., 1846), 329–44. 18 Browne, ‘Memoir of the late Mr James De Ville’, 333–4. 19 ‘Brindley’s Anti-phrenological lectures in London’, Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science, vol. xv (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart & Co., 1842), 280–3. 20 ‘Execution of Daniel Good’, Illustrated London News, 28 May 1842, 35. 21 On the relationship between Elliotson and Symes, see Fred Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 61–2. 22 ‘The head of Good the murderer’, Medical Times, 7 January 1843, 214. 23 Between October 2015 and April 2016 the Museum of London displayed around six hundred objects from the Crime Museum for the first time as part of the exhibition The Crime Museum Uncovered. Museum of London Press Release dated 19 March 2015. 24 Hutton, Portraits in Plaster, 85–6. 25 Hutton and Moore, Talks in a Library with Laurence Hutton, 211–2. 26 Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England, 24. 27 James Grant Wilson, Thackeray in the United States 1852-3, 1855-6, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1904), 189. 28 Steve Edwards, The Making of English Photography: Allegories (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 44. 29 Pointon, ‘Casts, imprints, and the deathliness of things’, 177. 30 Hutton and Moore, Talks in a Library with Laurence Hutton, 207. 31 ‘Caproni and another (trading as D. Brucciani) v. Alberti’, The Times, 10 December 1891, 13. 32 The oval form of the Hutton masks can be seen in the Brucciani after cast of the death mask of Oliver Cromwell, purchased by the National Portrait Gallery in 1899. 33 Napoleon III had visited Brucciani’s showroom in 1863 and it was reported that he ‘expressed great satisfaction at viewing the collection of works of art’, see Era, 4 October 1863, 13. 34 ‘The late Emperor Napoleon’, Daily News, 14 January 1873, 3. 35 Pointon, ‘Casts, Imprints, and the Deathliness of Things’, 177.

Notes

175

36 ‘The late Emperor Napoleon’, 3. 37 Édouard Papet, ‘The Imperial couple’, in The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, edited by James David Draper and Édouard Papet (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014), 213–21 (218). 38 ‘M. Carpaux has made from the Prince Imperial a wonderfully truthful drawing of the Emperor as he lies in his coffin, and has also been commissioned to execute a bust from the mask taken by Signor Brucciani’, ‘On-dits and facts of the month’, Treasury of Literature and The Ladies’ Treasury, 1 February 1873, 111. See also Papet, ‘The Imperial couple’, 221. 39 ‘The duplication of genius’, 806. 40 In a letter to the Standard, Finili corrected a previous report that he was a ‘street modeller’ when he first worked for the sculptor Joseph Boehm. He wrote: ‘When I first did business with Mr. Boehm, I was chief moulder in the firm of Mr. Brucciani, of Russell-street, Covent-garden, and a shop-keeper in Hatton-wall, Holborn.’ ‘Mills v. Finili’, 3. 41 ‘Dead men’s faces’, 3. 42 Ibid. 43 Letter from William Rossetti to William Bell Scott, 13 April 1882. 44 William Michael Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, vol. 1 (London: Ellis & Elvey, 1895), 400–1. 45 William Michael Rossetti, ‘The portraits of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. – III’, Magazine of Art, January 1889, 139. 46 Hutton, Portraits in Plaster, 122. 47 Thomas Hall Caine, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Elliot Stock, 1882), 254. 48 Frederic James Shields, The Life and Letters of Frederic Shields (London: Longmans, Green & Company, 1912), 277. 49 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 401. 50 Rossetti, ‘The portraits of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, 139. 51 ‘Hands that have done things’, Chicago Tribune, 28 August 1904, 54. 52 Pointon, ‘Casts, Imprints, and the Deathliness of Things’, 188. 53 Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England, 35–6. 54 ‘Grand Casino at the Adelaide Gallery, Strand’, Morning Post, 5 October 1846, 5. 55 Albert Smith, ed., ‘The Casino’, in Sketches of London Life and Character (London: Dean & Son, 1849), 26–31 (26). 56 ‘The Adelaide Gallery of Practical Science’, The Times, 15 December 1843, 5. 57 ‘The Adelaide Gallery of Practical Science’. 58 Albert Smith, ‘The Casino’, in Gavarni in London: Sketches of Life and Character, with Illustrative Essays by Popular Writers (London: David Bogue, 1849), 13–6 (13). 59 Smith, ‘The Casino’, 14.

176 Notes 60 61 62 63 64

‘Grand Casino at the Adelaide Gallery, Strand’, 5. Smith, ‘The Casino’, 16. ‘Theatres, &c.’ Era, 27 April 1851, 11. ‘Dr. Kahn’s new museum and gallery of science’, Era, 6 December 1857, 11. A. W. Bates, ‘Dr Kahn’s museum: obscene anatomy in Victorian London’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 99.12 (2006): 618–24. 65 ‘Indecent exhibitions’, Association Medical Journal, 9 December 1853, 1076. 66 ‘The indecency of the exhibition of Dr. Kahn’s museum. Letter from W. B. Kesteven, Esq., to the Editor’, Association Medical Journal, 9 December (1853): 1094. 67 ‘Notice to the public’, Saturday Review, 31 October 1857, 404. 68 ‘Dr. Kahn’s new museum and gallery of science’, 11. 69 ‘Notice to the public’, 404. 70 Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1978), 341. 71 Altick, The Shows of London, 342. 72 Francis Burdett Courtenay, Revelations of Quacks and Quackery: A Series of Letters by ‘Detector’, Reprinted from ‘The Medical Circular’ (London: Bailliere, Tinall & Cox, 1871), 77. 73 See ‘Dr. Kahn’s museum’ British Medical Journal, 8 February 1873, 151, ‘Prosecution Of indecent quacks’, British Medical Journal, 22 February 1873, 205 and ‘Anatomical models’, British Medical Journal, 15 March 1873, 295. 74 ‘Spiers and Pond’s Concert Hall at Margate’, Era, 8 July 1866, 11. 75 ‘The Hall-by-the-Sea – Margate’, Era, 22 July 1866, 10. 76 ‘The minor theatres of London’, Atlantic Monthly, March 1870, 296. 77 Jacky Bratton, ‘Vestris , Lucia Elizabeth (1797–1856)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2008. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18331 78 ‘Marlborough-Street’, The Times, 21 January 1831, 4. 79 ‘Marlborough-Street’. 80 ‘Old Bailey, Tuesday, Feb. 22. New Court’, The Times, 23 February 1831, 6. 81 ‘Domenico Brucciani and Giovanni Graziani, of 1, Leather-lane, Holborn, plaster figure makers’ in ‘The London Gazette of Friday, March 20. Partnerships dissolved’, Morning Chronicle, 21 March 1857, p. 2. Peter Malone has noted that 1 Leather Lane ‘was consistently used from the 1830s to the early years of the twentieth century by the cast makers Marchetti, Graziani, Brucciani and Landi though it is not known if any transference of business occurred’. See Peter Malone, ‘How the Smiths Made a Living’, 167. 82 ‘Old Bailey, Tuesday, Feb. 22. New Court’, 6. 83 ‘The Hanover Square Club’, Graphic, 13 May 1876, 459.

