Exhibition
The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
This event has passed
The Colour of Anxiety brings into focus sculpture exhibited and collected in Britain between 1850 and 1900, a rich yet largely overlooked body of work.
The exhibition examines objects that introduced colour and new materials into the sculptural process, situating them within the context of the anxiety which often weighed upon Victorian society in the face of social change and scientific advances.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, British sculptors began to move away from the whiteness of Neoclassical marble and started to incorporate colour into their work, using bronze, silver, gold, ivory and porcelain as well as semi-precious stones, tinted waxes, enamels and paint.
The adoption of these materials has typically been attributed to the renewed interest in medieval history and craftsmanship, discoveries about the polychromy of ancient sculpture, the allure of exoticism in the visual arts and the introduction of new industrial processes.
Anxieties about rapid social change, developments in science, threats to the established patriarchal order and imperial rule have been highlighted by many literary and social historians, but have received less attention from art historians.
The Colour of Anxiety examines the rise of colour in nineteenth-century sculpture by focusing on how male artists responded to, and reinforced, a concept of the cis female body influenced by anxieties of the time.
Despite Victorian ideals of virginity and chastity, the representation of women in sculpture was increasingly sexualised, reflecting fears regarding the changing role of women, Black female sexuality and racial intermingling.
Bringing together sculptures that either incorporate colour directly or imply it by means of subject matter and titles, the exhibition considers the fascination with colouring people and people of colour as a response to the perceived anxieties of the Victorian age.
The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture is guest curated by Dr Nicola Jennings (Director, Athena Art Foundation and Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art from 2015-21) and Dr Adrienne L. Childs (Adjunct Curator at the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. and independent scholar).
Publication
Essays on Sculpture Issue 81 features new essays by the exhibition’s co-curators Nicola Jennings and Adrienne L. Childs, alongside contributions from David Bindman, Christa Clarke and Charmaine A. Nelson.
It also features a reprint of David J. Getsy’s article ‘Privileging the Object of Sculpture: Actuality and Harry Bates’ Pandora of 1890’ originally published in Art History (vol. 28, no. 1, February 2005).
Product details:
Softback, staple-bound
76 pages
230 x 170mm
ISBN: 978-1-905462-64-3
Exhibition guide
Download a copy of the exhibition guide for The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture.
From the Hope Venus to the Tinted Venus
Antonio Canova’s Venus (The Hope Venus) 1817-20 and The Mother (Woman and Child) 1860-1910 (attributed to Raffaelle Monti), both in white marble, exemplify Victorian ideals of female chastity, purity and motherhood. Absence of colour was a key characteristic of Neoclassical sculpture, based on the belief that the sculptors of ancient Greece – considered to be the fount of Western culture – were interested above all in form, not colour.
Although this view was soon proven to be mistaken, it nevertheless continued to govern the making of British sculpture for much of the nineteenth century. This was no doubt related to the belief that absence of colour was the sign of a civilisation capable of abstract thought and moral rectitude, in contrast to the painted figures of animist and pagan societies.
In 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, setting off a chain reaction which would have a lasting impact across society. Darwin’s scientific theories of natural selection and evolution were soon translated into unscientific and alarmist notions of what could happen to society, including concepts such as ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘degeneration’.
Artworks such as G.F. Watts’ Found Drowned c. 1848-50 – depicting a victim of the sex work that many women were forced into – exemplified what could happen to the poor, weak and ‘degenerate’. The education of women and the imagined threat posed by the so-called ‘Orient’, considered to be a place full of barbarism and unbridled sexuality, further challenged the ideal of female chastity. Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave 1844 – depicting a white woman sold at an Ottoman slave market – became one of the most widely reproduced sculptures of the nineteenth century.
By around 1860 Powers’ Greek Slave had become the subject of a colour stereograph, The Captive c. 1860, transforming the white marble of the original into a flesh-and-blood woman. John Gibson’s Tinted Venus 1851-56, exhibited in London in 1862, underwent a similar transformation in sculpture. The public loved the lifelikeness of the goddess’ ivory-tinted skin, blue eyes and rosy lips, but Gibson’s fellow sculptors were outraged.
At the same time, sculpted femmes fatales such as the French artist Henri Baron de Triqueti’s Cleopatra Dying 1859 were beginning to be bought by British collectors. This work typified not only a taste for coloured materials but also a late Victorian fascination for all things Egyptian. Here again, colour was significant, for example playing a central role in the Theosophy preached by the cult mystic Madame Blavatsky (1831-91).
About the works in this section
Venus
John Gibson R.A.
