In David Getsy’s account of the “unprecedented and rapid increase in the interest in sculpture” (2) that emerged in late nineteenth-century Britain, the group of artists labeled the New Sculpture movement is given a long-overdue reappraisal. Focusing his study on five artists at the time considered central to the sculptural revival, the author presents detailed analyses of a small number of “imaginative” or “ideal” statues made between 1877 and 1905 by Frederic Leighton, Hamo Thornycroft, Alfred Gilbert, Edward Onslow Ford, and James Harvard Thomas. Body Doubles is generously illustrated with more than a hundred black-and-white illustrations. Some color plates of the polychrome sculptures would have been welcome, but that is minor criticism of an otherwise exemplary use of plates that serve directly to support the author’s analysis of the visual experience elicited by the works. The sculptures discussed here have to date largely been seen as conventional and antithetical to the emerging concerns of modernism. Getsy challenges this perception by exploring the conceptual complexity underpinning the sculptures and demonstrating their makers’ engagement with “pivotal issues for modern sculpture” (2). He identifies the modernity of British sculpture in the artists’ intense interest in realism and physicality, at times pursued to such an extreme that their works could be described as “body doubles”—that is, as “mimetic rendering[s] of the body” which could “convincingly and compellingly stand in for both a living body and an ideal image” (1). Getsy’s thesis, emphatically followed throughout, is that sculptors were employing realism consciously and strategically as a “modern theory of sculpture” (2). All of Getsy’s analysis is aligned to this proposition; nothing is taken as passive or implicit. Thus, for example, Leighton’s seminal Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877) not only “set the standard for subsequent developments in sculpture theory” (15), it was purposefully conceived by Leighton as “his sculptural manifesto” (24). The book’s agenda, therefore, is to be understood not as a retrospective “theorizing” of sculptors’ motivations, but as an attempt to show that artists were themselves deliberately “theorizing sculpture” (31) through their oeuvre.

Body Doubles marks a near-isolated return to the presentation of late Victorian sculpture as an identifiable movement. The book appears in the Paul Mellon Centre’s Studies in British Art series, the same imprint that undertook the publication of three key reference works on the subject more than twenty years ago: Benedict Read’s Victorian Sculpture (1982), Susan Beattie’s The New Sculpture (1983), and Richard Dorment’s monograph on Alfred Gilbert (1985). Although a growing number of scholars are turning their attention to nineteenth-century British art, few of the more recent studies have focused specifically on sculpture.¹ The renewed interest in individual artists (notably Leighton), and the cultural and social contexts in which they operated, is contributing useful contextual research to the field, but Beattie’s book still stands as the only major art historical survey of the New Sculpture.² Presenting his account both as a continuation and a “disagreement” to Beattie’s (9), Getsy recognizes the enduring value of her book, but importantly also highlights its surprisingly detrimental legacy. Beattie’s enthusiasm for the period extended only to a particular type of work that she saw as “contributing art to everyday life,” such as architectural and decorative sculpture (Beattie, 8). For her, the New Sculpture’s achievement lay in its increased public visibility and civic role, which extended the relevance of the discipline “far beyond the walls of the art establishment” (Beattie, 6). In thus circumscribing the historical significance of British sculpture, Beattie necessarily discounted a whole body of work made for what she saw as the “elitist” arena of the Royal Academy. A glance at the general literature quickly shows that her dismissal was fairly representative. Horst W. Janson, for example, in his survey Nineteenth-Century Sculpture (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), typically elevated France as the site of internationally significant innovation, while identifying British sculptors as parochial and imitative, an attitude that “prevented them . . . from reaching a level of quality which commands attention in an international perspective” (Janson, 243). Leighton’s sculptural works, which Getsy sees as inaugural to the New Sculpture, were for Janson “notable only as evidence of Rodin’s influence,” while of Thornycroft (who comprises the longest chapter in Body Doubles), Janson considered only The Mower of interest “within an otherwise unremarkable oeuvre” (Janson, 242–43).

