TY - JOUR
AU - Hart, Imogen
AB - I. Introduction Looking at Auguste Rodin’s Gates of Hell in 1886, Edmond de Goncourt saw ‘upon the two immense panels, a mess, an entanglement, an entangling, something like the formation of a bank of coral’.1 Goncourt seems to have seen the Gates of Hell through a Darwinian lens. The ‘entangled bank’ is one of the most familiar images in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), the concluding paragraph of which begins: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.2This article analyses another sculptural ‘entangled bank’, George Frampton’s Peter Pan statue, which was unveiled in London’s Kensington Gardens in 1912 (Figure 1).3 Figure 1. Sir George Frampton, Peter Pan, 1912. Bronze. London: Kensington Gardens. Photo: author. Figure 1. Sir George Frampton, Peter Pan, 1912. Bronze. London: Kensington Gardens. Photo: author. The ‘entangled bank’ passage from the Origin of Species has taken on a variety of meanings in Darwin scholarship, and even in Darwin’s sentence there is a slippage between different interpretations of entanglement. There is entanglement as an empirical fact that can be perceived by the eye (the plants, birds, insects, and worms coexisting in a specific location). There is an ecological entanglement that can be observed over time (their codependence). Finally, there is the conceptual entanglement that cannot be seen (the evolutionary relationship between all these organisms), although knowledge of it can affect how the world is seen. The passage has informed art historical interpretations of Victorian depictions of flora and fauna that appear to give visual shape to Darwin’s description of the entangled bank.4 It has also taken on a metaphorical significance, inspiring theories of the ‘entangled eye’ in literature and the ‘entangled subject’ in film studies.5 In these accounts, entanglement stands for shifts in perception that occurred as the implications of evolutionary theory were absorbed. Here I will argue that Frampton’s sculpture invites interpretation as an entangled bank on each of these levels. Animals and birds make their homes in the sculpture’s base, recalling Darwin’s imaginary entangled bank; the sculpture’s relationship with its outdoor surroundings suggests an ecological entanglement; and its details and composition call to mind the conceptual forms of entanglement associated with Darwin’s theory. I do not wish to argue that this is a strictly ‘Darwinist’ sculpture, but rather that it seems to register some of the implications of Darwinian theory for sculptural practice.6 John Addington Symonds (who also wrote on sculpture, among many other topics) summarized the profound effect of evolutionary theory on contemporary culture in 1890. In its wake, he observed: our views about the world and man’s place in it have so materially changed, that it is no longer possible to approach the study of human energy in any one of its great manifestations – religion, the state, art, philosophy – without adjusting this to the main current and keynote of thought.7More recently, art historian Michael Leja has suggested that nineteenth-century art writing ‘indicates that evolutionary theory had the power to reshape habits of seeing’.8 In this spirit, I attempt to show how ways of making and seeing sculpture were reshaped by Darwinism. Sculpture has received comparatively little attention in the recent literature on evolutionism and the visual arts.9 Using Frampton’s statue as a case study, this article aims to reinvest sculpture with its contemporary evolutionary resonances and to highlight the ways in which now-established sculptural-historical concepts such as materiality, process, and the fragment can be more fully understood in the context of Victorian natural history. II. ‘Entangled’ nature in Peter Pan Frampton’s Peter Pan was commissioned by J. M. Barrie, author of the Peter Pan stories.10 The statue is located next to the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens, London, at the very spot where, in The Little White Bird (the 1902 novel that introduced the character), Peter Pan came to shore after living on an island.11 The lone figure of Peter Pan stands atop a complex base, populated by animals and fairies. The sculpture’s setting and its base have been understood in terms of contemporary ‘notions that children are closer to nature than adults’.12 I propose that the sculpture’s representation of nature is more complex than this. Art historian Martina Droth observes that many of the figures are ‘still embedded’ in the background and notes the rabbit warrens that have produced the ‘shifted, molded earth’ of this ‘precarious, perforated ground’ (Figure 2).13 Darwin’s ‘entangled bank’ is ‘perforated’, too, with ‘worms crawling through the damp earth’. I suggest that this fluid natural world that appears to be mutating before our eyes in the sculpture corresponds to Darwin’s view of nature. Figure 2. Sir George Frampton, Peter Pan (detail showing the base), 1912. Bronze. London: Kensington Gardens. Photo: author. Figure 2. Sir George Frampton, Peter Pan (detail showing the base), 1912. Bronze. London: Kensington Gardens. Photo: author. In his study of the representation of landscape in late nineteenth-century fiction, James Krasner has argued that Darwin sees nature ‘through an empirically entangled eye’.14 Darwin’s ‘entangled eye’, according to Krasner, views nature not as a static system consisting of easily distinguishable, identifiable, and self-contained species, but rather as a mobile process in which evolutionary connections blur the boundaries between organisms.15 Krasner shows that Darwin’s ‘attention to body parts and organic details leads him unceasingly away from seeing in forms, and toward a fluxing, fragmented visual field’.16 Like the novelists Krasner discusses, other turn-of-the-century thinkers registered the ways in which evolutionary theory required a new kind of perception. Symonds pointed out, ‘the fundamental conception which underlies the Evolutionary method of thought is that all things in the universe exist in process’.17 Frampton’s statue represents a nature that ‘exist[s] in process’. As Droth observes, the forms of the base register the clay in which they were originally modelled (Figure 3).18 Another way of putting this is that the sculpture in its bronze form inherits certain characteristics from its ancestor, the clay model. The work thus draws attention not only to the process through which it was created – a feature often understood to be characteristic of modernist sculpture, as I will explore further in the next section – but also to the inherently reproductive nature of that process. The reproductive methods required for the manufacture of bronze sculpture, usually incorporating many stages including a clay model, plaster casts, wax casts, and often multiple bronze casts, allow this art form to resonate with evolutionary theory in a distinctive way. There is a conceptual parallel with the Darwinian theory of characteristics being passed on through reproduction while also being subject to mutation and chance. The fundamental reproducibility of sculpture is reinforced in the case of Frampton’s Peter Pan by the work’s international legacy in the form of six prominently displayed replicas.19 The variation among these casts, resulting from differences of patination and site, can be considered analogous to the variation within species that makes natural selection possible. Figure 3. Sir George Frampton, Peter Pan (detail showing the surface), 1912. Bronze. London: Kensington Gardens. Photo: author. Figure 3. Sir George Frampton, Peter Pan (detail showing the surface), 1912. Bronze. London: Kensington Gardens. Photo: author. The evolutionary implications of the visual signs of the sculpture’s clay origin