Notes

177

84 Edward Walford, ‘Hanover Square and neighbourhood’, in Old and New London, vol. 4 (London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1878), 314–26. 85 D. Brucciani, Catalogue of Reproductions of Ancient and Modern Sculpture on Sale at D. Brucciani’s Galleria delle belle Arte, 40, Russell Street, Covent Garden, London (London: H Flint, 1864), 19–21. 86 J. Copley, ‘The Theatre in Hunslet Lane II’, in The Thoresby Miscellany, vol. 16 (Leeds: The Thoresby Society, 1979), 196–208 (202). 87 ‘New Theatre Royal, Leeds’, Builder, 12 October 1867, 752. 88 Copley, ‘The Theatre in Hunslet Lane II’, 206–7. 89 ‘The New Theatre Royal and Opera House, Leeds’, Era, 8 October 1876, 9. 90 Brucciani, Catalogue of Reproductions of Ancient and Modern Sculpture, 19–21. 91 Henry George Farmer, Memoirs of the Royal Artillery Band: Its Origin, History and Progress – An Account of Military Music in England (London: Boosey & Co., 1904), 133, 139. 92 ‘Mdlle. Titiens’, Era, 28 March 1880, 5. 93 Census returns of England and Wales, 1871. Class: RG10; Piece: 1032; Folio: 10; Page: 13; GSU roll: 827476. 94 John Augustus O’Shea, ‘Reminiscences of a ringmaster’, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 24 (September 1881): 35. 95 O’Shea, ‘Reminiscences of a ringmaster’, 77. 96 ‘Royal Agricultural Hall, Islington’, Pall Mall Gazette, 16 December 1867, 13. 97 Advertisements and notices, Standard, 21 January 1863, 1.

Chapter 5 1 In a relatively early reappraisal of a late Victorian cast collection Mary Beard traced the origins of the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge and argues that the collection revealed the distance between the nineteenth-century perception of casts as the embodiment of ‘Greek genius’ and the twentieth-century refusal to attribute any of the qualities of the original to the reproduction. See Beard, ‘Casts and cast-offs’, 3–4. 2 As part of their work with the sculpture collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Diane Bilbey and Holly Trusted (formerly Marjorie Trusted) mapped the collection of plaster casts at the South Kensington Museum from the 1860s onwards, emphasizing the crucial role of John Charles Robinson in the formation of the collection. See Bilbey and Trusted, ‘The question of casts’, 465–83. 3 See for example, Diane Bilbey, ‘The cast courts’, in European Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, edited by Paul Williamson (London: V&A, 1996)

178 Notes and Diane Bilbey and Ruth Cribb, ‘Plaster models, plaster casts, electrotypes and fictile ivories’, in The Making of Sculpture, edited by Marjorie Trusted (London: V&A, 2007). Malcolm Baker extended the analysis of facsimiles and emphasized the interconnected nature of what he has described as a ‘reproductive continuum’ of plaster casts, electrotypes, fictile ivories and paper mosaics at the South Kensington Museum. See Malcolm Baker, ‘The reproductive continuum’, 485–500. 4 British Museum original letters and papers, vol. xlii, letter from D. Brucciani to the Secretary of the British Museum, 24 October 1849, 21. For the refusal, see British Museum Trustees Minutes CE3/24, vol. xxiv, 27 October 1849, 7869. 5 Jenkins, ‘Acquisition and supply of casts of the Parthenon sculptures by the British Museum, 1835-1939’, (105). 6 British Museum original letters and papers, vol. lvii, June–August 1857, 5386, two copies. 7 British Museum original letters and papers, vol. lvii, Articles of Agreement between the Trustees of the British Museum and Mr D. Brucciani, 18 July 1857. 8 British Museum original letters and papers, vol. lvii, letter from D. Brucciani to A. Panizzi, 6 October 1857, 6201. 196 High Holborn had previously been occupied by the noted organ builder Henry Cephas Lincoln. 9 Prices of Casts from Ancient Marbles, Bronzes, etc. in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1857), compared with Prices of Casts from Ancient Marbles, Bronzes, etc. in the British Museum (London: Woodfall & Kinder, 1856). 10 See Helen Davis, ‘John Charles Robinson’s work at the South Kensington Museum, part II. From 1863-1867: consolidation and conflict’, Journal of the History of Collections, 11.1 (1999): 95–115. 11 Anthony J. Hamber, ‘A Higher Branch of the Art’: Photographing the Fine Arts in England, 1839-1880 (Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 1996), 393. 12 Stevens and Trippi, ‘An encyclopedia of treasures’, 151. 13 J. C. Robinson, Italian Sculpture of the Middle Ages and Period of the Revival of Art. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Works Forming the Above Section of the Museum, with Additional Illustrative Notices (London: Chapman & Hall, 1862), x. 14 Robinson, Italian Sculpture of the Middle Ages and Period of the Revival of Art, xi. 15 A Guide to the Art Collections of the South Kensington Museum (London: Spottiswoode, 1870), 7. 16 ‘Address’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 20 November 1874, 2. 17 Catalogues of Reproductions of Objects of Art, in Metal, Plaster, and Fictile Ivory, Chromolithography, Etching, and Photography. Selected from the South Kensington Museum, Continental Museums, and Various Other Public and Private Collections. Produced for the Use of Schools of Art, for Prizes, and for General Purposes of Public Instruction (London: printed by George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1869), 27.

Notes 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32

33 34

179

A Guide to the Art Collections of the South Kensington Museum, 35. Catalogues of Reproductions of Objects of Art, 31. A Guide to the Art Collections of the South Kensington Museum, 23–4. Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 14 August 1872, 2. Moncure Daniel Conway, Travels in South Kensington: With Notes on Decorative Art and Architecture in England (London: Harper & Brothers, 1882), 69–70. Malcolm Baker, ‘A glory to the museum: the casting of the “Pórtico de la Gloria”’, in The V&A album 1, edited by Roy Strong et al. (London: Templegate, 1982), 100–8 (101). Nominal file, D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd. 1868-1994, MA/1/B3087, report prepared by Domenico Brucciani for Henry Cole, February 1867, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive. J. Harris Stone, ‘Santiago of Galicia’, English Illustrated Magazine, 45 (1911): 10. Eleventh Report of the Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education (London: printed by George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1864), xvi. Julius Bryant, ed., Art and Design for All: The Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), 197–201. Registered packet 290, Heinz Archive and Library, National Portrait Gallery. The eighteen remaining electrotypes in the collection represent: King Henry VII (1870) NPG 290; Elizabeth of York (1870) NPG 291; Mary, Queen of Scots (1870) NPG 307; King Richard II (1873) NPG 330; Anne of Bohemia (1873) NPG 331; King Edward III (1873) NPG 332; King Henry III (1873) NPG 342; Eleanor of Castile (1873) NPG 345; Philippa of Hainault (1873) NPG 346; Queen Elizabeth I (1873) NPG 357; Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox (1873) NPG 358; Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley (1873) NPG 359; Edward, Prince of Wales (1875) NPG 396; King Henry IV (1875) NPG 397; Joanna of Navarre (1875) NPG 398; Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (c. 1875) NPG 408; King Edward II (1877) NPG 439 and Robert, Duke of Normandy (1877) NPG 440. Letter from Domenico Brucciani to George Scharf, 23 July 1869, registered packed 290, Heinz Archive and Library, National Portrait Gallery. Letter from George Scharf to the Dean of Westminster Abbey, 24 July 1869, registered packed 290, Heinz Archive and Library, National Portrait Gallery. Letter from Domenico Brucciani to the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, 30 November 1869, registered packed 290, Heinz Archive and Library, National Portrait Gallery. Register number 290, registered packed 290, Heinz Archive and Library, National Portrait Gallery. Registered packet 440, Heinz Archive and Library, National Portrait Gallery.

