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Sculpture posts

Ramsay MacDonald by Sir Jacob Epstein, 1934, NPG 2934

Shocking sculptures?

It’s hard to believe it now, but for the first decades of his career, Jacob Epstein was the sculptor some people loved to hate. The genitals of the angel that he carved on the tomb of Oscar Wilde caused such a row that the sculpture was covered up with a tarpaulin while the naked woman in Rima, his memorial to W. H. Hudson, was attacked with green paint. As the sculptor Henry Moore said at Epstein’s funeral, Epstein ‘took the brickbats for modern art’. Epstein’s portrait busts didn’t provoke the same levels of outrage but I was surprised to learn that they were viewed with suspicion by many early critics. What was it about these lively sculptures that led one critic to compare them to a ‘mud-pie’? …

By Clare Barlow, Assistant Curator

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8 May 2013

The Hearse of Henry, Prince of Wales by William Hole, 1612 © The Trustees of the British Museum

The Shy Revolutionary

I have been fascinated by the eighteenth-century British radical Thomas Hollis ever since I came across his diary in the Houghton Library, America. It was very exciting, therefore, that one of my first projects at the National Portrait Gallery was helping with fundraising to buy a marble bust of Hollis by Joseph Wilton. If Hollis’s name isn’t familiar to you, it’s probably what he would have wanted: he preferred to be anonymous. Despite this reticence, the diary reveals a man who was tireless in attacking political corruption and defending civil liberties. …

By Clare Barlow, Assistant Curator