can be pursued further. Clay is earth and, as Droth observes, certain parts of the base seem to represent ‘the indeterminate matter that makes up earth’.20 In addition, the sculpture’s location encourages us to read it as an extension of the earth beneath. While a circular stone floor now reaches outwards from the very edge of the base, early photographs show a wide band of grass around the base with a narrow stone path beyond it, which would have increased the impression that the sculpture emerged directly from the earth.21 Frampton explained in a press interview that he intended the work to appear to have ‘simply grown out of the ground’.22 For Darwin, that ground is made up of the deposits of ‘the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth’.23 The resemblance of the base to a ‘tree-stump’ is another echo of Darwin’s ‘Tree of Life’.24 In Darwin’s writings the earth is also gradually and constantly reshaped as it passes through the digestive systems of worms. This bronze cast calls to mind the images of worm castings that Darwin reproduced in his 1881 book The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms (Figure 4).25 These visual references to earth and the actions of worms make this work, in a sense, a memento mori, bringing to mind the fact that the body is consumed by worms and, as Hilary Fraser has described it, ‘embraced by the earth at the grave site’.26 This sculpture of a fictional boy who never grows up is thus potentially a memorial for all those who will never grow up.27 Cast bronze bearing the imprint of hand-modelled clay stands for the worm-churned earth, out of which emerges the constantly reproducing, mutating natural world, whose lifeless remains are recycled to form new earth. Figure 4. Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms: With Observations on their Habits (London: John Murray, 1881), p. 124. University of California Library. Photo: Julie Wolf. Figure 4. Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms: With Observations on their Habits (London: John Murray, 1881), p. 124. University of California Library. Photo: Julie Wolf. There is no firm distinction between the life forms modelled in the base and the earthy substance from which they issue forth. The continuum between animate and inanimate forms in the sculpture seems to acknowledge the possibility raised by evolutionary theory, and recognized by contemporaries, that mental powers were not exclusive to human beings, but were shared by animals and even, potentially, inorganic material. For example, psychiatrist Henry Maudsley, who believed that ‘Life is not a contrast to non-living Nature, but a further development of it’, claimed, ‘The higher mental faculties are formed by evolution from the more simple and elementary’.28 Symonds later suggested, even more explicitly, that ‘we are forced to admit that inorganic Nature is implicated in the process of mental development’.29 It is not the lone human figure at the top of the statue that invites the viewer to reflect on mortality and evolution, but rather the way that figure is presented in relation to the non-human, decorative forms of the base. The sculpture thus explores the expressive potential of non-human subjects and forms, just as evolutionary theory considered the emotional and mental potential of ‘lower animals’ and inorganic nature.30 Section V will explore in more depth the evolutionary significance of the decorative, but first I shall pursue further the ways in which Peter Pan suggests the evolutionary implications of two concepts introduced in this section, the fragment and the emphasis on process, both of which were important in the development of modern sculpture. III. Destabilizing the spectator Darwinian nature is an ‘entangled’ system that ‘exist[s] in process’, whose individual, interdependent components are continuously subject to modification. Krasner perceives that Darwin was able to visualize the genealogical relationships between organisms by focusing on their body parts and imagining how they might have been arranged in different combinations in shared ancestors.31 Darwin’s theory replaced wholeness with fragmentation. This, of course, has been seen as one of the major interventions of modern sculpture. The period saw the production of torsos, heads, hands, and other partial figures, most famously in the work of Rodin, but also in the output of numerous other sculptors. As Moshe Barasch points out, many nineteenth-century art historians suggested that ‘the unfinished, the incomplete, and the fragmentary have a perfection of their own’.32 The rise of the fragment was connected to the rejection of ‘finish’, which, according to Barasch, traditionally meant ‘to make everything that may remind us of [a work’s] growth and production disappear altogether, erasing the stages of its emergence and final casting into shape’.33 This description of the purpose of artistic finish resonates with Darwin’s search for evolutionary clues in modern organisms, which, as evolving life forms, could themselves be described as ‘unfinished’. Frampton’s Peter Pan can be considered unfinished and fragmented in this sense, since, as we saw in the previous section, it draws attention to the ‘stages of its emergence and final casting into shape’. In nineteenth-century art the fragment took on a philosophical significance; it could be read, for example, as a Neoplatonic acceptance of the impossibility of realizing the ideal in matter.34 Fragmentation in sculpture, I will argue, challenged any notion of an ideal, eternal type by suggesting a nature that ‘exist[s] in process’. The kind of perceptual mode required by fragmentary sculpture was, in a sense, similar to that prompted by evolutionary nature. Critic Sadakichi Hartmann observed in 1907 that the beauty of form ‘has become fragmentary. It does not explain itself and asks the aid of imagination from without’.35 The viewer needs imagination to make sense of sculpture’s fragments, just as Darwin used his imagination to weave together the parts of living organisms to construct mental images of their possible ancestors. As David Getsy notes, sculptors in this period also used spiral compositions to ensure that each view of the sculpture would offer a partial and therefore temporarily fragmented impression, which was desirable because it evoked the ‘antique’.36 The Peter Pan statue embraces the principle of the spiral composition. From every angle the spectator’s view is incomplete and details are fragmented. In his famous 1846 Salon review, Charles Baudelaire complained that sculpture has a certain vagueness and ambiguity, because it exhibits too many surfaces at once. It is in vain that the sculptor forces himself to take up a unique point of view, for the spectator who moves around the figure can choose a hundred different points of view, except for the right one.37Fifty years later, in 1896, the influential art historian Heinrich Wölfflin published the first of his articles on how to photograph sculpture. Here Wölfflin is primarily interested in classical and Renaissance sculptures for which there is one ‘correct’ view.38 When such works are seen from the ‘correct’ position, ‘the figure explains itself all at once and becomes completely understandable’.39 Wölfflin acknowledges that there are instances where a sculpture ‘wants to be seen from various sides’, but even in these situations, ‘there must always be only one comprehensive main view if one does not want to be endlessly driven restlessly around the figure’.40 He relates the ‘pleasure’ and ‘liberation’ of ‘moving from the inferior views to the completely convincing [view]’ which is ‘calm and clear’.41 This is the position from which sculpture should be photographed. In Passages in Modern Sculpture, art historian Rosalind Krauss argues that neoclassicism