180 Notes 35 Care of the collection: Creating reproductions 1870-1881, Heinz Archive and Library, National Portrait Gallery, NPG7/1/2/3/4. 36 British Museum Trustees Minutes CE3/31, vol. xxxi, 24 March and 12 May 1866, 10963 and 10998. 37 British Museum original letters and papers, vol. lxxxv, letter from D. Brucciani to A. Panizzi, 21 March 1866, 2609. 38 Henry Augustus Ward, Catalogue of Casts of Fossils from the Principal Museums of Europe and America (Rochester, New York: Benton & Andrews, 1866), 71–2. 39 British Museum Trustees Minutes CE3/39, vol. xxxix, 12 June 1880, 15138–9. 40 ‘Sandow in plaster of Paris. A unique cast’, Strand Magazine, 22 (1901), 461–8. 41 ‘Sandow in plaster of Paris’, 461. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 462. 46 Ibid., 463. 47 Ibid., 465. 48 Ibid., 466. 49 Ibid., 467. 50 ‘The Leeds fine art gallery’, Leeds Mercury, 29 September 1888, 12. 51 George Birkett, A Catalogue and Handbook of Casts & Sculptures in the Permanent Collection (Leeds: Jowett & Sowry, 1899). 52 ‘Proposed Fine Art Gallery for Leeds’, Leeds Times, 31 May 1879, 3. 53 Leeds Mercury, 15 March 1883, 4. 54 Ibid. 55 Aid to provincial museums vol. 1, p. 265, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive and D. Brucciani and Co., Catalogue of Casts for Schools, Approved by the Science and Art Department (London, 1889). See also Birkett, A Catalogue and Handbook of Casts & Sculptures in the Permanent Collection (Leeds: Jowett & Sowry, 1899), 13, 15 and 16. The Dancing Faun is listed as the Clapping Faun or Satyr, the Discobolus of Myron as the Discobolus (Quoit Thrower) in Action and Hermes and the Infant Dionysus as Mercury and the Infant Bacchus. 56 Aid to provincial museums vol. 1, p. 267, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive. 57 Ibid., 268. 58 Ibid., 269. 59 Giles Waterfield, The People’s Galleries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 320. 60 Ian Cooke, ‘Colonial contexts: The changing meaning of the cast collection of the Auckland War Memorial Museum’ in Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, edited by Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 577–94 (577).

Notes

181

61 Alison Inglis, Fiona Moore and Pamela Tuckett, ‘“The auspicious commencement of so grand a design”: The opening of the Museum of Art at the Melbourne Public Library, 24 May 1861’, La Trobe, 88 (2011): 27–39 (31). 62 Inglis, Moore and Tuckett, ‘The auspicious commencement of so grand a design’, 32. 63 Ibid., 33. 64 Catalogues of the Objects of Ceramic Art and School of Design in the Melbourne Public Library (Melbourne: John Ferres, 1870?), 21. 65 Inglis, Moore and Tuckett, ‘The auspicious commencement of so grand a design’, 34. 66 Cooke, ‘Colonial contexts’, 580. 67 Ibid., 583. 68 See also Roger Blackley, ‘Plaster casts in a colonial museum’, in On Display: New Essays in Cultural Studies, edited by Anna Smith and Lydia Wevers (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004), 41–64. 69 Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 90–1. 70 Alan Wallach ‘The American cast museum: An episode in the history of the institutional definition of art’, in Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States, edited by Alan Wallach (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 38–56. 71 Wallach ‘The American cast museum’, 39. 72 Ibid., 40–1. 73 The afterlife of the Brucciani business is detailed in Chapter 6. 74 James L. Dyson, ‘Cast collecting in the United States’, in Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, edited by Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 557–75. 75 William T. Brigham, Cast Catalogue of Antique Sculpture (Boston; New York: Lee and Shepard; Lee Shepard and Dillingham, 1874). 76 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tentative List of Objects Desirable for a Collection of Casts, Sculptural and Architectural, Intended to Illustrate the History of Plastic Art (New York: De Vinne Press, 1891). 77 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of the Collection of Casts (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1908), vii. 78 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of the Collection of Casts, viii. 79 Ibid., 219; 264. In addition to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Brucciani plaster casts were also purchased by a substantial number of other North American museums and universities, including Brown University, Providence, RI; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL; Cincinnati Museum Association, OH; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; University of Kansas; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; University of Missouri, Columbia, MO; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Bernice Pauahi

182 Notes Bishop Museum, Honolulu, HI; Peabody Institute, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD; Rutgers College, New Jersey and the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI.

Chapter 6 1 British Museum Trustees Minutes CE3/39, vol. xxxix, 10 April 1880, p. 15061. The minutes pertaining to Brucciani’s death read: ‘The Principal Librarian acquainted the Trustees that Mr. Brucciani, the formatore to the Museum, died on the 8th of April. The Trustees authorised the Principal Librarian to make provisional arrangements for the safe custody of the moulds &c. belonging to the Museum; and deferred the consideration of the question of the appointment of a successor to Mr. Brucciani until Mr. Newton should return to the Museum.’ 2 ‘Obituary. The late Mr. Brucciani’, Builder, vol. 38 (1880), 556. 3 ‘Domenico Brucciani’, Standard, 25 May 1880, 8 and ‘Domenico Brucciani’, The Times, 26 May 1880, 15. 4 ‘Discoveries at Olympia’, Morning Post, 14 April 1881, 5. 5 ‘High Court of Justice. Chancery Division’, The Times, 10 December 1891, 13. 6 British Museum Trustees Minutes CE3/38, vol. xxxviii, 14 June 1879, 14724. 7 British Museum original papers CE4/177, nos. 59-1833, January to April 1880. Report by Edward Augustus Bond dated 22 April 1880, no. 1812. 8 British Museum Trustees Minutes CE3/39, vol. xxxix, 24 April 1880, 15088-9. 9 British Museum Trustees Minutes CE3/39, vol. xxxix, 26 June 1880, 15165–6. The White Wing was constructed between 1882 and 1885. 10 British Museum Trustees Minutes CE3/39, vol. xxxix, 10 July 1880, 15182–3. 11 British Museum Trustees Minutes CE3/39, vol. xxxix, 9 October 1880, 15297–8. 12 British Museum Trustees Minutes CE3/40, vol. xl, 12 March 1881, 15490. 13 Application for a Certificate of Incorporation, No. 85058, application dated 26 June 1905 and registered on 27 June 1905. National Archives, BT 31/17490/85058. 14 Copy of Register of Directors or Managers of D. Brucciani and Company, Limited, dated 4 July 1905 and registered 5 July 1905. National Archives, BT 31/17490/85058. 15 Victoria and Albert Museum Minute Paper, 26 April 1929, National Archives, ED 23/540. 16 Memorandum of Association of D. Brucciani and Company, Limited, dated 26 June 1905 and registered 27 June 1905. National Archives, BT 31/17490/85058. On 4 July 12 Debentures were issued at £100 each. Certificate of the Registration of Debentures of a Series where there is no Trust Deed, National Archives, BT 31/17490/85058.