It is precisely these “unremarkable” works that Getsy recovers from oblivion. Focusing on the critical positioning and visual impact of sculptures made expressly for exhibition at the Royal Academy, Getsy opens the late Victorian “ideal” statue to new and compelling interpretations. By illuminating the remarkably innovative achievements these works reflect of a generation of sculptors, he reveals their neglect as a serious omission from histories of nineteenth-century British art. Considered of great intellectual and aesthetic significance by its contemporary audiences, the New Sculpture played a crucial role in shaping critical debates; to overlook this work, the book demonstrates, is to present a skewed and incomplete picture of the artistic priorities of the period.

The sculptures around which the book is organized form a neat chronology that begins with Leighton’s 1877 Athlete and ends with Thomas’s 1905 Lycidas. The opening chapter on Leighton sets the tone of the book: the analysis is focused firmly on the sculpture, while contextual information of the kind one might have expected (such as the position of the Athlete in the painter’s oeuvre and his somewhat unusual role within the New Sculpture) is touched upon only cursorily. The chapter revolves around an extended analysis of the circumambulatory viewing experience elicited by the Athlete (25–42), supported by six full-page plates of the statue viewed from different angles. Put forward as Leighton’s “allegorization of the sculptural encounter” (42), the work is positioned as a kind of springboard from which the next generation evolved its central tenets. This idea is developed in the second chapter, on Thornycroft, which follows a similar pattern, although here Getsy explores not a single work but a group of statues he sees as closely related: Lot’s Wife (1878), Artemis and her Hound (1880), Teucer (1881), and The Mower (1884), all of which are illustrated by numerous full-page photographs showing the works from different angles. In his discussion of Lot’s Wife—the young Thornycroft’s first major Royal Academy showing—Getsy again concentrates on the viewing experience, this time in order to posit the work as a deliberate and “direct response to Leighton’s Athlete” (50). The unusual pose of Lot’s Wife, combining the frontality of a forward-striding figure with a sharp profile view of her turning head, is described as an “extreme” innovation that allowed Thornycroft to “[expand] upon Leighton’s address to the viewer’s co-presence” (85). As this chapter makes apparent, Getsy’s aim is not only to prompt us to reflect on and take seriously the significance of sculptors’ compositional decisions, but to highlight their progressive development. The notion that sculptors were responding to each other through works that articulated and increasingly refined an “art-theoretical” sculptural language forms a crucial subtext of the book: it is this aesthetic dialogue that supports and sustains the author’s interpretation of the sculptors’ theoretical ambitions.

In his third chapter, on Gilbert, Getsy necessarily departs from some of his own definitions of New Sculpture. The emphasis on realism and the titular “body double” with which the movement is otherwise characterized is shown to be problematic in the context of Gilbert’s increasingly complex decorative and symbolic visual vocabulary. The chapter focuses on Gilbert’s early nudes, a format that, as Getsy recognizes, the artist left behind after the 1880s. To explain Gilbert’s “gradual abandonment . . . of the body” (88), Getsy analyzes The Enchanted Chair (1886) as an “allegorical argument against sculpture’s reliance on the nude” (102). The sculpture, which combines a highly naturalistically rendered eagle and sleeping nude with an imaginative ensemble of cherubs and doves surrounding a winged throne, is thus given a strangely negative reading as a “lesson in what figural sculpture should avoid” (104). By thus highlighting Gilbert’s negation of the “body double,” the basis of the artist’s inclusion in the book becomes a contradiction to its overarching thesis. As a result, the chapter sits uneasily in the middle of the book, suggesting that the terms of reference by which the New Sculpture is defined may be too narrowly conceived to accommodate some of these idiosyncrasies. While presenting some refreshing ideas about Gilbert’s early work, which to date has been almost exclusively seen as autobiographical in origin and meaning, Getsy only cursorily examines the later decorative work that constitutes such a vital (and often perplexing) part of Gilbert’s overall contribution to British sculpture.

As this chapter makes evident, some sculptors exemplify Getsy’s thesis better than others. It is in the final two chapters, on Ford’s Shelley Memorial (1892) and Thomas’s Lycidas (1905), that the notion of the sculptural “body double” is played out most conclusively and convincingly. In an eloquent analysis of Ford’s distinctive realism, shown to have evolved from the sculptor’s early training and commitment to portraiture, Getsy demonstrates the crucial role this artist played in animating nineteenth-century debates about sculptural verisimilitude. As the author notes, “While there were other sculptors who were criticized for stylistic realism,” it was Ford who “emerged as the major proponent of ‘poetic realism’ in British sculpture” (123–24). One of the book’s central arguments—that realism presented sculptors with a strategy for drawing attention to “the quotidian circumstances of actual naked bodies” (123)—comes across powerfully here, and is developed further, but into a new direction, in the final chapter.

