If ever a single work of art seemed, in relation to its maker’s career, a final summation and fulfilment, that can surely be claimed for Alfred Stevens’s Monument to the Duke of Wellington in St. Paul’s Cathedral. It combines architecture with sculpture in a way which brings out the sculpture’s three-dimensionality, and does so in a way that benefits from a lifetime spent dreaming up decorative projects, consisting not of sculpture as such, but of paintings which make a virtue of the viewer’s relation to them in architectural space, and are, in that respect, sculptural.

Teresa Sladen’s new book on Stevens is remarkable above all for the way it traces the route by which her subject arrived at that summation, a route strewn with disappointments and unfinished business, but leaving behind a largely paper trail of scintillating preparatory work, conveniently conserved in a number of British public collections. New archival work in Italy and America sheds light on Stevens’s study years in Italy, between 1838 and 1841, where he spent time in Rome, Florence and Venice. As in the case of one of his rivals, Carlo Marochetti, there is no documentary evidence of a supposed apprenticeship in Bertel Thorvaldsen’s Roman studio, though Sladen does detect a Thorvaldsenian streak in some free line drawings of mythological subjects from these years. Without preliminary study at the Royal Academy, or even time spent in London, Stevens was essentially an autodidact, sponsored by wealthy admirers of his precocious talent from his home county of Dorset. His fellow students (in that same loose sense) were Americans or other Englishmen, who were equally impressed by his skills.

Back in Britain, Stevens met with disappointment in the Westminster Hall competition for decorative work in the new Houses of Parliament, where he entered a fresco with a scene from Shakespeare’s Richard III, and in another for an altarpiece painting for the new church of St James’s Bermondsey. Despite these setbacks, his talents soon attracted the attention of those responsible for the recently founded Government School of Design at Somerset House, where, in 1845, he found himself being taken on, as he jokingly put it, as a ‘Professor of everything’, though the actual job-description was the rather more dreary sounding ‘Drawing and painting Ornament, Geometrical Drawing and Modelling’. Unconfined by prejudice about the proper sphere of ‘fine art’, Stevens showed that he had the requisite mindset to fall in with Prince Albert’s ambition to see the fine arts raise the standard of industrial design, a project to which he made a practical contribution by designing ironwork for Hoole’s Green Lane factory in Sheffield, and for Minton’s ceramics in Stoke-upon-Trent. Needless to say, what Stevens brought to these products was of a largely historically referential nature, and certainly no anticipation of Bauhaus functionalism, the principal reference being to the Italian High Renaissance.

The main task of a Stevens biographer has, of necessity, to be one of reconstruction. Of the four major commissions for the decoration of private houses, only the least significant, that at Harewood House in Yorkshire, survives today. Those for Deysbrook House, Liverpool, 11 Kensington Palace Gardens, and Dorchester House in London, have survived only in fragments. One spandrel mosaic of the prophet Isaiah, executed in a rather lacklustre manner by the Venetian firm of Salviati, is the only element of a hugely ambitious scheme for the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral to have been carried out to Stevens’s design. In the case of a similar scheme for the dome of the reading-room of the British Library, we have only Stevens’s preparatory model and studies.

The Wellington monument might also have come down to us in radically truncated form. Only the very considerable posthumous surge of interest in Stevens, and determination amongst admirers such as the writer on art and museum curator, D.S. MacColl, to right the perceived wrongs done to him by the establishment, have ensured that the monument was erected on the spot originally intended for it, under the nave arcade, and that finally, in 1906, it was completed with the equestrian figure of the Duke, which a Dean of St Paul’s had deemed inappropriate in a place of worship.

This is a generously illustrated volume, which comes close to comprehensive coverage of the myriad projects in which Stevens was involved, and which situates these in a European context, reflecting his indubitable awareness of, for example, German Nazarene artists working in Rome, and of the numerous French immigrants who removed to England post 1848, and so profoundly influenced the world of the industrial arts in Britain at the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Sculpture enthusiasts may regret that some of Stevens’s more peculiarly sculptural projects and realisations, such as the designs for the doors of the Geological Museum, or the female figures on the Dorchester House fireplace are not illustrated in greater detail, but as is so often the case these days, such deficiencies are easily supplied by an online search. This reviewer was disappointed not to find a consideration of two technical issues. After the failure of his fresco entry in the Westminster Hall competition, Stevens took to using a patent paint called Parris’s Medium, which had at least the look of fresco. It would have been interesting to hear more of this. Also, a letter in the Stannus collection, referred to by Kenneth Romney Towndrow, in his 1939 biography of Stevens, suggests that the artist was an exponent of what the French call fonte brute. In other words, he was opposed to excessive intervention by chasers and finishers in sand-cast bronzes. It is odd that the founder of the bronzes on the Wellington Monument, Henry Young of the Pimlico works is not even mentioned in the book, even though, on the evidence of Stevens’s one-time assistant Hugh Stannus, Stevens and Young were on close confidential terms.

 

 

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