Notes

183

17 Marriages, Solicitors’ Journal and Reporter, vol. 10 (19 May 1866), 695. ‘Mary Sumer [sic] Brucciano [sic]’ was listed as Domenico Brucciani’s ten-year-old sister in the census of 1851. Also in the household were his second wife Eliza Brucciani née Sumner, and her older sister Charlotte Sumner. 18 Memorandum of Association of D. Brucciani and Company, Limited, dated 26 June 1905 and registered 27 June 1905. National Archives, BT 31/17490/85058. 19 Agreement between the Vendors and Company, 3 July 1905, registered 8 July 1905. National Archives, BT 31/17490/85058. Paul Joseph Ryan’s leasehold for 254-248 Goswell Road began on 7 November 1901 and was due to last for 77 and a half years, less 10 days, at £600 per annum. The agreement was made between Ryan and Mark Bromet. Bromet was a speculative developer responsible for building a number of warehouses on the Charterhouse estate. See, ‘Great Sutton Street area’, in Survey of London: Volume 46, South and East Clerkenwell, edited by Philip Temple (London, 2008), 280–293. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ survey-london/vol46/pp280-293 20 Summary of Capital and Shares for D. Brucciani and Company Limited, 31 December 1906, National Archives, BT 31/17490/85058. 21 Special Resolution of D. Brucciani and Company, Limited, registered 23 September 1916, National Archives, BT 31/17490/85058. 22 Minutes of a meeting on 8 October 1915 prepared by Eric Maclagan, 3281M, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, Nominal File, D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., 1868-1994, MA/1/B3087. 23 Minutes of a meeting on 8 October 1915 prepared by Eric Maclagan, 3281M, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, Nominal file, D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., 1868-1994, MA/1/B3087. 24 Letter from Edward Poynter to Herbert Henry Asquith, National Archives, 13166/1915/30412. 25 Memorial to Herbert Henry Asquith, 16 December 1915, National Archives, 13166/1915/30412. 26 Letter from the War Office to Vaughan Nash, 21 December 1915, National Archives, 13166/1915/30412. 27 Letter from Thomas Little Heath to Edward Poynter, 30 December 1915, National Archives, 13166/1915/30412. See also ‘The Brucciani casts: help for an important art business’, The Times, 26 December 1916, 3. 28 Letter from Paul Ryan to Cecil Harcourt-Smith, 26 April 1916, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, Sir Cecil Smith’s Confidential File on Brucciani, March 1916– November 1919, 19/39. 29 ‘The Brucciani casts: Help for an important art business’, The Times, 26 December 1916, 3.

184 Notes 30 Letter from H. W. Orange to the Treasury, 23 July 1919, National Archives, 13166/1919/332416. 31 Memorandum by Cecil Harcourt-Smith, 30 January 1919, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, File Relating to the Transfer of D. Brucciani and Co. to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 184/175. 32 Memorandum by Cecil Harcourt-Smith, 30 January 1919, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, File Relating to the Transfer of D. Brucciani and Co. to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 184/175. 33 Ibid. 34 Cecil Harcourt-Smith, minutes numbered 19/469, 7 February 1919, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, File Relating to the Transfer of D. Brucciani and Co. to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 184/175. 35 Letter from Lionel Earle to Sir A. Selby-Bigge, 13 February 1919, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, File Relating to the Transfer of D. Brucciani and Co. to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 184/175. 36 Cecil Harcourt-Smith, minutes numbered 19/469, 4 March 1919, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, File Relating to the Transfer of D. Brucciani and Co. to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 184/175. 37 Sir Sidney Colvin, ‘National education in art: A collection in peril’, Observer, 13 April 1919. 38 Letter from Sir Aston Webb to H. A. L. Fisher, 8 May 1919, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, File Relating to the Transfer of D. Brucciani and Co. to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 184/175. 39 Memorandum of Interview numbered 19/250, 14 May 1919, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, File Relating to the Transfer of D. Brucciani and Co. to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 184/175. 40 Memorandum from Aston Webb to the Treasury, 3 June 1919, National Archives, 13166/1919/32416. 41 Letter from H. W. Orange to the Treasury, 23 July 1919, National Archives, 13166/1919/332416. 42 Letter from H. W. Orange to the Treasury, 30 July 1919, National Archives, 13166/1919/332416. 43 Letter from Thomas Brock to the Board of Directors of D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., 31 July 1919, National Archives, 13166/1919/32416. 44 Letter from Aston Webb to Thomas Brock, 4 October 1919, National Archives, 13166/1919/4424. 45 Letter from Thomas Little Heath to the Secretary of the Board of Education, 8 August 1919, National Archives, 13166/1919/32416. 46 Letter from the Board of Education to the Treasury, 25 October 1919, National Archives, 13166/1919/5173.

Notes

185

47 Letter from the Treasury to the Secretary of the Board of Education, 18 November 1919, National Archives, 13166/1919/32416. 48 Letter from G. L. Barstow at the Treasury to the Secretary of the Board of Education, 31 January 1920, National Archives, 13166/1920/3494. 49 Letter from H. W. Orange at the Board of Education to the Secretary of the Treasury, 21 January 1920, National Archives, 13166/1920/304. 50 Letter from M. R. N. Lamb on behalf of Aston Webb to Cecil Smith, 18 March 1920, National Archives, 13166/1920/13166. 51 Letter from Selby-Bigge at the Board of Education to the Secretary of the Treasury, 1 March 1920, National Archives, ED 23/540/482. Letter in reply from the Treasury to the Secretary of the Board of Education, 31 March 1920, National Archives, ED 23/540/13166. 52 Notice of Appointment of Liquidator, registered 12 April 1921, National Archives, BT 31/17490/85058. 53 Return of Final Winding-up Meeting of D. Brucciani and Co. Ltd., signed 18 August 1921 and registered 19 August 1921, National Archives, BT 31/17490/85058. 54 Letter from H. W. Orange at the Board of Education to the Secretary of the Treasury, 7 October 1921, National Archives, ED 23/540/3075. 55 Letter from Paul Ryan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, 25 November 1920, National Archives, ED 23/540/543. 56 Letter from F. H. Oates at the Board of Education to the Secretary of the Treasury, 26 April 1922, National Archives, ED 23/540/22/1207. 57 Letter from W. P. Hildred at the Treasury to M. G. Holmes at the Board of Education, 14 June 1923, National Archives, ED 23/540/23/2104. 58 Letter from M. G. Holmes at the Board of Education to W. P. Hildred at the Treasury, 24 June 1923, National Archives, ED 23/540/23/2104. 59 Victoria and Albert Museum Minute Paper signed by Cecil Harcourt-Smith, 12 November 1923, National Archives, ED 23/540. 60 Letter from B. P. Moore to the Treasury, 15 November 1923, National Archives, ED 23/540. 61 Letter from M. G. Holmes at the Board of Education to W. P. Hildred at the Treasury, 20 November 1923, National Archives, ED 23/540/23/3910. 62 Victoria and Albert Museum Minute Paper, 17 January 1924, National Archives, ED 23/540/24/132. 63 Victoria and Albert Museum Minute Paper, 29 January 1925, National Archives, ED 23/540/24/8725. 64 The losses for the first four years were as follows: 1921–22: £1122, 1922–23: £218, 1923–24: £291, 1924–25: £45. A £190 profit was recorded for 1925–26 and a £69

