Thomas Brock: Forgotten Sculptor of the Victoria Memorial

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Published by AuthorHouse 08/13/2012

ISBN:   978-1-4678-8334-4(sc)

ISBN:   978-1-4772-2738-1 (ebk)

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Worcester Apprentice

Chapter 2: Under The Foleyage

Chapter 3: Foley’s Legacy

Chapter 4: Leighton And Millais

Chapter 5: Associate Of The Royal Academy

Chapter 6: Liberal Or Conservative, Sir?

Chapter 7: The Black Prince

Chapter 8: Rodin And Modernist Sculpture

Chapter 9: Royal Academy Politics

Chapter 10: The Victoria Memorial

Chapter 11: Grand In Conception, Noble In Execution

Chapter 12: The Royal Society Of British Sculptors

Chapter 13: Edward Vii, King Emperor

Chapter 14: Not Hastily Done, But Well Done

Chapter 15: Conclusion

Notes

Select Bibliography

Annex I: The Techniques Of Sculpture

Annex 2: Catalogue Of Works By Sir Thomas Brock

List Of Illustrations

Foreword

Thomas Brock, a ‘forgotten sculptor’, is one of a number of British artists whose name and reputation are now fairly obscure, except to avid students in the field, but whose work is in fact known to many. In Brock’s case, his pre-eminent work is the Victoria Memorial opposite Buckingham Palace (fig. 2), as much a national monument as Baily’s figure of Nelson in Trafalgar Square, and seen on screens throughout the world during many national celebrations (fig. 3). Frederick Brock even refers to Phidias and Michelangelo in relation to his father’s work on a number of occasions; such implicit comparisons with great masters of the past must have seemed entirely appropriate to the author.

In the early years of the twentieth century Brock enjoyed an outstanding reputation: he had been elected the first President of the Society of British Sculptors (now the Royal British Society of Sculptors), and was the undisputed leading British sculptor of his day. But already change was in the air, and his style of sculpture, unashamedly naturalistic and traditional, even at times historicist, was already coming to seem old-fashioned, redolent of the Establishment, the Academy, and inimical to advocates of the avant-garde. During one of Rodin’s celebrated visits to Britain, shortly before the unveiling of the Victoria Memorial, he apparently made a remark concerning Brock of ‘but half a dozen words’, which would have ‘considerably nonplussed certain people in this country’. Tantalisingly Frederick Brock only tells us that these words ‘meant more . . . than the highest honour that could have been bestowed upon him’, and does not reveal their content. But his defensive and teasing allusion to the French sculptor’s implied admiration for his British contemporary encapsulates Frederick Brock’s own awareness of the perceived quality of his father’s art, rooted as it was in the nineteenth century.

Conversely Rodin’s work could be seen as a touchstone for the evolution of European sculpture around 1900, his deliberately unfinished, often fragmentary, style pointing forward to the modernist developments seen in the work of British sculptors of a later generation, such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. This style was very different from the highly polished, even grand, works Brock was producing. Perhaps now in the twenty-first century we can appreciate Brock for what he did achieve, rather than criticise him for not being an artistic revolutionary. His Black Prince (fig. 39) in Leeds, his marble figure of Eve (fig. 38) owned by Tate, and indeed his Victoria Memorial, are distinctive sculptures, characterising late nineteenth century sculpture in Britain, and in particular the so-called New Sculpture, which had moved away from the tired classicism of the mid-Victorian period.

Brock’s links with South Kensington are significant. He was a member of the Council for Advice on Art at the V&A, and recommended the purchase of three statuettes by Alfred Gilbert for the Museum in 1904. In addition bronze casts of three of Brock’s clay maquettes for the Victoria Memorial are housed at the V&A, having been acquired in 1977 from a descendant of the Chairman of the Morris Singer foundry where they were cast. It was the V&A which acquired the manuscript life of Brock in 1986, the text which forms the basis of the present publication. It was then anonymous and undated, and it is thanks to John Sankey that its authorship and date have been established, and, most importantly, that it has been published at all.

How does this memoir help us appreciate Brock? From the time of Vasari onwards there has been a fascination for biographies of artists, such lives conveying the idea that we can better understand their art if we understand them as human beings. During the nineteenth century a number of British sculptors’ biographies were written, and sometimes these colour not only our view of the subjects, but of their authors. J.T. Smith’s Nollekens and his Times, published in 1828, is only one of the most notorious of these, Smith, a former assistant of Nollekens, in that case making malicious swipes at his subject.