Gibson was one of few Neoclassical sculptors to colour sculpture. This plaster sculpture is a model for his Tinted Venus 1851-56, which used coloured wax to tint the marble Venus. Most of Gibson’s colleagues were outraged, considering polychromy a barbaric practice detracting from the purity of Classical sculpture. For them, white marble was a symbol of Western civilisation. Nevertheless, when the Tinted Venus was exhibited at the International Exhibition of 1862, the public was enthusiastic. Despite their reputation for prudery, Victorians were avid consumers of sculptural nudes.
John Gibson R.A. (1790-1866)
Venus c. 1850
Plaster
Lent by the Royal Academy of Arts, London
Minerve Du Parthenon
Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy
Based on extensive study of ancient texts and visits to Italy, French art historian Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849) challenged the belief that ancient Greek sculpture was never coloured. He coined the term ‘polychromy’ to mean the use of paint and coloured material to achieve chromatic effects. Le Jupiter Olympien re-imagined lost works and highlighted the popularity of chryselephantine sculpture, a technique combining gold and ivory.
Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849)
Minerve Du Parthenon from Le Jupiter Olympien, ou l’art de la sculpture antique considéré sous un nouveau point de vue: ouvrage qui comprend un essai sur le goût de la sculpture polychrome
(Statue of Athena Parthenos from The Olympian Jupiter, or the art of ancient sculpture considered from a new point of view: a work that includes an essay on the taste for polychrome sculpture)
Paris, 1814, Plate VIII
Etching and watercolour
Lent by the Royal Academy of Arts, London
The Greek Slave
Hiram Powers
American sculptor Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave was one of the most celebrated sculptures of the nineteenth century. The Neoclassical nude represents a Christian captive for sale in a Turkish slave market during the Greek War of Independence (1821-32). Many viewers understood this work to be an abolitionist statement that indirectly indicted American slavery, while others considered the depiction of a white slave by an American sculptor as a deliberate dismissal of the problem of African American enslavement. Nonetheless it received widespread acclaim for its idealised beauty fashioned in white marble – characteristics that appealed to Victorian audiences.
Hiram Powers (1805-73)
The Greek Slave 1844
Marble
On loan from Lord and Lady Barnard, Raby Castle
The Greek Slave
Minton & Co., after Hiram Powers
The popularity of Powers’ The Greek Slave made it a prime candidate for translation into decorative sculpture. The Staffordshire-based Minton porcelain factory reproduced the work at a reduced size in Parian ware, an unglazed ceramic designed to resembled marble. Reductions of ‘fine art’ sculpture in ceramic form afforded more people opportunities to collect and offered commercial opportunities for manufacturers. Reproductions of The Greek Slave circulated widely in a variety of media including the popular press, photography and printmaking. Even the celebrated African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass (c. 1818-95) owned a ceramic replica of The Greek Slave.
Minton & Co., after Hiram Powers
The Greek Slave 1862
Parian porcelain
Victoria and Albert Museum
Given by C. H. Gibbs-Smith
Cleopatra Dying
Henri Baron de Triqueti
Henri Baron de Triqueti (1803–74)
Cleopatra Dying 1859
Ivory and bronze on a marble and ebony base, with traces of polychromy and gilding
Victoria and Albert Museum Purchased with support from the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation, Art Fund, Henry Moore Foundation, W.L. Hildburgh Bequest, The Crescent Trust, Bowman Sculpture, Daniel Katz MBE, Horn Bequest and The Decorative Arts Society 40th Anniversary Fund
Continental sculptors began to experiment with the ancient chryselephantine technique in the 1840s. This figure was the first chryselephantine work to arrive in the UK where it was displayed at London’s Colnaghi gallery. Cleopatra was the archetypal femme fatale, a popular subject in Victorian art. Triqueti’s figure not only typified a growing taste for coloured materials but also a fascination for all things Egyptian.
Echoes of Slavery
While women of colour, fashioned in white marble or coloured materials, were unusual subjects in nineteenth-century sculpture, there are significant examples of works representing them as erotically charged and bound slaves, sexualised Venuses, or a hybrid of both.
These reveal conflicting attitudes towards race, sexuality, slavery and abolition. White male sculptors such as John Bell and Charles Cordier intended to bring the pathos of the institution of slavery to public attention, yet they nonetheless traded on the allure of illicit sexuality born of that same system. Many works in this gallery evoke both vixen and victim.
Using white marble – the traditional medium of Neoclassical sculpture – to represent the Black body created a tension that challenged the material’s association with white Western culture, morality and purity. Using coloured materials to depict Black bodies was one approach to resolving this quandary.
