Harry Bates (sculptor)

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Harry Bates
Royal Academy

Harry Bates

Art Workers Guild. He was a central figure in the British movement known as New Sculpture
.

Early life and education

Bates was born on 26 April 1850 in Stevenage in Hertfordshire. He began his career as a carver's assistant, and before beginning the regular study of plastic art he passed through a long apprenticeship in architectural decoration working from 1869 for the firm of Farmer & Brindley.[2]

Career

In 1879 he went to London and entered the

Lambeth School of Art, now the City and Guilds of London Art School).[3] There he studied under Jules Dalou and won a silver medal in the national competition at South Kensington. [2][4]
In 1881, he was admitted to the
Royal Academy schools, where in 1883 he won the gold medal and the travelling scholarship with his relief of Socrates teaching the People in the Agora.[2]

In 1883 he immediately went to Paris, where he took up an independent studio (on Dalou's suggestion) in 1883–85. He was influenced by Rodin, who advised him on occasion about his work. A head and three small bronze panels (the

Chantrey Bequest trustees; but the selection had to be cancelled, because they had not been modelled in Britain.[5][2]

In 1886, Bates returned to Britain and was elected to the

Art Workers Guild.[citation needed
]

Bates's figure of Victoria above the Victoria Law Courts in Birmingham

He created panels of

Rhodope (1887).[2]

Bates's primary skill lay in the composition and sculpting of relief sculpture, and it is in this medium that he achieved his most technically and aesthetically refined work. The freestanding ideal sculpture remained the most important of sculptural genres, however. Bates gradually turned to statues such as the 1889 Hounds in Leash, which is essentially a relief composition translated to three dimensions. In this work, Bates demonstrated his ability to convey muscular intensity and movement and led to his greater success and ambition.[citation needed]

His next major statue, the 1890

Chantrey Bequest.[5] The gallery label at the Tate said in 2010, "Bates shows the moment of hesitation before Pandora opens the forbidden box. He suggests Pandora's mood of consideration and temptation while also recognising the inevitable fulfilment of the myth. This way he acknowledges the compulsion of character, and frailty of the human spirit."[7] His creation of the marble altar front for the Holy Trinity church in Sloane Street, London was another piece he created in 1890.[3]

In the year of his death 1899, Bates finished Mors Janua Vitae (death, gateway of life), now at Walker Art Gallery Liverpool. In 2007 it has been described as "bizarre polychrome symbolist fantasy".[8]

One of his final commissions was a large bronze statue of Queen Victoria unveiled in Albert Square in Dundee shortly after his death.[9]

Personal life and death

Bates died in poverty, having drained his finances "by his insistence on financing the Calcutta statue of Lord Roberts from his own pocket."[10] He died on 30 January 1899 at his residence, 10 Hall Road, St. John's Wood, N.W. He was buried at Stevenage on 4 February.[5]

Assessment

The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica wrote: "The portrait-busts of Harry Bates are good pieces of realism: strong, yet delicate in technique, and excellent in character. His statues have a picturesqueness in which the refinement of the sculptor is always felt. Among the chief of these are the fanciful Maharaja of

Queen Victoria for Dundee. But perhaps his masterpiece—in which his interest in polychromy and mixed materials in a format that fused decorative art and sculpture achieved its fullest realization—was an allegorical presentment of Love and Life, a winged male figure in bronze, with a female figure in ivory being crowned by the male."[2] The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica felt, "his premature death robbing English plastic art of its most promising representative at the time".[2]

As of 2022, the figure of Pandora is understood "as one of the many

chryselephantine technique in the 1840s, Bates Pandora was the first chryselephantine work by a British artist.[11]
: 6 

Bates is primarily remembered as one of the most important sculptors working with the traditions of the decorative arts within the New Sculpture movement. Both through his innovative use of polychromy and his allusive subject matter, he is understood to be one of primary representatives of international Symbolism within British sculpture.[citation needed]

Gallery

References

  1. ^ American Art Annual, Volume 2. American Federation of Arts. 1899. p. 82.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Chisholm 1911.
  3. ^ a b Edwards, Jason (June 2008). "A curious feature': Harry Bates's Holy Trinity altar front (1890)". Sculpture Journal. 17 (1). Liverpool University Press: 36.
  4. ^ City and Guilds of London Art School History Archived 4 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ a b c Radford 1901.
  6. ^ Stephens, Frederic George. “Art Gossip” The Athenaeum No. 3258 (April 5, 1890): 443-44.
  7. ^ Tate (2010). "'Pandora', Harry Bates, exhibited 1891". Tate. Retrieved 19 January 2023.
  8. ^ Victoria and Albert Museum (6 July 2007). "Reappraising a nineteenth century sculptor: Harry Bates and his circle".
  9. ^ "Statue of Queen Victoria | Yale Center For British Art".
  10. ^ Bowman, Robert. Sir Alfred Gilbert and the New Sculpture. London: The Fine Art Society, 2008.
  11. ^ a b Nicola Jennings, Adrienne Childs (nd). "The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture (booklet)". Henry Moore Foundation. p. 16. Retrieved 19 January 2023.
  12. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica, ed. 1911, vol. 24, pg. 504, Plate III.
Attribution

Further reading

  • Beattie, Susan. The New Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
  • Getsy, David. "Privileging the Object of Sculpture: Actuality and Harry Bates's Pandora of 1890." Art History 28.1 (February 2005): 74–95.
  • Read, Benedict. Victorian Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.
  • Wilton, Andrew and Robert Upstone. The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Watts: Symbolism in Britain. Exh. cat., Tate Gallery, 1997. Paris: Flammarion, 1997.

External links

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