Here, in contrast, Frederick Brock’s adulatory tone suggests, as indicated above, that he wished to rehabilitate his father’s reputation in the midst of twentieth century shifts of taste. But as well as attempting to convince any reader of the esteem in which Brock should be held, this sequence of chapters sums up in an animated way his life and times. Brock, we are told, was above all a ‘studio man’, whose work ethic was intense and unrelenting. We have vivid pictures of Brock working both as an apprentice himself and later with his own studio assistants. A lively account is given of contemporary workshop practices, even including practical jokes played by the young aspiring sculptors. Brock also comes across as a very clubbable man, his election to the Royal Academy, and his subsequent elevation to the Presidency of the Society of British Sculptors, accepted and welcomed by his peers.

John Sankey has worked extensively on Brock, and his edition of these memoirs is exemplary; he has also added a useful catalogue of Brock’s works at Annex 2. We are fortunate enough to have here a highly readable and intriguing perspective on a sculptor’s life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, one which reveals as much about the art world of his time as about the individual whose life forms its subject.

Marjorie Trusted

Victoria and Albert Museum

Introduction

In 1986 the Victoria and Albert Museum’s National Art Library acquired the typewritten manuscript of a memoir of the life and works of Sir Thomas Brock. Although the typescript was unsigned and undated, one passage in the text clearly identifies the author to be Brock’s son Frederick. It appears in Chapter 14, near the end of the typescript:

‘The statue of Lord Sydenham, which stood packed ready for shipment for four or five years, has never been erected, and probably never will be. Where it is at the present moment I have no idea. The authorities are afraid to put it up because Lord Sydenham had the courage during his term of office as Governor of the Bombay Province to control with an iron hand those Indian agitators who sought to bring the country to ruin. After the sculptor’s death I wrote to Lord Sydenham informing him of the steps I had taken to enable the statue to be identified in years to come and permitting its discoverers to procure a certain necessary sum at present lodged at one of the Bombay banks. He replied: India is passing away and in a few years will become chaotic. This statue, over which your good father took much trouble and which was a fine specimen of his art, will never be erected; but what you propose may have the effect of identifying it when it is discovered some day under a heap of rubbish.’

Sir Thomas Brock’s statue of Baron Sydenham was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1918. These letters must have been written after Brock’s death in 1922, when Frederick became his father’s sole executor. He wrote to Lord Sydenham in this capacity, and in his reply Sydenham refers to ‘your good father’. So Frederick Brock is without doubt the author.

The gloomy predictions of Lord Sydenham and Frederick regarding the fate of the statue proved to be wrong. It is one of the relatively few statues by English sculptors in India to have survived intact and in its original location. It stands prominently in the entrance hall of the Mumbai Institute of Science, which Sydenham founded (fig. 95).

Final proof that Frederick is the author came to light in November 2011. In the same Chapter 14 as the reference to Lord Sydenham, there is an account of how Brock purchased John Singer Sargent’s painting Vespers. This work is now in the Walker Art Gallery, and the Gallery confirmed that Frederick had sold the painting to them in 1928. In a letter dated 5 June 1928 to the Director of the Gallery, Frederick wrote ‘you might like to hear how the picture came into Sir Thomas Brock’s possession. It is a pleasant little story, never previously published, which I tell in the biography I am now preparing.’

He evidently intended to make some additions. In a letter to the Walker dated 23 June 1928, he wrote ‘Will you please tell Mr Audley that when referring to Vespers in the Biography, I will mention its present home, and say how it comes to be there.’ In fact, the typescript does not mention the sale to the Walker Art Gallery. There are amendments to the first few pages of the typescript in Frederick’s handwriting, but he abandoned work on the biography after this letter was written. We do not know the reason.

Frederick Brock was born on 24 August 1880, the seventh of Thomas Brock’s nine children. From 1885 the family lived in Worcester Lodge, a house built by Brock in the growing London suburb of Brondesbury. In 1889 a shortage of commissions and the need to educate his large family compelled Brock to move temporarily to Bedford. He himself slept ‘over the shop’ in the Osnaburgh Street studio and travelled to Bedford at weekends. Not an easy time for Brock, and one which Frederick refers to as the ‘lean years’.

In 1893 the family moved back to Brondesbury and lived there until 1905, when Brock bought Merrieweathers, an estate near Mayfield in East Sussex. Frederick, now 25, seems not to have had paid employment but kept himself occupied looking after the Merrieweathers estate while his father worked in the London studio. He also helped with the paperwork during his father’s presidency of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. Brock called him his ‘literary’ son, while William and Charles Edmond were his ‘painter’ sons.

Brock died in 1922 and in his Will named Frederick as his sole executor. In the London studio were several unfinished commissions, including the war memorial for Queen’s University Belfast, the Lister Memorial for Portland Place and the bronze groups for the Victoria Memorial. Frederick supervised the casting and installation of the bronze groups and entrusted the completion of the other memorials to his father’s studio assistant, Frank Arnold Wright. He also found homes for many of the full-size plaster models by presenting them to institutions like the Royal Academy, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Wales.

