Industry and the ideal: ideal sculpture and reproduction at the early international exhibitions

This thesis considers a period when ideal sculptures were increasingly reproduced by new technologies, different materials and by various artists or manufacturers and for new markets. Ideal sculptures increasingly represented links between sculptors’ workshops and the realm of modern industry beyond them. Ideal sculpture criticism was meanwhile greatly expanded by industrial and international exhibitions, exemplified by the Great Exhibition of 1851, where the reproduction of sculpture and its links with industry formed both the subject and form of that discourse. This thesis considers how ideal sculpture and its discourses reflected, incorporated and were mediated by this new environment of reproduction and industrial display. In particular, it concentrates on how and where sculptors and their critics drew the line between the sculptors’ creative authorship and reproductive skill, in a situation in which reproduction of various kinds utterly permeated the production and display of sculpture. To highlight the complex and multifaceted ways in which reproduction was implicated in ideal sculpture and its discourse, the thesis revolves around three central case studies of sculptors whose work acquired especial prominence at the Great Exhibition and other exhibitions that followed it. These sculptors are John Bell (1811-1895), Raffaele Monti (1818-1881) and Hiram Powers (1805-1873). Each case shows how the link between ideal sculpture and industrial display provided sculptors with new opportunities to raise the profile of their art, but also new challenges for describing and thinking about sculpture.