New Sculpture

New Sculpture. A trend in British sculpture between about 1880 and 1910 characterized chiefly by an emphasis on naturalistic surface detail and a taste for the spiritual or Symbolist in subject-matter in reaction against the blandness of much Neoclassical sculpture. The name was coined by the critic Edmund Gosse in a series of four articles, ‘The New Sculpture, 1879–1894', published in the Art Journal in 1894. Leading representatives of the trend include Gilbert Bayes, Alfred Drury, Edward Onslow Ford (1852–1901), Sir George Frampton, Sir Alfred Gilbert, the Australian-born Sir Bertram Mackennal (1863–1931), Frederick William Pomeroy (1857–1924), Sir William Reynolds-Stephens (1862–1943), Sir Hamo Thornycroft, Albert Toft (1862–1949), and Derwent Wood. Their archetypal product was ‘the “ideal” sculpture … the free-standing figure untrammelled by the requirements of the public monument and dependent not on prior commission but on the hope that a collector would finance the transition from fragile plaster to the lasting but expensive marble or bronze’ ( John Glaves-Smith in ‘Reverie, Myth, Sensuality: Sculpture in Britain 1880–1910', catalogue of an exhibition at the City Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, 1992). Most typically these ideal figures were in bronze, although polychromy—using such materials as ivory and coloured stones—was also a feature of the New Sculpture. Mythology and poetry were the main sources of imagery. Although the New Sculpture did not survive the First World War as a major force, some artist went on working in the idiom long after this.