Sculpture Victorious, Tate Britain

Sculpture in Victorian Britain was everywhere: from ornaments and imperial instruments to everyday coins, the ubiquitous medium reached millions of people across the world. Thanks to new technologies in mass production and the massive wealth of Industrialism, enriched patrons and hungry markets encouraged a boom in the production and reception of sculpture across Britain and the Empire. Sculpture therefore became a natural part of public life, with illustrious commissions by public institutions and monuments to her majesty Queen Victoria marking the landscape of the nineteenth century.
Sculpture Victorious, Tate Britain London
This must-see on the calendar of Tate Britain upcoming exhibitions 2015 is scholarly in scope and magnificent in content, looking at the imagination and inventive streak of Victorian sculptors working across many different sculptural media such as marble, bronze, silver and wood, gem stones, glass and porcelain. This is the first time that we have seen such examples of infamous sculpture in London, as it rarely leaves its home at Yale University.
Tate Britain highlights
This London sculpture exhibition boasts stars of the Great Exhibition and acclaimed artists Francis Chantrey, Alfred Gilbert and Frederic Leighton amongst its highlights. Look out also for one of the most well-known pieces of sculpture in the later nineteenth century, Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave (1847): a demure, white marble imitation of the Venus de Medici as sex slave with her hands clad in sculpted chains. Although made by an American sculptor, the Tate curators return the work to its British origins after it was shown at the 1851 Great Exhibition. Provocatively place beside Powers’ work is John Bell’s riposte The American Slave (1853). A dark bronze with a darker subject, it depicts an African woman, chained, awaiting trans-Atlantic transportation into slavery. The result is heart-stopping.