Although limited in scope, images of Black women in sculpture were transformed and widely circulated through the processes of reproduction within the industrialised decorative arts. Large-scale works were scaled down and reproduced in bronze, plaster, porcelain and other metals. Bell’s Octoroon 1868 was reduced and reborn in Parian ware by Minton and Co. Even though these editions afforded a larger audience access to the works, the commodification and commercialisation of the image of the enslaved woman as a luxury object echoed the practice of slavery itself.
Sanford Biggers and Maud Sulter
The Colour of Anxiety is an exhibition that features largely white male artists who drove the art world in the nineteenth century. The narratives about race and gender that their works embody have come under scrutiny in recent years by contemporary artists reconsidering historical works that reveal racist and sexist attitudes. These artists also question the centuries-long exclusion of women and people of colour from the world of art-making in the West.
Works in the exhibition by American conceptual artist Sanford Biggers and the late Scottish-Ghanaian photographer Maud Sulter offer a reminder of the relevance of this inquiry in today’s critical landscape. Together they bring Black voices – and in Sulter’s case, a female voice – to the conversation, interrogating the power of the European Classical tradition and the contested figure of the Black female in Victorian visual culture.
About the works in this section
The Octoroon
John Bell
Bell’s Neoclassical-styled white marble nude The Octoroon depicts a woman whose one eighth percentage of African blood renders her a slave. Her visibly white physiological characteristics testify to generations of forced racial mixing that left some enslaved peoples at an impossible racial crossroads – as neither Black nor white. The octoroon character appeared in popular Victorian entertainment, often dying tragically as she could not reconcile her white beauty with the fact of her Black blood. Racial mixing, a fact of life in the colonial world, was the source of considerable anxieties in Victorian culture.
John Bell (1811-95)
The Octoroon 1868
Marble
Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery
The Manacled Slave / On the Sea Shore
John Bell and Elkington & Co.
The Manacled Slave / On the Sea Shore
John Bell and Elkington & Co.
This bronze figure of an enslaved Black woman bound with chains is a reduced version of British sculptor John Bell’s American Slave 1853. The work is Bell’s abolitionist response to Powers’ The Greek Slave and was intended to elicit sympathy for the plight of Black slaves in America. The nudity and sensuous rendering of the figure both exposes the widespread sexual exploitation of enslaved women within the American system while trading on her alluringly taboo sexuality. The use of bronze rather than marble reinforces the links between skin colour, race and enslavement.
John Bell and Elkington & Co.
The Manacled Slave / On the Sea Shore 1877
Bronze
Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Nile
Sanford Biggers
American contemporary artist Sanford Biggers’ Nile fuses Classical African and European sculpture to create a hybrid work. Part of Biggers’ Chimera series, Nile challenges the primacy of Western Classicism and brings the shared histories and mythologies of African and European cultural inheritance into conversation. The body is based on French sculptor Antoine Coysevox’s La Seine 1703/06 and the head is a West African Dan mask form. Biggers’ use of black marble speaks to the idealisation of white marble, revealing that colour in sculpture and people of colour were both part of the West’s Classical inheritance.
Sanford Biggers (b. 1970)
Nile 2021
Marmo nero / Black marble
Courtesy of the artist and MASSIMODECARLO
La femme Africaine
Charles Cordier
French ethnographic sculptor Charles Cordier combined bronze and onyx marble in this depiction of an Egyptian fellah, or peasant woman, carrying water. Picturesque images of life in North Africa were part of the craze for Orientalist art in the nineteenth century and often included sexualised women of colour. Cordier was particularly interested in the physiognomy and costumes of exoticised Black figures from North Africa. La femme Africaine was fashioned with marble extracted from French colonial Algeria, reflecting how luxury objects embodied colonial power relations in both subject matter and materials.
Charles Cordier (1827-1905)
La femme Africaine 1867
Onyx marble and bronze
Rotherham Museums, Arts and Heritage Services
Vénus Africaine
Charles Cordier
French sculptor Charles Cordier generated a new language for depicting Black people in nineteenth-century sculpture with Vénus Africaine. Cordier was interested in the growing field of ethnography and sought to represent the true beauty of different ‘races’ of mankind in his sculpture. Although she is idealised, the figure is drawn from a live model and captures the individual likeness of a woman of African descent with naturalistic facial features and hair. The frank sensuality of the figure also demonstrates that Black women were thought of as inherently sexual beings. Cordier often adorned his sculptures with jewellery, adding a decorative flair. This sculpture was acquired by Queen Victoria in 1852 (1819-1901) and has remained in the Royal Collection.