186 Notes profit for 1926–27. See Report signed off by H. Orange, 4 May 1928, National Archives, ED 23/540. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Board of Education Minute Paper, 27 April 1929, National Archives, ED 23/540/29/754. 68 Victoria and Albert Museum Minute Paper, 26 April 1929, National Archives, ED 23/540. 69 Victoria and Albert Museum Minute Paper, 7 May 1929, National Archives, ED 23/540/754. 70 Letter from R. S. Wood to the Secretary of the Treasury, 3 July 1929, National Archives, ED 23/540/29754. 71 Letter from A. E. Banham to R. S. Wood, 2 August 1929, National Archives, ED 23/540/E.12108. 72 Letter from H. E. Fass to the Secretary of the Board of Education, 13 August 1929, National Archives, ED 23/540/29/2275. 73 Letter from R. S. Wood to A. E. Banham, 10 December 1929, National Archives, ED 23/540/29/3312. 74 Letter from A. E. Banham to R. S. Wood, 1 January 1930, National Archives, ED 23/540/25. 75 Victoria and Albert Museum Minute Paper, 15 December 1930, National Archives, ED 23/540/1168. 76 Letter from R. R. Scott to the Secretary of the Board of Education, 30 December 1930, ED 23/540/31/2. 77 Paul Ryan, Board of Education Minute Paper, 28 September 1931, National Archives, ED 23/540. 78 Letter from R. S. Wood to A. E. Banham, 30 September 1931, National Archives, ED 23/540/31/2592. 79 Letter from A. E. Banham to R. S. Wood, 14 October 1931, National Archives, ED 23/540/31/2734. 80 Letter from R. S. Wood to A. E. Banham, 21 October 1931, National Archives, ED 23/540/31/2794. 81 Letter from A. E. Banham to R. S. Wood, 26 October 1931, National Archives, ED 23/540/31/2828. 82 Letter from Eric Maclagan to G. F. Hill, 8 March 1933, National Archives, ED 23/540/33/19½. 83 Letter from J. P. Willcock to R. S. Wood, 16 August 1933, National Archives, ED 23/540/33/19½. 84 Memo, 23 April 1933, National Archives, ED 23/540/33/19½. 85 Eric Maclagen, 24 April 1933, National Archives, ED 23/540/33/19½.

Notes

187

86 Ryan was given notice of the termination of his services in a letter from R. S. Wood dated 28 December 1933, with his final day with the Department to be 30 June 1934 along with the assistant manager, National Archives, ED 23/540/537. 87 Godon remained as the foreman; the two craftsmen were H. Murphy and A. H. Prescott; the learners W. H. C. French and J. P. Langhorn and the boy learner was H. Tarling. See Museum office arrangements no. 312, 17 March 1934, National Archives, ED 23/540. 88 Letter from the Treasury to the Secretary of the Board of Education, 30 January 1934, National Archives, ED 23/540/12108. 89 Museum office arrangements no. 312, 17 March 1934, National Archives, ED 23/540. 90 Victoria and Albert Museum, Catalogue of Plaster Casts and Victoria and Albert Museum, Illustrated Supplement to the Catalogue of Plaster Casts (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1936). 91 For a manifesto of the pedagogy that turned away from South Kensington and towards the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, see Richard Hamilton, Tom Hudson, Victor Pasmore and Harry Thubron, The Developing Process: Work in Progress Towards a New Foundation of Art Teaching as Developed at the Department of Fine Art, King’s College, Durham University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, and at Leeds College of Art (Durham: King’s College, 1959). For secondary interpretations of this movement see Paul Barlow, ‘Fear and loathing of the academic, or just what is it that makes the avant-garde so different, so appealing?’, in Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Rafael Cardoso Denis and Colin Trodd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 15–32, Stuart Macdonald, ‘Basic design and visual education’, in The History and Philosophy of Art Education (London: University of London Press, 1970), 365–78; Inés Plant, ‘The Leeds experiment: The story of a new creativity’, in Behind the Mosaic: One Hundred Years of Art Education, edited by Corinne Miller (Leeds: Leeds Museums and Galleries, 2003), 61–9 and Richard Yeomans, ‘Basic design and the pedagogy of Richard Hamilton’, in Histories of Art and Design Education: Collected Essays, edited by Mervyn Romans (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 195–210. 92 See National Archives ED 23/892. By 1955 most of the moulds had been transferred to the British Museum, see Timothy Clifford, ‘The plaster shops of the Rococo and NeoClassical era in Britain’, Journal of the History of Collections, 4.1 (1992): 39–65 (49). 93 Giovanni Duprè, Thoughts on Art and Autobiographical Memoirs of Giovanni Duprè; tr. from the Italian by E M Peruzzi, with an Introduction by W W Story (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1886), 280. 94 Duprè, Thoughts on Art and Autobiographical Memoirs of Giovanni Duprè, 280–1. 95 The only photographs of the interior of the Galleria delle Belle Arti at 40 Russell Street, Covent Garden, appear after Domenico Brucciani’s death, published in George Bellingham, ‘Plaster casts’, Ludgate, April 1898, 604–8.

Bibliography Primary sources Austin & Seeley, Select Specimens of Austin & Seeley’s Works in Artificial Stone (London: Austin & Seeley, 1841). Birkett, George, A Catalogue and Handbook of Casts & Sculptures in the Permanent Collection (Leeds: Jowett & Sowry, 1899). Birkett, George, A Catalogue and Handbook of Casts & Sculptures in the Permanent Collection (Leeds: Jowett & Sowry, 1909). Brigham, William T, Cast Catalogue of Antique Sculpture (Boston; New York: Lee and Shepard; Lee Shepard and Dillingham, 1874). British Museum, Prices of Casts from Ancient Marbles, Bronzes, etc. in the British Museum (London: Woodfall & Kinder, 1856). British Museum, Prices of Casts from Ancient Marbles, Bronzes, etc. in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1857). British Museum, List of Casts from Sculptures etc. in the Departments of Antiquities; Sold by Messrs. Brucciani & Co. (London: British Museum, 1905). Caine, Thomas Hall, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Elliot Stock, 1882). Catalogue of the Splendid Collection and Stock in Trade, Fixtures, &c., of Mr. Lewis Brucciani, 5 Little Russell Street, Covent Garden, to be Disposed of on Very Moderate Terms (London: H. Robertson, 1840). Catalogues of the Objects of Ceramic Art and School of Design in the Melbourne Public Library (Melbourne: John Ferres, 1870?). Cincinnati Museum Association, Catalogue of Oil Paintings and Sculpture (Cincinnati: Robert Clark & Co., 1894). Conway, Moncure Daniel, Travels in South Kensington: With Notes on Decorative Art and Architecture in England (London: Harper & Brothers, 1882). D. Brucciani, Catalogue of Casts for Sale by D. Brucciani, 5, Little Russell Street, Covent Garden, London (London: H Flint, undated but before 1860). D. Brucciani, Catalogue of Reproductions of Antique and Modern Sculpture on Sale at D. Brucciani’s Galleria delle Belle Arti, 40 Russell Street, Covent Garden, London (London: H Flint, 1864). D. Brucciani and Co., Catalogue of Casts for Schools, Approved by the Science and Art Department (London: C. Stutter, 1889).