seeks a single ‘ideal viewpoint’ that ‘will contain the totality of information necessary for a conceptual grasp of the object’.42 In contrast, she claims, ‘Rodin’s work has no angle or view that would be correct’ and ‘resists all attempts to be read as a coherent narrative’.43 For Krauss, Rodin’s work is about process. She describes his famous emphasis on facture as ‘visual evidence of the passage of the medium itself from one state to another’.44 Krauss argues that Rodin’s sculptures ‘are about a lack of premeditation, a lack of foreknowledge, that leaves one intellectually and emotionally dependent on the gestures and movements of figures as they externalize themselves’.45 In other words, instead of a sculpture communicating a set of pre-existing meanings, new meanings come into being at the same time as the sculpture.46 What Wölfflin calls the ‘correct’ view, and what Krauss calls the ‘ideal viewpoint’, ‘enables one […] to understand the object’ and produces ‘pleasure’ at the ‘calm and clear’ impression received.47 Conversely, the absence of a ‘comprehensive main view’ results in restlessness for Wölfflin, in ‘vagueness and ambiguity’ for Baudelaire, and, for Krauss, it is an ‘attack’ on ‘rationalism’ that prompts troubling reflections on the self’s relation to the world.48 The single viewpoint is associated with order and harmony and the alternative is disturbing. Sculpture – like evolutionary theory – has the capacity to modify a spectator’s view of the world. The spectator is prompted to reflect on the limits of perception; the eye is presented with a confusing mass of parts that are not easily comprehensible visually; the scene appears to be visibly in flux; forms describe processes of change instead of fixed meanings. Such a world refuses to be made sense of if the spectator insists on retaining an anthropocentric, idealist perspective. While the concept of the ideal requires a permanent pattern to be imposed from without (whether on organic material or on a sculptural medium), the possibility raised by evolutionary theory and modern sculpture is that an organism or a sculpture can be seen as having come into being by processes of mutation and chance. Peter Pan is a sculpture that, as Wölfflin would put it, ‘wants to be seen from various sides’. There is something Darwinian about such an unresolved process of viewing. It involves more data than can easily be subsumed into a ‘calm and clear’ picture of the world. The sculpture’s total effect is not presented neatly packaged to viewers who take up the ‘correct’ or ‘ideal’ viewpoint. In being ‘driven restlessly around’, the spectator is not external to and independent of the sculpture; he or she is drawn into its world. The sculpture presupposes an ‘entangled eye’ that knows its limits as a means of making sense of what it sees. As Krasner observes, Darwin’s theory revealed that vision itself was a product of natural selection, challenging assumptions of distanced objectivity that spectators might have held in their contemplation of nature.49 Hartmann’s claim that sculptors who aim to ‘fix the most favourable viewpoint’ create a ‘pictorial’ effect recalls the picturesque in painting and its function as a means of re-presenting nature as ordered and perceived from without.50 This authoritative way of seeing was threatened by evolutionary theory, which questioned the perfection of vision and reframed the human eye, along with its owner, as part of the very nature it attempted to analyse. Maudsley observed: man’s inability, as being himself a part of Nature, to form a conception of Nature as a whole. He must necessarily regard things in relation to himself; for as he exists only in relation to Nature, and as every phase of consciousness is an expression of this relation, it is plain that one of the elements of the relation cannot free itself, and from an independent point of view watch unconcernedly things as they really are.51When a viewer is denied the clarity and objectivity of a single viewpoint in sculpture, the contingency of nature and vision becomes inescapable. The boundary between sculpture and viewer blurs. Discussing the spiral composition of Frederic Leighton’s An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (Tate, 1877), Getsy argues that the sculpture ‘evokes the bodily co-presence of the viewer through its incitement to circumambulation’.52 Similarly, the presence of circling spectators is anticipated by the Peter Pan statue.53 A strong sense of motion infuses the base, where the fairies swoop diagonally upwards and in a spiral around the sculpture, their momentum promising to carry them onwards to the summit. IV. Evolution’s threat to ideal sculpture As Droth observes, ‘the top of the plinth acts as a destination; it is a place that is aspired to’.54 Viewers are free to touch this outdoor work, and indeed many young visitors reach out to caress one of the animals at hand height. The aspiration of the figures in the base is shared by the children who climb up the base to have their photograph taken with Peter. In the context of narratives of evolutionary ‘progress’, we can see (white, male) humanity as the state that the other organisms in the base ‘aspire to’.55 As Darwin put it, ‘Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale’.56 Mary Brewer has argued that Peter Pan’s ‘identity as Great White Father places him in a category of idealized patriarchal authority: the masculine figure for which one need face no competition’.57 The implication is that the chaste, white, masculine Peter Pan is immune to the struggle for existence that Darwin saw in nature. The Peter Pan sculpture can thus be read as an anthropocentric, gendered evolutionary narrative, presenting as it does an idealized male human child as the culmination of the evolutionary process and a succession of adult females, in the form of the fairies on the base, only gradually aspiring to his place of dominance. This would be consistent with sexist interpretations of natural selection that corresponded to and enlarged on Darwin’s conclusion that ‘thus man has ultimately become superior to woman’.58 Peter Pan stands elevated above and detached from the entirely female nature beneath.59 Yet, on the stage, the role of Peter Pan was (and is) played by an adult woman (Figure 5). One critic saw in all the figures in the sculpture ‘a certain likeness to Miss Pauline Chase’, the actress who had recently assumed the role of Peter Pan, ‘the tall forehead and straight eyebrows being unmistakable’.60 For contemporary audiences, the figure crowning Frampton’s sculpture was potentially both male and female. Similarly, s/he was both human and non-human. Barrie suggests in The Little White Bird that Peter Pan is an inter-species figure, neither ‘exactly a human’ nor ‘exactly a bird’, but rather a ‘Betwixt-and-Between’, according to the wise crow Solomon Caw.61 Solomon is present on the sculpture’s base as a reminder of this background, as the Westminster Gazette noted.62 On the one hand, a figure who is ‘Betwixt-and-Between’ genders and species is far from being the typical subject of ideal sculpture, which was often understood by the Victorians to represent perfect masculinity or femininity (John Ruskin, for example, famously described the Venus de Medici as ‘one of the purest and most elevated incarnations of woman conceivable’) and to depict ‘human subjectivity at one with itself’.63 On the other hand, since the antique canon included statues of gods, mythological hybrid creatures, and androgynous or hermaphroditic figures, Frampton’s Peter Pan could be interpreted as participating in a long sculptural tradition that was fascinated by the tension between idealized human form and the suggestion of species hybridity and/or indistinct gender. Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Bassano Ltd, Pauline Chase as Peter Pan in Peter Pan, 1907. Whole-plate glass negative. © National Portrait Gallery, London. Figure 5. View largeDownload slide Bassano Ltd, Pauline Chase as Peter Pan in Peter Pan, 1907. Whole-plate glass negative. © National Portrait Gallery, London. The identity of the figures on the statue’s base was likewise ambiguous. While some critics assumed that they were fairies, one described them as ‘more like demure Girton girls, or classic-browed suffragettes’.64 Another reported that ‘many mothers insisted to their children that they were not fairies but the mothers looking for lost children, and that the impudent one at the top was trying to capture Peter’.65 The female figure at the top could be interpreted as Wendy or Mrs Darling, whose attempted embrace Peter rebuts in Peter and Wendy with the words, ‘Keep back, lady, no one is going to catch me and make me a man’ (Figure 6).66 This ascending fairy’s ‘voluptuous’ sexuality, Gillian Beer notes, represents ‘oncoming adulthood’.67 By never growing up, Peter Pan seems to offer a check to the ruthless process of reproduction, mutation, and extinction threatened by evolution. Frampton’s sculpture suggests that Peter’s invulnerability is only illusory and shows the unstoppable force of evolution in the form of a tangled, sexualized nature on the verge of subsuming him. Figure 6. Sir George Frampton, Peter Pan (detail showing the female figure at the top of the base), 1912. Bronze. London: Kensington Gardens. Photo: author. Figure 6. Sir George Frampton, Peter Pan (detail showing the female figure at the top of the base), 1912. Bronze. London: Kensington Gardens. Photo: author. In a photograph of the sculpture in Frampton’s studio, the fairy at the top of the base has wings, but in the final version her back is smooth (Figure 7).68 Critics frequently mentioned the lack of wings on some of the fairies, and one offered Frampton’s explanation: ‘there was no law upon the subject. Fairies were not bound to have wings’.69 The presence of fairies with and without wings suggests different varieties or even species of fairy. Groups of these winged and wingless female figures embrace intimately, even sensually, introducing a homoerotic element that the sculpture’s evocation of a fairy tale should not preclude us from recognizing (Figures 8 and 9). Barrie’s stories of Peter Pan engage openly with themes of dawning adolescence, of innocence, and of sexuality.70 Figure 7. Photograph of Sir George Frampton’s studio, ‘Recent Designs in Domestic Architecture’, Studio 49 (1910), 214. University of California Library. Photo: Julie Wolf. Figure 7. Photograph of Sir George Frampton’s studio, ‘Recent Designs in Domestic Architecture’, Studio 49 (1910), 214. University of California Library. Photo: Julie Wolf. Figure 8. Sir George Frampton, Peter Pan (detail showing figures embracing), 1912. Bronze. London: Kensington Gardens. Photo: author. Figure 8. Sir George Frampton, Peter Pan (detail showing figures embracing), 1912. Bronze. London: Kensington Gardens. Photo: author. Figure 9. Sir George Frampton, Peter Pan (detail showing winged and wingless female figures embracing), 1912. Bronze. London: Kensington Gardens. Photo: author. Figure 9. Sir George Frampton, Peter Pan (detail showing winged and wingless female figures embracing), 1912. Bronze. London: Kensington Gardens. Photo: author. Frampton seems to have conceived the figure of Peter himself in terms of the ideal sculptural tradition. ‘I had three models,’ he reports, ‘and I took the best from each.’71 This kind of selective method, though not exclusive to sculptors, was nevertheless seen as especially critical for sculptural practice, as contemporary critics and practitioners repeatedly observed. Scottish sculptor D. W. Stevenson quotes the eighteenth-century art critic Denis Diderot in a lecture of 1889: ‘One paints all one sees; the severe, grave, and chaste sculptor chooses.’72 According to critic Claude Philips, writing in 1886: the highest truth is not necessarily attained by a reproduction of the accidental imperfections of individuals, but rather by a selection which shall take all that is expressive and essential, and cast aside or simplify the rest. Sculpture, essentially an art of compromise, can only proceed on such a basis.73Similarly, seventeen years later in 1903, the American art journal the Brush and Pencil explains: ‘The merely transient, ephemeral, and picturesque idiosyncrasies of nature are lopped off, pruned, or relegated to their proper places, and only what is eternal and ever-recurring becomes the legitimate material for the sculptor’s art.’ 74 Various ends would be served by adherence to the selective method: the sculpture could represent the ideal or the type rather than the individual; ‘competition with nature’ could be avoided; and the danger of a too-realistic sculpture arousing desire among spectators could be reduced.75 The human figure in sculpture was expected to be idealized, stylized, and chaste, representing the ‘eternal’ and ‘essential’. Edmund Gosse criticizes the failure to observe the selective principle in his review of T. Stirling Lee’s sculpture Dawn of Womanhood (1883), which ‘was like an absolute cast from the flesh. There was no selection of type, no striving after beauty of line; the figure was a literal copy of an ugly naked woman’.76 This condemnation was delivered in the context of Gosse’s 1894 articles on the phenomenon he inaugurated as ‘The New Sculpture’. Gosse (apparently paradoxically) also praised the ‘naturalism’ in the work of this group of contemporary British sculptors, which included Frampton. Jason Edwards has demonstrated that Gosse’s ‘dual, scientific-illustrative emphasis on the New Sculpture’s minute detail and selection of idealized, representative types’ can be understood as a version of the ‘natural theological stance’ of his father, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse.77 The conception of the ideal as a sign of divine creation is consistent with P. H. Gosse’s staunch anti-evolutionism.78 A theological natural history made room for – and even depended on – the concept of the ideal, whereas Darwin’s evolutionary theory completely undermined the idea of an ‘eternal and ever-recurring’ human form, and consequently challenged the basis of the selective sculptural method. The repetition of the word ‘selection’ by these sculpture critics calls to mind Darwin’s theories of natural and sexual selection, and indeed the creation of sculptural beauty through this process of ‘casting aside’ the imperfect is analogous to the intensification of natural beauty through the mechanism of sexual selection, which, according to Darwin, favours the reproduction of the most beautiful in nature. However, the crucial difference is that Darwin’s sexual selection does not presuppose a pre-existing standard of beauty or an ‘ever-recurring’ human type; nor does it presume that perceptions of beauty are either universal or ‘eternal’.79 Peter Pan is a meditation on the condition of the statue in a post-Darwinian world. It attempts to elevate chaste, idealized boyhood as an icon of human potential, but it cannot help acknowledging the threat of evolution to that anthropocentric, masculinist ideal. Peter Pan’s dominance is threatened by the ascending fairy, who emerges from the cluttered, swirling confusion of the base in an effort to share the position of prominence with Peter. Evolutionary theory posed a threat to the ‘eternal’ and the ‘essential’. The challenge to the idea of the fixed type in nature brings with it a challenge to ideal sculpture.80 As Symonds put it, ‘man is not the final product of Nature’.81 The female fairy’s potential to disrupt the privileged place of masculine humanity at the pinnacle of the evolutionary pyramid – both by