Charles Cordier (1827-1905)
Vénus Africaine (African Venus) 1852
Bronze
Lent by His Majesty The King
The Bitter Draught of Slavery
Ernest Normand
Ernest Normand was one of many nineteenth-century artists whose work engaged with the histories, peoples and cultures of North Africa and the Middle East, a region around the Mediterranean that Europeans referred to as the ‘Orient’. Images of sexualised women in opulent harems (domestic spaces reserved for women in a Muslim household) were popular subjects of Orientalist art. Here, Normand depicts the plight of a white slave woman for sale in an ‘Oriental’ harem, a scene that reflects the history of white slavery on the Barbary coast. While ‘bitter draught of slavery’ is a familiar abolitionist term that evokes slavery’s repulsive nature, the painting’s sumptuous colours and beautifully detailed interior are seductively compelling.
Ernest Normand (1857-1923)
The Bitter Draught of Slavery 1885
Oil on canvas
Bradford District Museums and Galleries, CBMDC
Calliope
Maud Sulter
Scottish-Ghanaian feminist artist Maud Sulter was a pioneer of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s. Sulter was among a cadre of activists who sought to bring attention to the work of marginalised Black artists who were women. Calliope is from her 1989 Zabat series of photographs that depicts Black women posing as Classical Greek muses. Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, is a self-portrait that draws upon celebrated photographer Félix Nadar’s (1820-1910) photograph of poet Charles Baudelaire’s (1821-67) mixed race mistress Jeanne Duval (c. 1820- c. 62). Here, Sulter employs Black self-representation to start a conversation about Black women as muses in Victorian-era visual culture.
Maud Sulter (1960-2008)
Calliope 1989
Cibachrome print
On loan from City Art Centre
City of Edinburgh Museums & Galleries
A Slave Girl
James Havard Thomas
James Havard Thomas (1854–1921)
A Slave Girl 1885
Marble
Ar fenthyg gan / Lent by Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales
Thomas was part of the ‘New Sculpture’ movement of the late nineteenth century in which British artists moved away from the idealism of Neoclassicism towards a more naturalistic and sexualised depiction of the human body. A Slave Girl lacks the chains, jewellery and other garments that defined exoticised slave bodies in sculpture. Thomas was influenced by Greek sculpture and A Slave Girl is likely a reference to slavery in antiquity, yet her individualised face and fleshy body give the work the immediacy of a contemporary nude.
Deathly Women
The education of women and the prospect of female emancipation were also sources of anxiety for men. The pioneering British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley’s 1874 pamphlet, ‘Sex in Mind and Education’, claimed that education would damage the female reproductive organs, turning women into ‘monstrosities’ threatening the survival of the human race.
Such anxieties were no doubt a factor in the proliferation of femmes fatales in late Victorian painting and sculpture, in which colour was used to symbolise women’s dangerously seductive nature. Harry Bates’ Pandora 1890 was the first British sculpture to employ the ancient chryselephantine technique to draw attention to the jar full of evil that this mythical woman had unleashed upon the world. Sir George Frampton used ivory, bronze, opals and glass to create his sculpture of the serpentine temptress Lamia 1899-1900.
Another popular subject was the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, in which the sculptor Pygmalion, having rejected real women, sets about carving his perfect partner from marble. Ernest Normand’s painting Pygmalion and Galatea 1881 captures the moment when the white stone flushes with colour as the goddess Venus grants Pygmalion’s wish to bring Galatea to life.
Women were also associated with death in stories involving female vampires such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, a dark medieval tale retold as ‘Briar Rose’ in the popular Grimms’ Fairy Tales (first published in 1812). Inspired by Edward Burne-Jones’ series The Legend of the Briar Rose, the sculptor Sir Alfred Gilbert encircled The Virgin and St Elizabeth 1899 with pink rose briar on his tomb for the Duke of Clarence (1864-92) at Windsor Castle, depicting the women as if in the sleep of eternal maidenhood.
Harry Bates’ Mors Janua Vitae 1899 – also chryselephantine and produced in the final months before his death – features another woman with her eyes closed. She represents Life but is about to be engulfed by the dark wings of the male figure of Death. They stand on a sphere depicting a Christian Last Judgement and imagery from ancient Greek myths about death.
About the works in this section
Pandora
Harry Bates A.R.A.