Bibliography 189 D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Catalogue of Casts for Schools which the Board of Education Considers Suitable for Schools and Classes Receiving Grants from It (London: Hudson & Kearns, 1906). D. Brucciani and Co., Ltd., Catalogue of Casts for Schools: Including Casts of Most of the Statues which the Board of Education have Approved, in their Regulations for the Art Examinations, as Suitable for Study in Schools of Art (London: Hudson & Kearns, 1914). Department of Practical Art, First Report of the Department of Practical Art (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1853). Duprè , Giovanni, Thoughts on Art and Autobiographical Memoirs of Giovanni Duprè ; tr. from the Italian by E M Peruzzi, with an Introduction by W W Story (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1886). Ewart, William, Report from Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures: Together with the Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix (London: House of Commons Papers, 1835). Ewart, William, Report from the Select Committee on Arts and their Connexion with Manufactures; with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index (London: House of Commons Papers, 1836). Gleichen, Lord Edward, London’s Open-air Statuary (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1928). Graves, Algernon, The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their Work from its Foundation in 1769 to 1904, vol. 5 (London: Henry Graves & Co. Ltd. and George Bell & Sons, 1906). Hunt, Robert, Handbook to the Industrial Department of the International Exhibition, 1862, vol. 1 (London: Edward Stanford, 1862). Hutton, Laurence, Portraits in Plaster, from the Collection of Laurence Hutton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894). Hutton, Laurence and Isabel Moore, Talks in a Library with Laurence Hutton, Recorded by Isabel Moore (New York; London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1905). International Exhibition 1862, Medals and Honourable Mentions Awarded by the International Juries, second edition (London: printed for Her Majesty’s Commissioners by George Edward Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1862). International Exhibition 1862, Official Catalogue of the Fine Art Department (London: printed for Her Majesty’s Commissioners by Truscott, Son & Simmons, 1862). International Exhibition 1862, Official Catalogue of the Industrial Department (London: printed for Her Majesty’s Commissioners by Truscott, Son & Simmons, 1862). Maynard, Frederic W., Descriptive Notice of the Drawings and Publications of the Arundel Society (London: J B Nichols & Sons, 1869). Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tentative Lists of Objects Desirable for a Collection of Casts, Sculptural and Architectural, Intended to Illustrate the History of Plastic Art (New York: De Vinne Press, 1891).

190 Bibliography Metropolitan Museum of Art, Catalogue of the Collection of Casts (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1908). National Portrait Gallery, A List of the Paintings, Sculptures, Miniatures, &c., with 100 Illustrations (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1914). Pope, Williard Bissell, ed., The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960–63). Robinson, John Charles, Italian Sculpture of the Middle Ages and Period of the Revival of Art. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Works Forming the Above Section of the Museum, with Additional illustrative Notices (London: Chapman & Hall, 1862). Rossetti, William Michael, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, vol. 1 (London: Ellis & Elvey, 1895). Scharf, George, Historical and Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures, Busts, &c. in the National Portrait Gallery, Exhibition Road, South Kensington (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1884). Shields, Frederic James, The Life and Letters of Frederic Shields (London: Longmans, Green & Company, 1912). Smith, Albert, ed., ‘The casino’, in Gavarni in London: Sketches of Life and Character, with Illustrative Essays by Popular Writers (London: David Bogue, 1849), 13–16. Smith, Albert, ed., ‘The casino’, in Sketches of London Life and Character (London: Dean & Son, 1849), 26–31. Smith, Horace, ‘The Italian image-boy’, in The Midsummer Medley. A Series of Comic Tales, Sketches, and Fugitive Vagaries in Prose and Verse, vol. 1 (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1830), 12–27. Society of Friends of Foreigners in Distress, An Account of the Society. For the Year 1883 (London: printed by Wertheimer, Lea & Co., 1883). South Kensington Museum, A Guide to the Art Collections of the South Kensington Museum (London: Spottiswoode, 1868). South Kensington Museum, Catalogues of Reproductions of Objects of Art, in Metal, Plaster, and Fictile Ivory, Chromolithography, Etching, and Photography. Selected from the South Kensington Museum, Continental Museums, and Various Other Public and Private Collections. Produced for the Use of Schools of Art, for Prizes, and for General Purposes of Public Instruction (London: printed by George E Eyre and William Spottiswoode for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1869). South Kensington Museum, A Guide to the Art Collections of the South Kensington Museum (London: Spottiswoode, 1870). Taylor, Tom, ed., Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from His Autobiography and Journals, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853). Victoria and Albert Museum, Catalogue of Casts for Schools: Including Casts of Most of the Statues which the Board of Education have Approved, in their Regulations for the Art Examinations, as Suitable for Study in Schools of Art (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1922).

Bibliography 191 Victoria and Albert Museum, Catalogue of Plaster Casts (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1936). Victoria and Albert Museum, Illustrated Supplement to the Catalogue of Plaster Casts (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1936). Victoria and Albert Museum, Catalogue of Plaster Casts (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1939). Ward, Henry Augustus, Catalogue of Casts of Fossils from the Principal Museums of Europe and America (Rochester, New York: Benton & Andrews, 1866). Wilson, James Grant, Thackeray in the United States 1852-3, 1855-6, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1904). Wornum, Ralph N., Analysis of Ornament: The Characteristics of Styles: An Introduction to the Study of the History of Ornamental Art (London: Chapman and Hall, 1856). Wyatt, Matthew Digby, An Address Delivered in the Crystal Palace on November 3, 1855 (London: Bell & Daldy, 1855).

Secondary sources Allington, Edward, Reproduction in Sculpture: Dilution or Increase? (Leeds: Centre for the Study of Sculpture, 1994). Altick, Richard, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA; London, England: Harvard University Press, 1978). Atterbury, Paul, ed., The Parian Phenomenon: A Survey of Victorian Parian Porcelain Statuary & Busts (Shepton Beauchamp: Richard Dennis, 1989). Aymonino, Adriano and Anne Varick Lauder, Drawn from the Antique: Artists & the Classical Ideal (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2015). Bailey, Peter, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830-1885 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). Baker, Malcolm, The Cast Courts (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1982). Baker, Malcolm, ‘The reproductive continuum: Plaster casts, paper mosaics and photographs as complementary modes of reproduction in the nineteenth-century museum’, in Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, ed. by Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 485–500. Baker, Malcolm and Brenda Richardson, eds, A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V&A, 1997). Bates, A. W., ‘Dr Kahn’s museum: Obscene anatomy in Victorian London’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 99.12 (2006): 618–24. Beard, Mary, ‘Casts and cast-offs: The origins of the Museum of Classical Archaeology’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, 39 (1993): 1–29.

