Sculpture Through the Lens
Sculpture in England : Mediaeval. By H. D. Molesworth. Sculpture in England : Renaissance to Early Nineteenth Century. By H. D. Molesworth. (Longmans, Green & Co., for the British Council. 7s. 6d. each.) To say that these two admirably cheap volumes, each containing more than fifty photogravure plates up to eight inches by ten-and- three-quarters in size, constitute the best available pictorial record of the history of sculpture in England from the first century to the middle of the nineteenth is both to speak the truth and to damn with faint praise—for after all where are the others ? Mr. Gardner has done nobly by the Middle Ages in general ; Mr. Cave has brought roof bosses in particular within reach of us all ; Mr. Fabar, the late Mrs. Esdaile, Mr. Bell and Mr. Constable have all written mono- graphs, on Cibber, Roubillac, Banks and Flaxman respectively, that are illustrated with something better than what publishers with suitable inelegance call " minimum blocks." Yet the publication of a series of a hundred-odd really sizeable plates covering the whole field is something new.
That it should be so is odd but explicable. Although Ruskin saw as early as anyone the potentialities of the camera for recording works of art, until recently there was in England a tendency to regard photographs of works of art more as aides-memoires than as definitive records, with a consequent disregard for their quality. It was a not altogether unhealthy tendency, for at least it presupposed that the looker at photographs had something to remember. Today, how- ever, all that is changed. Like it or not, we must recognise that many will look at these photographs who will never seek out the originals in the dim aisles of Westminster Abbey or the no-longer-so-crowded galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The photographer of sculpture needs rather special qualities. If he is to convey anything at all he must be an artist in his own medium ; if he is to convey the truth he must be self-effacing enough to subordinate his art to the claims of his subject. Nearly all the photographs in this collection are the outcome of these two conditions successfully fulfilled; the less satisfactory are so not so much through the fault of the photographer as because of the peculiarities of the camera's vision, which arise from its need to translate all form into terms of light and shade. How interesting it would be if one could confront the artists represented with these photographs of their works ! One can imagine Webber's delighted recognition of the splendidly lit detail of his Garrick monument (plate 38 in the second volume)—so much easier to study here than in its skied position in the Abbey. But what would be the reaction to a photograph of his own work in the first volume of any mediaeval carver, who lived not only before Fox Talbot and Daguerre but also before those seventeenth-century painters whose work made the camera's interpre- tation of things acceptable ? I suspect that it would be complete bewilderment, and that if I am right it is a fact which in looking at the fine photographs in that volume we should bear in mind.
MARCUS WHIFFEN.
Previous page