In 1912 Frederick published an English verse adaptation of Victor Hugo’s tragedy Hernani. After his father’s death four popular novels appeared in quick succession: The Arrest in 1924, The Reproach in 1925, The Slapped Woman in 1926 and The Kissing-Gate in 1927. The Slapped Woman ran into a second edition. At the same time he began writing this detailed account of his father’s life and works, provoked by the patronising tone of some of the obituaries of his father and by the critical attitude of certain institutions like the Tate Gallery.

Criticism of Brock’s ‘ideal’ statues Genius of Poetry and Eve prompts Frederick to deplore the defects of contemporary poets and ‘modern’ art. He is particularly scornful of Roger Fry’s suggestion that Brock should have sought inspiration for his Queen Victoria from a headless pre-Babylonian statue in the Louvre. These excursions into polemic make the memoir of wider interest than a simple narrative of Brock’s career. The memoir also throws new light on Brock’s relationship with the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and with his fellow Academicians, including Leighton, Millais, Poynter and Woolner.

Modern accounts of late Victorian and Edwardian sculpture often refer to the ‘New Sculpture’. This term was coined by the art critic Edmund Gosse in 1894 to describe the marked improvement in the quality of English sculpture led by Frederick Leighton’s Athlete struggling with a python in 1877 and continued by Hamo Thornycroft, Alfred Gilbert and Thomas Brock. Frederick does not use the term ‘New Sculpture’; for him Brock had a unique and characteristic style which owed nothing to other ‘schools’ or ‘movements’.

My own interest in Brock began in 1979, when I purchased Merrieweathers and discovered it had been Brock’s home for seventeen years. Shortly afterwards Ben Read’s ground-breaking Victorian Sculpture appeared and inspired me to research Brock’s life and works. In 2002 I completed a thesis on Brock’s place in the New Sculpture movement.

The initiative for publishing Frederick Brock’s memoir came from a member of the Brock family, Mr Ian Thompson. He and Sir Thomas Brock are both descended from Joseph Hale Brock, who was Thomas Brock’s grandfather and Ian Thompson’s great-great-great grandfather. Mr Thompson believed that Frederick’s manuscript deserved to be better known and sought the permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum (readily given) to publish it in memory of his distinguished relative.

Mr Thompson invited me to edit the typescript for publication. The chapters are as numbered by Frederick; I have added the titles and moved the detailed account of sculptural methods, originally Chapter 7, to Annex 1. I have also compiled the first comprehensive list of Brock’s works, giving their date, type, material and location (Annex 2).

Many institutions and individuals have given advice and information during the preparation of this book, particularly Joanna Barnes, Xanthe Brooke (Walker Art Gallery) Katherine Eustace, Alexander Kader, Rupert Maas, Garston Phillips (Worcester Art Gallery), Mark Pomeroy, Timothy Stevens, Mark Stocker and Philip Ward-Jackson. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum for granting permission to publish the memoir, to Marjorie Trusted for writing the Foreword, to my daughter Caroline Jarrett for researching and editing the illustrations, and to my wife Gwen for her support throughout.

John Sankey

Chapter 1: The Worcester Apprentice

Although it would be incorrect to describe the life of Thomas Brock as uneventful, it was a simple life; and considering the position to which he rose in his profession, a somewhat retired one. Over the long period of fifty years, he passed the greater part of his time in the comparative seclusion of his studio. He rarely indulged in a holiday. For him the months of August and September were no different from any other month in the year. When the Court left London, when Parliament rose, when lawyers shook the dust of the Law Courts from their feet, when surgeons put away their instrument cases and physicians their consulting books, when Society scattered to the four corners of the earth, he remained at the studio. There was no grouse shooting or salmon fishing for him, no visiting of foreign spas, no travelling to distant parts; and in winter it was the same.

An imaginative journalist once compared his professional career to Lord Roberts’s memorable march to Kandahar and the comparison was a just one.¹ People always knew where to find him. He was never so happy as when busily engaged at his Osnaburgh Street studio; and even when his health began to fail and he could now and then be persuaded to take a brief rest, it was always with the eagerness of a boy setting forth upon a holiday that he would return to London and to work. No man could have displayed a deeper affection for his art nor have laboured more assiduously in the service of those who commissioned him. Both his industry and his rapidity of execution were remarkable; and it may be doubted that any other British sculptor sent from his studios an amount of work comparable in volume with that for which he was responsible.

He was born in the city of Worcester – Civitas Fidelis – on the first day of March 1847, being the younger of two children born to William and Catherine Brock (figs. 4 & 5). ² He was named Thomas after his maternal grandfather Thomas Marshall, a Worcestershire farmer. William Brock, born on 7 March 1820, carried on the business of a decorator. He was the son of Joseph Hale Brock, a designer and colourist of porcelain, whose brother Samuel held a responsible position in connection with the Duke of Bedford’s London estate. It was in 1756 that the Duesbury family established at Derby the business of porcelain manufacture, destined to become world famous. This business they controlled until about 1800. Seeing that Joseph Brock migrated from Derby to Worcester, and that when he did so he was between forty and fifty years of age, there is reason to assume that he was employed by them either as a designer or a colourist.