192 Bibliography Bell, Quentin, The Schools of Design (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). Bilbey, Diane and Marjorie Trusted, ‘ “ The question of casts” – collecting and later reassessment of the cast collections at South Kensington’, in Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, ed. by Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 465–83. Blackley, Roger, ‘Plaster casts in a colonial museum’, in On Display: New Essays in Cultural Studies, ed. by Anna Smith and Lydia Wevers (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004). Blackwood, John, London’s Immortals: The Complete Outdoor Commemorative Statues (London: Savoy Press, 1989). Bryant, Julius, ed., Art and Design for All: The Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V&A Publishing, 2011). Burton, Anthony, ‘The uses of the South Kensington art collections’, Journal of the History of Collections, 14 (2002): 79–95. Carline, Richard, Draw they Must: A History of the Teaching and Examining of Art (London: Arnold, 1968). Clifford, Timothy, ‘The plaster shops of the Rococo and Neo-Classical era in Britain’, Journal of the History of Collections, 4.1 (1992): 39–65. Coltman, Viccy, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760-1800 (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Connor, Peter, ‘Cast-collecting in the nineteenth century: Scholarship, aesthetics, connoisseurship’, in Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination, ed. by G. W. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 187–235. Conway, Hazel, People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Cooter, Roger, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Cormier, Brendan and Danielle Thom, eds, A World of Fragile Parts (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2016). Davis, Helen, ‘John Charles Robinson’s work at the South Kensington Museum, part II. From 1863-1867: Consolidation and conflict’, Journal of the History of Collections, 11.1 (1999): 95–115. Dawson, Aileen, Portrait Sculpture: A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection, c. 1675-1975 (London: British Museum Press, 1999). Droth, Martina, Jason Edwards and Michael Hatt, eds, Sculpture Victorious: Art in an Age of Invention, 1837-1901 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014). Elliott, Brent, The Royal Horticultural Society: A History, 1804-2004 (Chichester: Phillimore & Co. Ltd., 2004).

Bibliography 193 Frayling, Christopher, The Royal College of Art: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Art and Design (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1987). Frederiksen, Rune and Eckart Marchand, eds, Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2010). Frederiksen, Rune and R. R. R. Smith, The Cast Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum: Catalogue of Plaster Casts of Greek and Roman Sculpture (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2011). Gazda, Elaine K., ed., The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). Gretton, Thomas, ‘‘Art is cheaper and goes lower in France.’ The language of the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Arts and Principles of Design of 1835-1836’, in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790-1850, ed. by Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 84–100. Hamber, Anthony J., ‘A Higher Branch of the Art’: Photographing the Fine Arts in England, 1839-1880 (Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 1996). Hartwell, Clare and Nikolaus Pevsner, Lancashire: North (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2009). Haskell, Francis and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). Helsted, Dyveke, Life and Death Masks in Thorvaldsen’s Collection (Copenhagen: The Thorvaldsen Museum, 1985). Hughes, Anthony and Erich Ranfft, eds, Sculpture and its Reproductions (London: Reaktion, 1997). Inglis, Alison, Fiona Moore and Pamela Tuckett, ‘“The auspicious commencement of so grand a design”: The opening of the Museum of Art at the Melbourne Public Library, 24 May 1861’, La Trobe, 88 (2011): 27–39. Jenkins, Ian, ‘Acquisition and supply of casts of the Parthenon sculptures by the British Museum, 1835-1939’, Annual of the British School at Athens, 85 (1990): 89–114. Kenworthy-Browne, John, ‘Plaster casts for the Crystal Palace, Sydenham’, Sculpture Journal, 15.2 (2006): 173–98. Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Retaining the original? The state of the question’, Studies in the History of Art, 20 (1989): 7–11. Kriegel, Lara, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007). Lambourne, Lionel, ‘The image sellers’, in The V&A album 1, ed. by Roy Strong (London: Templegate, 1982), 118–23. Lloyd, Fran, Helen Potkin and Davina Thackara, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011). Macdonald, Stuart, The History and Philosophy of Art Education (London: University of London Press, 1970).

194 Bibliography Malone, Peter, ‘How the Smiths made a living’, in Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, ed. by Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 163–77. Nichols, Kate, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854-1936 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Papet, É douard, À  fleur de peau: Le moulage sur nature au xixe siè cle (Paris: É ditions de la Ré union des musé es nationaux, 2002). Papet, É douard, ‘The imperial couple’, in The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, ed. by James David Draper and É douard Papet (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014), 213–21. Pointon, Marcia, William Dyce 1806-1864: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Pointon, Marcia, ‘Casts, imprints, and the deathliness of things: Artifacts at the edge’, Art Bulletin, 96.2 (2014): 170–95. Quinn, Malcolm, ‘The political economic necessity of the art school 1835-52’, International Journal of Art & Design Education, 30.1 (2011): 62–70. Rifkin, Adrian, ‘Success disavowed: The schools of design in mid-nineteenth century Britain. (An allegory)’, Journal of Design History, 1.2 (1988): 89–102. Rionnet, Florence, L’Atelier du moulage du Musé e du Louvre 1794-1928 (Paris: Ré union des musé es nationaux, 1996). Romans, Mervyn, ‘Living in the past: Some revisionist thoughts on the historiography of art and design education’, International Journal of Art & Design Education, 23.3 (2004): 270–77. Romans, Mervyn, ed., Histories of Art and Design Education (Bristol: Intellect, 2005). Romans, Mervyn, ‘An analysis of the political complexion of the 1835/6 Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures’, International Journal of Art & Design, 26.2 (2007): 215–24. Saabye, Marianne, Mette Mourier, et al., Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844): A Pictorial Survey of Thorvaldsen’s Life, trans. Ann Thornton (Copenhagen: Thorvaldsens Museum, 2003). Saliot, Anne-Gaë lle, The Drowned Muse: Casting the Unknown Woman across the Tides of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Schreiter, Charlotte, Gipsabgü sse und antike skulpturen: prä sentation und kontext (Berlin: Reimer, 2012). Schreiter, Charlotte, Antike um jeden preis: gipsabgü sse und kopien antiker plastik am ende des 18 jahrhunderts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). Settis, Salvatore, ed., with Anna Anguissola and Davide Gasparotto, Serial/Portable Classic: The Greek Canon and Its Mutations (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2015). Sponza, Lucio, Italian Immigrants in nineteenth-Century Britain: Realities and Images (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1988). Stewart, Margaret, The Edinburgh College of Art Cast collection and Architecture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh College of Art, 2009).

Bibliography 195 Trusted, Marjorie, ed., The Making of Sculpture: The Materials and Techniques of European Sculpture (London: V&A Publications, 2007). Wade, Rebecca, ‘The production and display of Domenico Brucciani’s plaster cast of Hubert Le Sueur’s equestrian statue of Charles I’, Sculpture Journal, 23.2 (2014): 250–5. Wallach, Alan, ‘The American cast museum: An episode in the history of the institutional definition of art’, in Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States, ed. by Alan Wallach (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 38–56. Waterfield, Giles, The People’s Galleries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). Wise, Sarah, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004). Wood, Ethel Mary Hogg, A History of the Polytechnic (London: Macdonald, 1965). Wood, Paul, ‘Between god and the saucepan: Some aspects of art education in England from the mid-nineteenth century until today’, in The History of British Art: 1870now, vol. 3, ed. by Chris Stephens (London: Tate Publishing, 2008), 164–87. Yarrington, Alison, ‘Made in Italy: Sculpture and the staging of national identities at the International Exhibition of 1862’, in Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural Transactions, ed. by Manfred Pfister and Ralf Hertel (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2008) 75–99. Yarrington, Alison and Cinzia Sicca, eds, The Lustrous Trade: Material Culture and the History of Sculpture in England and Italy c. 1700-c. 1860 (London: Leicester University Press, 2000).