introducing a potentially non-human, female creature to that place and by enacting the link between the two spaces – undermines an anthropocentric view of evolution. V. The ecology of decoration As Symonds observed, ‘Evolution dealt a death-blow at the assumptions of human self-conceit’.82 Recognizing that sculpture and sculpture history have traditionally been remarkably anthropocentric, Jason Edwards has urged sculpture historians ‘to ponder further the ecology of sculptural histories and historiographies’, meaning ‘both the sculptural depiction of and interaction with species and ecosystems beyond the human’.83 Exploring sculpture’s connections with evolutionary theory is one step towards addressing part of this challenge. Barbara Creed, drawing on Krasner’s account, has identified what she calls the ‘entangled subject’ in her study of Darwin’s influence on film. ‘The entangled subject,’ Creed argues, ‘exists in close interrelationship with others and with the material world.’84 I suggest that in sculpture, a Darwinian subject could not be represented in the form of an idealized, ‘essential’, and ‘eternal’ human figure, but rather called for an approach that recognized the mutability and interconnectedness of nature. Grant Allen’s Physiological Aesthetics of 1877 claimed that the proper subject for sculpture was ‘the nude or semi-nude human form’.85 Late Victorian and Edwardian sculptors may have perceived Darwin’s implications for their own practice in ways that Allen, the evolutionist, did not. Many challenged the narrowest definition of sculpture and experimented with alternative subjects, often incorporating plants, animals, and abstract decorative forms into complex compositions alongside human figures.86 In an interview of 1897 Frampton declared, ‘I pay as much attention to a leaf as to a figure’.87 The revelation, discussed earlier, that what Darwin called the ‘lower animals’, and even inorganic matter, belonged to the same evolutionary story as human physical and mental characteristics, may have facilitated or even partly inspired this development in sculpture.88 Bearing the evolutionary context in mind, we can think afresh about sculpture’s close relationship with decoration in this period. In a memorial tribute to Frampton at the Art Workers’ Guild in 1928, Robert Anning Bell notes Frampton’s admiration for leading New Sculptor Alfred Gilbert.89 ‘Both delighted in skilled workmanship,’ Anning Bell observes, ‘and in the beauty of precious metal and ivory and enamel and mother-of-pearl, and both possibly felt that they had more elbow room and were happier when using these than when confined to the more austere limitations of the sculptor.’90 The use of non-traditional sculptural materials was not the only way in which Gilbert and Frampton embraced the decorative. As Getsy recounts, ‘Gilbert increasingly hid the body away, shrouding it in its surroundings to which he invested far greater expressive force’.91 This process is seen as a decentering of the human form. The subordination of the human body to decoration can be understood as an anti-anthropocentric move that registers an understanding of the implications of Darwinian theory. Alex Potts offers an insight into what was at stake in sculpture’s negotiation of the human figure versus the decorative. Discussing the ‘richness of spectacle’ of nineteenth-century sculptural displays, such as the Sculpture Garden at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, he observes, ‘the vivid representation of a human figure was almost a necessary precondition for a statue to stand out from other decorative objects and architectural features in its immediate environment’.92 But what if standing out from an environment no longer seemed valid in the light of Darwin’s vision of an intimately interconnected, ‘entangled’ nature? Instead of seeing decoration as something that compromised the purity of the sculpted human body, we can understand decoration as a step towards representing a Darwinian subject in a sculptural object.93 Another important aspect of sculpture’s close relationship with decoration is its incorporation into architectural surroundings. American critic Charles Caffin provides an explicitly evolutionary narrative for this process in 1903: Nature in a marvellous way adapts the colour and forms of the blossoms to the character and structure of the tree and shapes of the woodland flowers […] In the spirit of this example the sculptor fashions his designs in conformity with that of the architecture.94 Exemplary for Caffin is Philip Martiny’s staircase decoration at the American Library of Congress in Washington DC. Caffin’s language, evoking the adaptation of species to their environments through natural selection, suggests an awareness of the evolutionary implications of sculpture’s decorative function. Returning to Peter Pan, it is significant, in the context of these debates about anthropocentrism and decoration, that so much attention is given to the base. A sculpture’s base – a plinth or pedestal, for example – is usually considered in similar terms as a painting’s frame, performing an ornamental function, and serving to set the work apart from its surroundings.95 If Peter Pan’s base is ornamental, it represents ornament threatening to subsume ‘sculpture proper’, the human figure.96 Moreover, although it does elevate the figure in the manner of a traditional pedestal, rather than setting the work apart it connects the sculpture to its outdoor environment, as we have seen. A critic described it as ‘an admirable example of sculpture successfully divorced from architecture’.97 One reason for this is that in a way the gardens serve as the sculpture’s architecture. There are suggestive parallels between sculpture’s engagement with its surroundings and evolutionary concepts of interdependence. Like the various components of Darwin’s ‘entangled bank’, sculpture, decoration, and environment are, in Frampton’s Peter Pan, ‘dependent on each other in so complex a manner’. VI. Conclusion In Frampton’s sculpture, Peter Pan’s two feet are firmly attached to the plinth. In Barrie’s stories, Peter tries to reattach his shadow with soap before Wendy sews it back onto his feet.98 The extraordinary sculpted base takes the position of Peter’s shadow. In nineteenth-century cartoons depicting ‘shadow-portraits’, shadows represented the troubling animal ancestry of modern human beings.99 Oscar Wilde, in a passage Rachel Teukolsky identifies as Darwinian, described the burden of heredity as ‘this terrible shadow’ which brings us ‘complex multiform gifts of thought that are at variance with each other, and passions that war against themselves’.100 Just as the image of the shadow serves to represent evolution’s threat to a vision of ideal humanity, it has likewise been employed to expose the limitations of ideal sculpture. In a discussion of late nineteenth-century sculpture, Michael Hatt describes the ideal as ‘an image which has lost its shadow’.101 This, Hatt observes, is a Nietzschean vision of the shadow as an essential part of the self, because ‘to be human is to have a shadow’ and ‘the body casts a shadow which, like a spectral double or second voice, needs to be acknowledged’.102 Though it may represent darkness, the self is not complete without it, as Peter Pan recognizes in his anxiety to reclaim his shadow. Frampton’s statue restores Peter Pan’s shadow in the form of an entangled, evolutionary nature. In the process, it returns the shadow denied by ideal sculpture. It offers a material vision of what an evolutionary shadow means for the ideal body upheld by sculptural tradition. I have suggested ways in which sculptural techniques of production and composition reveal an engagement with Darwinian interpretations of the entangled relation between humanity and