Thomas’s Lycidas suggests an intensification of the kind of verisimilitude evident in Ford’s work, but it also marks a shift from earlier conceptions of realism. Like all the works discussed in this book, Lycidas was made for exhibition at the Royal Academy, but unlike Ford, Gilbert, Thornycroft, and Leighton, Thomas had his sculpture rejected by the Academy’s board. Clearly, Lycidas had overstepped a line of acceptability; and with it, the sense of continuity so far suggested in the book comes to an end. Although Thomas began his career in the same period as Ford, Gilbert, and Thornycroft, he is presented as an artist who stood apart from his generation, and whose most significant contribution came at the end of the flowering of the New Sculpture. His detachment, antipathy even, to the other sculptors (indeed, Getsy reveals Thornycroft to have been instrumental in the Academy’s rejection of Lycidas) disrupts the trajectory of the book and complicates Getsy’s proposal that “formulations of a modernist sculptural vocabulary” can be traced back to Leighton (12). That it is this chapter alone that explores in any detail a direct connection to historical narratives of modernism further implies that it was through a disavowal, rather than an extension, of the earlier artists’ concerns that British sculpture was able to assert itself as “modern.”

The conclusion further entrenches this division. Although Getsy makes a strong case that late Victorian sculptors shared their twentieth-century successors’ concern with sculptural “materiality” and “physicality” (187), the analysis is too brief to fully counterbalance his own recognition that the “idealized verisimilitude that the New Sculpture had put at the core of its art-theoretical innovations . . . was discarded in favour of a more abstracted representation of the human form” (184). But if the book thereby appears to undermine some of its own proposals, this is not a fault of the information it presents, but rather of what it leaves out, and this is largely due to its length and structure. A slender volume, the main text running to just over two hundred pages (more than a quarter of which are given over to plates), the book is organized as a series of case studies, framed by a brief introduction and conclusion. Versions of three of the chapters have appeared previously (chapter 2 in Sculpture Journal 7, 2002: 44–57; chapter 4 in Visual Culture in Britain 3, no. 1, 2002: 53–76; chapter 5 in Getsy’s own edited volume Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain, c. 1880–1930, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004). Assembled into Body Doubles, all five chapters have a sense of autonomy that suggests the book should be read as a collection of related but discrete essays, rather than as a historical narrative. There is, as a result, some unevenness in the information presented, and few cross-references are made between events and developments arising in the essays. Thus, while the chapters are arranged chronologically, implying a gradual deepening of the artistic concerns outlined in the introduction, there is no narrative framework to tie the historical trajectory together. This is perhaps most evident from the gap between the first and final chapters. The book opens with Leighton’s influence, as a sculptor and as President of the Royal Academy from 1878 to 1896, during the crucial two decades of the flowering of the New Sculpture; it closes with the scandalous rejection in 1905 of Thomas’s Lycidas from the Royal Academy, under the presidency of the painter Edward Poynter, and influenced by Leighton’s friend Thornycroft. A significant historical development is thus implied, but not explored; readers must draw their own conclusions.

A more discursive framework would also have helped to reinforce the author’s call for a greater integration of British sculpture into the art history of the late nineteenth century. The absence of a contextual analysis of the wider national, international, and longer-term implications of the subject essentially leaves these sculptors in a cultural vacuum. But if the omissions are consequential, and the reader is left wanting more, it seems unwarranted to fault the book for what it leaves out. Clearly, it is not intended as a reappraisal of the field as a whole, and should rather be seen, as Getsy emphasizes in his introduction, as a first step toward rekindling interest in an area of sculpture that has been undeservedly neglected. This the author does admirably; and by uncovering what makes the works interesting and valuable to the art history of the period, it achieves its aim of “alert[ing] others to the rich potential of this material” (13).