Bronze Age Gold from Wales

This bronze statuette shows a topless young farmworker in a hat and navvy boots resting with his arm on his hip, holding a scythe. It was created by William Hamo Thornycroft, one of the most famous sculptors in Britain in the nineteenth century, and an artist associated with the New Sculpture movement. Thornycroft was fascinated with manual labourers and the working classes, in part due to the influence of his wife, Agatha Cox. He wrote ‘Every workman’s face I meet in the street interests me, and I feel sympathy with the hard-handed toilers & not with the lazy do nothing selfish ‘upper-ten.’ In The Mower, he presents the body of a young working-class man as a classical hero or god. The inspiration for this work came while Thornycroft was sailing the Thames with friends. He spotted a mower on the riverbank, resting, made a quick sketch, and developed the idea into a sculpture. The real-life mower they saw was wearing a shirt, but for his sculpture Thornycroft stripped away his clothes, explaining to his wife that he wanted to ‘keep his hat on and carry his shirt’ and that a brace over his shoulder will help ‘take off the nude look’. Several art historians have interpreted The Mower through a queer lens. Michael Hatt describes the work as homoerotic, which he defines as the ambiguous space between the homosocial and homosexual. This version was donated to the Museum in 1928 by Sir William Goscombe John, but other versions exist, including an 1882 wax model sketch at the Tate, and an earlier, life-size version at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. This is said to be the first significant free-standing sculpture showing a manual labourer made in Britain.

New sculpture is a name applied to the sculptures produced by a group of artists working in the second half of the nineteenth century The term was coined by critic Edmund Gosse in an 1876 article in Art Journal titled The New Sculpture in which he identified this new trend in sculpture. Its distinguishing qualities were a new dynamism and energy as well as physical realism, mythological or exotic subject matter and use of symbolism, as opposed to prevailing style of frozen neoclassicism. It can be considered part of symbolism. The keynote work was seen by Gosse as Lord Fredrick Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python, but the key artist was Sir Alfred Gilbert followed by Sir George Frampton. An Important precursor was Michelangelesque work of Alfred Stevens.