the natural world. I have argued that sculpture’s close relationship with decoration allowed it to enact the entanglement of the subject by demonstrating its interconnection with its environment. Getsy asserted in 2004 that sculpture ‘is frequently marginalized in histories of art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’.103 That is still true, although important recent interventions, including the scholarship of Droth, Edwards, Getsy, and Hatt cited here, have contributed enormously to our understanding of sculpture in Britain c. 1900. Sculpture has indeed been marginalized in the otherwise popular field of Darwinism and visual art, in which rigorous and innovative scholarship has recently been published, especially by Barbara Larson, Fae Brauer, and Jonathan Smith.104 In the Introduction to one such volume, Larson writes that a key question for art historians studying Darwin is: ‘What kinds of Darwinian messages are being communicated and by what method?’105 This article has aimed to offer a response to that question with regard to sculpture. Frampton’s Peter Pan raises the possibility of a static, chaste, universal, set-apart, ideal sculpted human figure and exposes it as a fiction that cannot survive in the age of evolution. When nature is interdependent, vision is the imperfect result of natural selection, beauty is a product of sexual desire, and species are evolving, sculpture is impelled to find a new path that does not depend on the ‘essential’ and ‘eternal’ human figure. Sculpture meets this challenge partly by exploiting medium specificity and thus finding its own evolutionary niche. Yet this most recognizable sign of modernism is not sculpture’s only, or most important, response to evolutionary theory. Although Peter Pan, as we have seen, does draw attention to processes of production, it is far from what art historians would usually associate with so-called ‘modernist’ sculpture.106 Yet, by considering sculpture alongside evolutionary theory, we can begin to see how a work like this reconceived the problem of ideal figurative sculpture in the light of contemporary aesthetic and scientific debates. Disclosure statement No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the author. Acknowledgements I am indebted to Michael Hatt for his constructive feedback on an early draft of this paper. The argument subsequently benefited from the insights of conference audiences at the College Art Association, the Association of Art Historians, and ‘The Arts and Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture’; I thank Nancy Rose Marshall, Natasha Ruiz-Gómez and Juliet Bellow, and Victoria Mills for the opportunity to present versions of this paper on those occasions. In particular, I would like to thank Nancy Rose Marshall and Caroline Arscott for their helpful suggestions. I am grateful to members of the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, for their responses to an early draft, and to Julie Wolf and Lynn Cunningham for assistance with images. I extend my thanks to the staff at the Archive of Art and Design for facilitating my research and to the anonymous readers at the Journal of Victorian Culture for their valuable comments. Finally, I would like to thank Stephe Harrop and the Drama Society at the University of York for the chance to perform in a production of Peter Pan many years ago. 1. ‘C’est sur les deux immenses panneaux, un fouillis, un emmêlement, un enchevêtrement, quelque chose comme la concrétion d’un banc de madrépores.’ See Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt: Memoires de la vie litteraire, 9 vols (Paris: Fasquelle, 1894–1908), vii, 123. 2. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 2nd edn (London, 1859; repr. ed. by Gillian Beer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 360. The first part of this passage was translated as ‘Il est intéressant de contempler une berge enchevêtrée’, corresponding to Goncourt’s perception of ‘un enchevêtrement’ (see Charles Darwin, L’origine des especes au moyen de la sélection naturelle, trans. by J. J. Moulinié (Paris: Reinwald, 1873), p. 513). There is an earlier mention of an ‘entangled bank’ in On the Origin, where Darwin discusses the struggle for existence that must have led to the plants’ ‘proportional numbers and kinds’ (p. 59). 3. On Frampton, see Susan Beattie, The New Sculpture (New Haven, CT and London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Yale University Press, 1983), especially pp. 85–106; Timothy Stevens, ‘George Frampton’, in Patronage and Practice: Sculpture on Merseyside, ed. by Penelope Curtis (Liverpool: Tate Gallery, 1989), pp. 74–85; and Andrew Jezzard, ‘The Sculptor George Frampton’ (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 1999). Frampton’s sculpture is the main focus of my argument, but Rodin does reappear. British and French sculptors knew one another’s work well, travelled in both directions across the Channel, and frequently exhibited in both countries. Frampton studied and worked in Paris during the 1870s and 1880s and won many medals at French exhibitions during his career. Meanwhile, in the 1870s French sculptor Aimé-Jules Dalou was an exile in England, where he taught students who would go on to become successful sculptors, such as Alfred Drury. See Beattie, The New Sculpture, and Jezzard, ‘The Sculptor George Frampton’. Edmund Gosse, who in 1894 coined the phrase ‘New Sculpture’ to describe the work of a group of British sculptors including Frampton, saw the sculptural exchange between the two countries stretching back decades: ‘What the New Sculpture in England has really sprung from,’ he claimed, ‘is unquestionably the French school of the last generation.’ Edmund Gosse, ‘The New Sculpture, 1879–1894’, Art Journal, 56 (1894), 138–42 (p. 139). 4. See Diana Donald and Jan Eric Olsén, ‘Art and the “Entangled Bank”: Colour and Beauty out of the “War of Nature”’, in Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, ed. by Diana Donald and Jane Munro (Cambridge and New Haven, CT: Fitzwilliam Museum and Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 101–17; and Nicola Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 5. See James Krasner, The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and the Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Barbara Creed, Darwin’s Screens: Evolutionary Aesthetics, Time and Sexual Display in the Cinema, (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing, 2009), p. xii. 6. See Morse Peckham, ‘Darwinism and Darwinisticism’, Victorian Studies, 3.1 (September 1959), 19–40. 7. John Addington Symonds, ‘On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Art and Literature’, Essays, Speculative and Suggestive, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), i, 52. 8. Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 111. 9. Sculpture was not central to either of the major art exhibitions held to mark the Darwin bicentenary in 2009 at the Shirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Yale Center for British Art. It appears only occasionally in the important recent studies of Darwin and the visual arts, including the catalogues accompanying both exhibitions. See Darwin: Art and the Search for Origins, ed. by Pamela Kort and Max Hollein (Cologne: Weinand Verlag, 2009); and Endless Forms, ed. by Donald and Munro. On Darwin and art see Evolution and Victorian Culture, ed. by Bernard Lightman and Bennett Zon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History, ed. by Barbara Larson and Sabine Flach (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture, ed by Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2009); Art, Sex and Eugenics, ed. by Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); and Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Notable exceptions include Michael Leja, ‘Progress and Evolution at the U.S. World’s Fairs, 1893–1915’, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, 2.2 (2003) <http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org> [accessed 30 October 2016]; Ted Gott, ‘Stowed Away: Emmanuel Frémiet’s Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman’, Art Bulletin of Victoria, 45 (2005), 6–17; and significant studies of sculpture in relation to race, such as Hugh Marles, ‘Arrested Development: Race and Evolution in the Sculptures of Herbert Ward’, Oxford Art Journal, 19.1 (1996), 16–28. 