The ancient Greek story of Pandora is about a desirable but foolish woman created from clay by the god Zeus to punish humanity. Giving her a jar of evil which he knows that she will open, Zeus sends her to the world of mortals to unleash its terrible contents. Pandora was one of many femmes fatales whose deadly attraction mesmerised Victorian men. Bates’ figure was the first chryselephantine sculpture by a British artist.
Harry Bates A.R.A. (1850-99)
Pandora 1890
Marble, ivory and bronze on marble base
Tate: Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1891
Mors Janua Vitae
Harry Bates A.R.A.
Mors Janua Vitae means ‘Death, gateway of Life’, and Bates finished this sculpture just before he died. Its iconography points to an existential search for meaning in both Christianity and Greek mythology. Death, the dark figure with wings, looms threateningly over the ivory Life. The crown and a now lost butterfly symbolise the transience of mortal existence, and the bronze sphere is decorated with images of the Last Judgement, singing angels and Greek ceremonial processions.
Harry Bates A.R.A. (1850-99)
Mors Janua Vitae 1899
Marble, bronze, ivory and mother of pearl
National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery
Lamia
Sir George Frampton R.A.
Sir George Frampton R.A. (1860-1928)
Lamia 1899-1900
Ivory, bronze, opals, and glass
Lent by the Royal Academy of Arts, London
Lamia was an ancient Greek femme fatale who was well known to Victorians, thanks to a poem by John Keats (1795-1821). Half-woman, half-snake, she was said to seduce young men and then feed on their flesh afterwards, not unlike the female vampires in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The repeated appearance of figures such as Lamia and Pandora in late Victorian art and literature suggests deep-seated anxieties about female sexuality. Colour was often used to heighten the danger symbolised by these women.
The Virgin and St Elizabeth of Hungary
Sir Alfred Gilbert R.A.
The Virgin and St Elizabeth of Hungary
Sir Alfred Gilbert R.A.
Gilbert’s inspiration for these figures was Edward Burne-Jones’ series The Legend of the Briar Rose. This was the name the Brothers Grimm gave to the story of ‘Sleeping Beauty’. The theme of sleeping women was popular with late Victorian artists, perhaps because depicting them in this way rendered them submissive. Originally intended for the tomb of Queen Victoria’s grandson, the Duke of Clarence (1864-92), but later sold for financial reasons and replaced with replicas, these were Gilbert’s first works incorporating polychromy.
Sir Alfred Gilbert R.A. (1854-1934)
The Virgin 1899
Bronze, painted
St Elizabeth of Hungary 1899
Bronze, ivory, tin inlaid with mother of pearl and semi-precious stones
Kirk Session of Kippen Parish Church of Scotland
Pygmalion and Galatea
Ernest Normand
Ernest Normand (1857–1923)
Pygmalion and Galatea 1881
Oil on canvas
Lent by The Atkinson, Lord Street, Southport
The Roman poet Ovid’s story ‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ was very popular with Victorian artists. Pygmalion is a sculptor who, having rejected living women as impure, carves a perfect ivory virgin and prays for her to be brought to life. His prayers are granted, and the white marble flesh turns pink as he watches. The sculptor John Gibson described having similar thoughts as he made his own Tinted Venus 1851-56, exclaiming ‘How was I ever to part with her?’
List of artists in the exhibition
Harry Bates (1850-99)
John Bell (1811-95)
Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse (1824-87)
Sanford Biggers (b. 1970)
Antonio Canova (1757-1822)
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-75)
Charles Cordier (1827-1905)
Sir George Frampton R.A. (1860-1928)
John Gibson R.A. (1790-1866)
Sir Alfred Gilbert (1854-1934)
Ernest Normand (1857-1923)
Luigi Pagani (1837-1904)
Hiram Powers (1805-73)
Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy (1755-1849)
Antonio Rossetti (1819-89)
Maud Sulter (1960-2008)
James Havard Thomas (1854-1921)
Henri Baron de Triqueti (1803-74)
George Frederick Watts (1817-1904)
Attributed to Raffaelle Monti (1818-81)
Reviews
The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture review – nonstop shocks.
🟊🟊🟊🟊☆
Nudes in bondage, endless bared breasts, passion, prurience… this superb survey of sculpture’s depiction of women in 19th-century Britain unsettles at every turn.
Read the full review on The Observer
So, the Victorians were anxious about sex and race? Seriously confused, more like.
🟊🟊🟊🟊☆
This daring, revelatory new show at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds explores and exposes Victorian mores with great flair.
Read the full review on The Telegraph
Femme fatale: The images that reveal male fears
Three new exhibitions explore how the femme fatale in art reflects evolving anxieties, writes Cath Pound.
Read the full review on BBC Culture
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