Index Adelaide Gallery. See Grand Casino Agricultural Hall  101 Alexandra Palace  69–71 Allsopp, William  54–5 Apollo Belvedere  3, 38, 44–7, 51, 124, 127–8 Apsley House  62 artificial stone  48–9, 60, 64–5, 72 Arundel Society  51–2 Astley’s Amphitheatre  95–6 Auckland Institute  127–8 Auckland War Memorial Museum  127–8 Baldacci, Leopold  15–16 Biagiotti, Albert Henry  135 Biagiotti, Saverio  135 Blackpool Winter Gardens  63–4 Board of Education  105, 125, 131, 141–9, 151–2 Boehm, Sir Edgar  18–19 British Museum agreement with Brucciani  104–5, 118, 131 moulds  18, 104, 117–18, 134–5, 153 Brock, Thomas  138–9, 141–2, 144 Brucciani, Antonio Luigi ‘Lewis’  1, 76, 155 Brucciani, Domenico early activities  12–14 death  104–5, 129, 131, 133–4, 139 family  135–8, 154–5 reputation  15–16, 51–4, 75, 83, 101, 144, 149, 155 teaching role  24–5 Brugiotti, Luigi  98 busts domestic market  1, 12–14, 53 educational market  38 historical and political figures  9, 12–14, 17, 58, 99–100 public display  55, 63, 66, 69, 71, 128

Canova, Antonio  63, 69, 75 Cantoni, Enrico  139 Caproni, Antonio  5–6 Caproni, Emilio  129 Caproni, Joseph Louis  25–6, 85, 134 Caproni, Pietro Paolo  129 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste  88–9 Casci, Bartholomew  78 Cheverton, Benjamin  50–3, 72 Cole, Henry  24–5, 37, 105–6, 110, 112 Collinson, James  7–9 Colvin, Sidney  58, 141–2 Copeland  49–53, 72. See also Parian ware Crystal Palace  43, 47, 52, 62, 69, 72, 141 Daniels, William  8–10 D. Brucciani and Company Limited incorporation  135–8 rescue  138–46 shareholders  137–8 death masks Caunt, Ben  75, 81–2 Good, Daniel  75, 77–81 Kean, Edmund  75–7 Napoleon III  75, 86–9 production  89 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  75, 90–3, 101 Thackeray, William Makepeace  75, 82–6, 93, 101 Department for the Sale of Casts  146–54 Department of Science and Art  25–6, 62, 72, 105, 112, 114 design reform  22, 32 Dr Kahn’s Museum and Gallery of Science  96–7 Duprè , Giovanni  154–5 Dyce, William  28, 33–4 Earle, Lionel  141 é corché   38, 55–6, 58

Index electrotypes  52, 107, 113, 114–17, 131. See also Elkington Elgin Marbles  3–4, 51–3, 131 Elkington  52, 69–70, 72, 107, 114–17, 131. See also electrotypes Fletcher, Frank Morley  142 Finili, Luigi  18–19, 89–90 Fontana, Giovanni Giuseppe  67–8, 109 Franchi, Giovanni Ferdinando  107–9, 113 Galleria delle Belle Arti  56–9, 72, 75, 84 Gibson, John  53, 62–3, 69 Giuntini, Andrew Lawrence ‘Lorenzo’  17–18 Government Schools of Design. See also Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures curriculum  22, 24–35 establishment  22–4 Somerset House  22, 25–6, 28, 35, 38, 105 Grand Casino  93–5 Graziani, Giovanni ‘John’  15 Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations  13, 43, 44–7, 49–51, 71 Hall by the Sea  97 Hall, Herbert Austen  139 Hanover Square Club  98–9 Harcourt-Smith, Cecil  18, 139–42, 147–8 Hardy, Thomas  11 Haydon, Benjamin Robert  3–4 Herbert, John Rogers  28, 30 Holborn  11, 15, 17, 19, 98, 104, 134–6 Hutton, Laurence  77, 81, 84–6, 92 image boys crimes against  6–7 criminality  2, 6, 8, 15–16 literary characters  5–6, 11–12 in painting  3–4, 7–10 public perception  2–3 image sellers. See image boys International Exhibition of 1862 Greek Slave  48–51, 62, 69 prizes awarded to Brucciani  48, 134

197

Italians in London  9, 11, 15–17, 78, 104 migration  2, 11, 18, 129–30 networks  18–19, 68, 136–7 Kenyon, Frederic  139, 142 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert  140 Leeds Art Gallery  124–6 Leeds Mechanics’ Institution  35–7, 40–2 Leeds School of Design  35–42 Leverotti, Julian  16–17 life drawing  26–7, 29–30 Liverpool  4, 7–8, 53–5, 72 London. See also Holborn Covent Garden  1, 6, 13–15, 50, 56, 58–9, 72, 76–7, 82, 133 Cremorne Gardens  60–1 Leicester Square  66–8 Maclagan, Eric  142, 148–9, 152 Manchester  54, 134 Maudslay, Alfred  17 Melbourne Public Library. See National Gallery of Victoria Metropolitan Museum of Art  130–1 National Course of Instruction  24 National Gallery of Practical Science. See Grand Casino National Gallery of Victoria  127 National Portrait Gallery  114–16 Natural History Museum  116–24 New Theatre Royal and Opera House, Leeds  99 Newton, Ernest  139 Parian ware  14, 50–1, 72. See also Copeland Petersen, William  140, 144–5 photography  51, 55, 61, 80, 84, 109, 113, 153 phrenology  78, 80, 101 Pink, William  103–5 plaster casts cost  25, 108, 116, 125, 127, 129 surface treatments  66, 101

198 Index Pó rtico de la Gloria  110–14, 131, 148 Poynter, Edward John  40, 139–40, 143 Pre–Raphaelite Brotherhood  7 rational recreation  71, 93–101 Robinson, John Charles  105–8, 110 Royal Academy of Arts  15–17, 26–8, 31, 41, 67–8, 139–40 Royal Horticultural Society  60, 114 Ryan, Paul Joseph  65, 86, 135–40, 145–53 Sandow, Eugen  118–24, 131 Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures  22–4, 26–7, 35, 39. See also Government Schools of Design Shields, Frederic  91–2 Smith, Arthur Hamilton  141–2

Smith, John Thomas  2–3 South Kensington Museum  17–18, 22, 58, 103, 105–14, 129. See also Victoria and Albert Museum Spielmann, Isidore  139 Thorvaldsen, Bertel  54, 69, 75 Tietjens, Thé rè se  99–100 Vestris, Lucia Elizabeth  98 Victoria and Albert Museum  53, 103, 105, 109–10, 135, 139, 142, 148, 150, 152–3. See also South Kensington Museum waxworks  43, 54–6, 72, 96 Webb, Aston  142–5 Wilson, Charles Heath  28–31, 38