10. Anne Helmreich, ‘Peter Pan and the Role of Public Statuary’, in The Edwardian Sense: Art, Design, and Performance in Britain, 1901–1910, ed. by Morna O’Neill and Michael Hatt (New Haven, CT and London: Yale Center for British Art and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2010), pp. 193–203 (p. 196). 11. Morning Leader, 24 March 1911. Archive of Art and Design, Frampton papers, 13/614–1988, vol. XIV. See J. M. Barrie, The Little White Bird; or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902). 12. Helmreich, ‘Peter Pan and the Role of Public Statuary’, p. 197. 13. Martina Droth, ‘Making Sculpture and the Two Worlds of Peter Pan’, in The Edwardian Sense, ed. by O’Neill and Hatt, pp. 213–21 (p. 217). Droth describes the fairies as ‘metaphors of becoming’ and relates them to the process of making sculpture (p. 220, see note 46). 14. Krasner, The Entangled Eye, p. 35. 15. Krasner, The Entangled Eye, p. 35. 16. Krasner, The Entangled Eye, p. 62. 17. Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, p. 8. 18. Droth, ‘Making Sculpture’, p. 217. 19. They are located in Liverpool; St John’s, Newfoundland; Camden, New Jersey; Brussels; Perth; and Toronto. A number of reduced versions of the figure of Peter Pan, without the base, were also cast. 20. Droth, ‘Making Sculpture’, p. 217. 21. See the Daily Graphic, 2 May 1912, p. 3, reproduced in Helmreich, ‘Peter Pan and the Role of Public Statuary’, p. 198. 22. Morning Leader, 29 March 1911. Archive of Art and Design, Frampton papers, 13/614–1988, news cuttings 1910–11, vol. XIV. 23. Darwin, On the Origin, p. 100. 24. The Westminster Gazette, 23 April 1912, describes the base as a ‘tree-stump’. Archive of Art and Design, Frampton papers, 13/633–1988, news cuttings 1912/13. 25. I am indebted to Caroline Arscott for this observation. 26. Hilary Fraser, ‘The Language of Mourning in Fin-de-Siècle Sculpture’, Sally Ledger Memorial Lecture, ‘The Arts and Feeling in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture’, Birkbeck College, University of London, 16 July 2015. 27. Jezzard calls the sculpture a ‘monument to J. M. Barrie’, a description that suggests the work took on a memorial function after the author’s death. Jezzard, ‘The Sculptor George Frampton’, p. 151. 28. Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders (London: Macmillan and Co., 1870), pp. 163, 165. 29. Symonds, ‘The Philosophy of Evolution’, p. 14. 30. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871), i, 10. 31. Krasner, The Entangled Eye, p. 82. 32. See Moshe Barasch, ‘The Fragment as Art Form’, in Modern Theories of Art 2: From Impressionism to Kandinsky (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 69–78 (p. 76). 33. Barasch, ‘The Fragment as Art Form’, p. 73. 34. Barasch, ‘The Fragment as Art Form’, p. 75. 35. Sadakichi Hartmann, ‘The Decadence of Sculpture’ (1907), reprinted in Sadakichi Hartmann: Critical Modernist, Collected Art Writings, ed. by Jane Calhoun Weaver (Berkeley: University of California, 1991), p. 188. 36. David Getsy, Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (New Haven, CT: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2004), p. 61. 37. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Why Sculpture is Tiresome’ (1846), in Art in Paris 1845–62: Salon and Other Exhibitions Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, trans. and ed. by Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1965), p. 111. 38. Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘“How One Should Photograph Sculpture”, Parts I and II, (1896–97)’, trans. by Geraldine A. Johnson, Art History, 36.1 (February 2013), 52–71 (p. 55, plate 3 caption). 39. Wölfflin, ‘“How One Should Photograph Sculpture”’, p. 53. 40. Wölfflin, ‘“How One Should Photograph Sculpture”’, pp. 56, 58. 41. Wölfflin, ‘“How One Should Photograph Sculpture”’, p. 59. 42. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1977), p. 18. 43. Krauss, Passages, pp. 25, 15. 44. Krauss, Passages, p. 29. 45. Krauss, Passages, p. 28. 46. Sadakichi Hartmann makes a similar observation about Rodin in 1907, writing that Rodin ‘uses form to embody ideas instead of creating forms which in themselves embody an idea’ (‘The Decadence of Sculpture’, p. 187). Another comparable reading is provided by Georg Simmel, who, in Michael Hatt’s words, saw a contrast between ‘static sculpture of Being and Rodin’s mobile sculpture of Becoming’: see Michael Hatt, ‘Substance and Shadow: Conceptions of Embodiment in Rodin and the New Sculpture’, in Rodin: The Zola of Sculpture, ed. by Claudine Mitchell (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 217–35 (p. 221). Caroline Arscott discusses ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ in relation to evolutionary theory in her ‘William Morris’s Tapestry: Metamorphosis and Prophecy in The Woodpecker’, Art History, 36.3 (June 2013), 608–25 (p. 614, note 13). 47. Krauss, Passages, p. 18; Wölfflin, ‘“How One Should Photograph Sculpture”’, p. 59. 48. Krauss, Passages, p. 9. Darwin’s challenge to contemporary thought is frequently discussed in similar language. For example, Margot Norris describes his ‘break with eighteenth-century rationalism’ in Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 6. Krauss and Norris each use the argument for the existence of God from design as an example of that undermined rationalism. 49. Krasner, The Entangled Eye, p. 5. 50. Hartmann, ‘The Decadence of Sculpture’, p. 186. On the picturesque, see, for example, Romita Ray, Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (New Haven, CT: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2013); and Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 25–63. 51. Maudsley, ‘The Theory of Vitality’, 1863, republished as an appendix to Maudsley, Body and Mind, pp. 153–54. 52. Getsy, Body Doubles, p. 36. 53. Helmreich, ‘Peter Pan and the Role of Public Statuary’, p. 197. 54. Droth, ‘Making Sculpture’, p. 220. 55. Such narratives, though widespread, represent a misreading of Darwin. Patrick O’Sullivan argues that despite the common misconception to the contrary, ‘“Evolution” (natural selection) is not progressive’; see Patrick O’Sullivan, ‘Editorial: Science Under Plutocracy’, Journal of William Morris Studies, 18.2 (Summer 2009), 3–14 (p. 6). Notwithstanding phrases in Darwin’s writings that suggest a belief in such ‘progress’, such as the observation that ‘as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection’ (Darwin, On the Origin, p. 360), his theory does not presuppose inevitable progress but rather prioritizes chance mutation and adaptation to changing conditions. Nevertheless, concepts of evolutionary ‘progress’ were used to legitimize racist practices and eugenics. See Art, Sex, and Eugenics, ed by Brauer and Callen. 56. Darwin, Descent, ii, 405. 57. Mary Brewer, ‘Peter Pan and the White Imperial Imaginary’, New Theatre Quarterly, 23.4 (November 2007), 387–92 (p. 391). 58. Darwin, Descent, ii, 329. See Evelleen Richards, ‘Darwin and the Descent of Woman’, in The Wider Domain of Evolutionary Thought, ed. by D. Oldroyd and I. Langham (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), pp. 57–111. 