‘Between ‘dirty ghosts’ and ‘a tailor’s dummy’: The Problem of Dressing a Portrait Statue in Victorian Britain’ - Claire Jones, Independent Scholar

‘Between ‘dirty ghosts’ and ‘a tailor’s dummy’: The Problem of Dressing a Portrait Statue in Victorian Britain’.

Claire Jones, Independent Scholar

Britain’s streets, squares, parks and public buildings are peopled with statues which were mainly commissioned, produced and erected during the Victorian period. They can be difficult to distinguish one from the other, because they generally follow a similar format – a white, middle-aged man in frockcoat and trousers with one foot extended forward, standing on a plinth four-foot high. Yet these now rather homogenous figures belie the fact that, in their day, the portrait statue was one of the most contested forms of contemporary sculpture. Central to this was the problem of how to dress a statue.

In this paper, I will consider the contested subject of clothes in Victorian portrait statues. This was a new type of sculpture, which meant that its parameters were uncertain. Sculptors therefore faced potential opportunities - and serious challenges - when attempting a portrait statue. There were three main dress options available to Victorian sculptors – classical drapery, historic costume and contemporary dress. Some critics demanded that all portraits should be clothed in classical drapery; others maintained that sculpture should be representative of its historical moment. Contemporary dress was the most contested category. The problem was how to depict actual, rather than imagined, people, and still work within the parameters of ideal sculpture. Far from being dull or ubiquitous, I argue that clothing these statues in frockcoats, reveals a profound experiment in modelling modern man in Victorian Britain.

2b: Fabricating Masculinity (Chair: Deborah Wynne) – CWE 125