Brock always spoke of his grandfather Joseph as an exceptionally capable man, an artist to his fingertips and gifted in more than one direction. But his indolent disposition, the bane of so many skilful men, coupled with a propensity for taking more of what is stimulant (as Farington the diarist politely expresses it) than was conducive to activity – a fairly common one in those days – contributed to his failure to make a name for himself.³ After his marriage with Sarah Furniss, a Derbyshire woman of independent means, he appears to have done little or no work, preferring to live upon his wife’s income and to pass the greater part of his time in the pursuit of novelty and pleasure. He lived to the advanced age of ninety-two, and it was his boast almost to the last that he had never known more than a day’s illness in his life.

Elderly people living in Worcester remembered Joseph Brock as a character, and this he must have been. He was utterly fearless, and occasionally acted as though he imagined all other people to be equally fortunate. A powerful swimmer, he one day – this was when he was over seventy years of age – took his grandson Tom under one arm and his grandson Arthur, child of the younger Joseph, under the other; and plunging into deep water, supported the two infants after the manner of the mothers of India, while they splashed, kicked and howled on the surface of the water. That was how Brock received his first swimming lesson; and young though he was at the time, he never forgot it.

The old man, whom Brock held in affection and withal respectful remembrance, retained a true zest for life to the end of his days. He was excellent company, and like poor Yorick, the king’s jester, was wont to set the table on a roar.⁴ People who knew him said that he had a rare gift for extemporary versifying, being the possessor of a ready wit and a sensitive ear; and that, if called upon, he could rattle off lines composed on the spur of the moment, no matter what the subject might be, with an ease that many regarded as little short of marvellous. But he was one of those men to whom the drudgery - inseparable from every kind of occupation, if success is to be achieved - proves an insurmountable barrier; and so he sauntered through a long life without leaving behind him a single piece of work by which he personally might be remembered.

To two of his sons – and Brock’s father was one of them – he transmitted his indolent nature. His namesake Joseph alone displayed any real industry and it would be idle to deny that work was distasteful to both John and William. All three sons were capable men and it is sad to reflect that they should have achieved so little. John Brock was perhaps the most attractive of the three. His was an inventive mind, but men took advantage of his indolence and weakness to derive profit for themselves. He claimed to be the inventor of the process by means of which metals are enamelled and said that the secret was extorted from him one night by a method which has frequently been employed to loosen the tongues of men of his lamentably weak nature. Brock referred to this matter on more than one occasion, as well as to others relating to his unfortunate uncle who, careless and debonair to the last – to judge by his appearance, he might have been the ground landlord of a London parish – strolled through life in very much the same easy fashion as the elder Joseph had done. Brock’s father William showed himself equally averse to strenuous effort and as indifferent to his own advancement. He retired from business at an age when the aim of most men is to extend their sphere of operations. Having put by sufficient to enable him to live at his ease, he purchased the long lease of two houses in London, and in one of them passed the remainder of his life doing practically nothing.⁵

Considering the longevity and robust health of one grandfather and the fine physique of the other – for Thomas Marshall, who lost his life under dramatic circumstances, was a powerful man – it seems strange that during his early years Brock should have been extremely delicate. While quite a child he underwent an operation, from the effects of which he made but a slow recovery. Indeed it was not until he reached the age of thirteen that his health began materially to improve; and even when he had passed the period of adolescence, there was in his appearance nothing that gave promise of his developing into the robust and vigorous man whom so many people knew and remember.

He was sent to a school presided over by a Mr Hyde, who employed as his chief assistant a good stout rod. That gentleman quickly decided that whatever distinction his latest pupil might achieve in other directions, he would never achieve much in the field of learning; and as a result the services of the chief assistant were frequently brought into play. Those were the days when parents still believed in the truth of the old saying: Qui parcit virgae odit filium and when schoolmasters continued to thrash their charges upon the slightest provocation. For many boys the via Latina must then have offered travelling even more painful than it does today; and to judge by what Brock used to say when speaking of those early days, he was clearly one of their number. He readily admitted, however, that he was much to blame, and said that it was the severity rather than the frequency of Hyde’s punishments which caused his recollections of that gentleman to be so very painful. He hated his books; hated them as only a child can.⁶

In after years he frequently expressed his regret that he had not made better use of his opportunities; for had he shown greater diligence and so won the esteem of his masters, his parents would undoubtedly have done everything in their power to provide him with such an education as would have stood him in good stead throughout his life. As it was, drawing appeared to be the only subject that gave him pleasure; and this, unfortunately for him, was then, as now, one which in the opinion of schoolmasters