59. On the association of women with nature, see James Eli Adams, ‘Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine in Tennyson and Darwin’, Victorian Studies, 33 (Autumn 1989), 7–13. 60. Manchester Guardian, 2 May 1912. Archive of Art and Design, Frampton papers, 13/633–1988, news cuttings 1912–13. 61. Barrie, The Little White Bird, p. 166. 62. Westminster Gazette, 1 May 1912. Archive of Art and Design, Frampton papers, 13/633–1988, news cuttings 1912–13. 63. John Ruskin, Letters to a College Friend, V, 3 December 1840, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903), i, 433. Potts, The Sculptural Imagination, p. 16. 64. Liverpool Courier, 2 May 1912. Archive of Art and Design, Frampton papers, 13/633–1988, news cuttings 1912–13. 65. Manchester Guardian, 2 May 1912. Archive of Art and Design, Frampton papers, 13/633–1988, news cuttings 1912–13. 66. J. M. Barrie, Peter and Wendy, reprinted in J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, ed. by Anne Hiebert (Alton, Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2011), p. 171. 67. Gillian Beer, ‘George Frampton’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens’, in The Edwardian Sense, ed. by O’Neill and Hatt, pp. 205–11. 68. Reproduced in Droth, ‘Making Sculpture’, p. 218. 69. Westminster Gazette, 25 March 1911. Archive of Art and Design, Frampton papers, 13/614–1988, news cuttings 1910–11. 70. See Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984). 71. Morning Leader, 29 March 1911. Archive of Art and Design, Frampton papers, 13/614–1988, news cuttings 1910–11, vol. XIV. 72. David Watson Stevenson, ‘The Picturesque in Sculpture’, Transactions (1889) (London: National Association for the Advancement of Art and its Application to Industry, 1889; repr. New York: Garland, 1979), p. 132. 73. Claude Philips, ‘Royal Academy III’, Academy, 29 May 1886, p. 385. 74. Cyrus Edwin Dallin, ‘American Sculpture: Its Present Aspects and Tendencies’, Brush and Pencil, 11.6 (March 1903), p. 420. 75. Philips, ‘Royal Academy III’, p. 385. See also Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: H. S. King & Co., 1877), p. 238; Wilfrid Meynell, ‘Our Living Artists: Joseph Edgar Boehm, A. R. A.’, Magazine of Art, 3 (1880), 333–38 (pp. 334–35); and Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality, and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), especially pp. 4 and 204. 76. Edmund Gosse, ‘The New Sculpture, 1879–1894’, Art Journal, 56 (1894), 277–82 (p. 277). 77. Jason Edwards, ‘Generations of Modernism, or, A Queer Variety of Natural History: Edmund Gosse and Sculptural Modernity’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 14.2 (Summer 2015) <http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org> [accessed 15 September 2016]. 78. See Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (London: Heinemann, 1908), pp. 113–14. 79. See Darwin, Descent. On art and sexual selection, see Phillip Prodger, ‘Ugly Disagreements: Darwin and Ruskin Discuss Sex and Beauty’, in The Art of Evolution, ed. by Larson, pp. 40–58; Laurence Shafe, ‘Why Is the Peacock’s Tail So Beautiful?’, in Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History, ed. by Larson and Flach, pp. 37–51; and Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, pp. 92–136. Allen briefly mentions the relevance of ‘sexual selection’ to discussions of ‘the beauty of the human face’ in art (Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, p. 239). 80. Martha Lucy argues that the ‘evolutionary body’ was a challenge to the ideal in her discussion of Degas, explaining that ‘what the classical tradition represented during the evolutionary era was pure, unvarying form’. Martha Lucy, ‘Reading the Animal in Degas’ Young Spartans’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2.2 (Spring 2003) <http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org> [accessed 30 October 2016]. 81. Symonds, Essays, Speculative and Suggestive, p. 19. 82. Symonds, Essays, Speculative and Suggestive, p. 6. 83. Jason Edwards, ‘Introduction: From the East India Company to the West Indies and Beyond: The World of British Sculpture, c. 1757–1947’, in British Sculpture c. 1757–1947: Global Contexts (special issue, Visual Culture in Britain, 11.2 (2010)), 147–72 (p. 167). 84. Creed, Darwin’s Screens, p. xxiv. 85. Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, p. 233. 86. See S. K. Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism 1900–1920: Early Modernism and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Edwardian England (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 146–52. 87. Fred Miller, ‘George Frampton, A.R.A., Art Worker’, Art Journal, 59 (1897), 321–24 (p. 323). 88. Darwin, Descent, p. 10. See Maudsley, Body and Mind, pp. ix–x, and Symonds, Essays, Speculative and Suggestive, p. 14. 89. Droth briefly compares Peter Pan to Gilbert’s Icarus and Eros: Droth, ‘Making Sculpture’, p. 215. 90. Memorial Tribute to George Frampton by R. Anning Bell, Art Workers’ Guild Meeting, 1 June 1928 (read by F. Ernest Jackson), p. 1. Archive of Art and Design, Frampton papers, AAD 13/510–1988. 91. Getsy, Body Doubles, p. 107. 92. Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 18. 93. The Craftsman, for example, criticizes the decorativeness of British sculpture. See Giles Edgerton, ‘Bronze Sculpture in America: Its Value to the Art History of the Nation’, Craftsman, 13.6 (1 March 1908), 615–30 (p. 615). Lorado Taft claims that British sculpture is ‘weakened by curious combinations of materials and by insistence upon ornamental detail’. Taft calls Gilbert the ‘chief culprit’, his ideals ‘curiously perverted’. Of Saint Michael, he observes that ‘the saint’s armor is so overwrought that it fairly peels off from the figure, giving the limbs the look of shagbark hickories’, while the Virgin is ‘stifled’. See Lorado Taft, Modern Tendencies in Sculpture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the Art Institute of Chicago, 1921), pp. 75–77. See also Alex Potts, ‘Eros in Piccadilly Circus: Monument and Anti-Monument’, in Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, ed. by David Getsy (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 105–27 (p. 121). 94. Charles Caffin, American Masters of Sculpture (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1903), p. 175. 95. See Getsy, Body Doubles, p. 137. 96. Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, p. 236. 97. Daily Herald, 6 May 1912. Archive of Art and Design, Frampton papers, 13/633–1988, news cuttings 1912–13. 98. Barrie, Peter and Wendy, p. 72. 99. Charles H. Bennett and Robert B. Brough, Character Sketches, Development Drawings, and Original Pictures of Wit and Humour (London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, 1872), pp. 47 and 48. Reproduced as Figure 6.7 in Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, p. 238. 100. Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, cited in Teukolsky, Literate Eye, p. 188. 101. Hatt, ‘Substance and Shadow’, p. 225. 102. Hatt, ‘Substance and Shadow’, pp. 223–25. 103. Getsy, Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal, p. 1. 104. See note 9 for a list of the major recent publications in the field. 105. Barbara Larson, ‘Introduction’, in The Art of Evolution, ed. by Larson and Brauer, pp. 1–17 (p. 11). 106. Droth discusses the ‘self-reflexive’ aspects of Frampton’s Peter Pan in Droth, ‘Making Sculpture’, p. 220. Jezzard, contradicting Lorado Taft, describes the sculpture as modernist: ‘The way in which narrative representation and pedestal have been made integral was wholly original and modernist, the work and its base being as one’; Jezzard, ‘The Sculptor George Frampton’, p. 154. © 2017 Leeds Trinity University
TI - The Darwinian Subject in Sculpture: George Frampton’s Peter Pan
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