Sandy Stoddart's letter in full to the Council

I am writing to express my great concern over the current proposal to remove the statuary from George Square, Glasgow. This civic precinct contains works of art that stand amongst the finest and most historically important statues to be made in these islands. Their removal, even if only temporary, cannot be countenanced, and any protest that this is to be done “for their own safety” during the much-need restoration of the Square, is to be greatly mistrusted. The thunderball pace with which the re-design of this already highly brutalised place is being pursued is being led by the central idea of having the statues taken away. There has been no public statement to the effect that the retention of the statues is sacrosanct in any new design and because of this every witness to this highly covert process can have no alternative but seriously to misdoubt the core intentions as regards the fate of these works of sculpture. Thus I must protest that the statues are in a de facto state of danger, as is the monumental nature of the Square itself, which distinguishes Glasgow as a whole by setting an elevated image of a poet at its heart.

I have, over many years, taken visitors from Germany, France, the Scandinavian countries, the United States of America and other cultivated and serious countries to visit the monuments in George Square, and there is a general feeling that, while the Square itself stands as a kind of World Disgrace, nevertheless the quality of the statuary and the distinction of those represented therein are second to none. There are two poets of stratospheric significance in the modern culture of the West (Scott and Burns); a tyrant-slayer and war-hero, concerning whose fate one of the most moving poems in the English language was written (Sir John Moore); a scientist whose discoveries led to the chemical basis of the modern medical procedure of kidney dialysis (Thomas Graham); two reforming politicians (Peel and Oswald); the presiding giant of the Industrial Revolution (Watt); one of the greatest Prime Ministers of the 19th century (Gladstone); one Queen and Empress after whom the age of Darwin, Wagner, Liszt, Brunel, Maxwell and countless others was named (Victoria), and  finally a Prince in whom the  development of the Fine Arts and Manufactures of Great Britain found its greatest advocate (Albert). There is also one who fought in the Crimea and in India (Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde) and although his presence often most excites those with a pathological desire to make George Square statue-free, owing to his easy castigation as a soldier in service of the Empire, nevertheless he is certainly more of a man than any, or all of those put together, who would seek the erasure of the statuary on his account. Then, finally, there is the statue of Thomas Campbell, the poet, who was a friend of Byron and a prominent “philhellene” when Greece was in turmoil in the 1820s. This means that he was a liberal type; this aside, his poetry is often sublime, his verses written on his taking leave of Bavaria amounting to one of the finest landscape poems of the 19th century.

The subjects are well-known, and the visceral anger felt across Britain and beyond that these figures may be set aside from  their rightful accommodation in Glasgow will mostly feature, I suppose, the biographical and historical cases – and quite rightly. Yet there is another, just as important, side to this problem; Glasgow will be taking away a collection of works of art of the utmost distinction, rendering its heart empty of objects of true culture. Statues are often overlooked as art-works; they are mistaken as objects of “civic amenity” or some-such talk, and put in the charge of the Parks Department. But observe, Sir or Madam, that here you have in your hands the finest civic bronze (the Sir John  Moore) ever made by John Flaxman (1755-1826) whose works are housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Soane Museum, both in London, and in the central vestibule of University College London. Flaxman’s influence extended throughout the Western world, being felt most strongly on the continental artists of Germany and France, so that the leading French painter Ingres directly quotes from his compositions on several occasions. He has a resounding impact on von Carolsfeld, Phillip-Otto Runge, Carstens, Koch and every British artist of distinction to follow him, this extending even to the Pre-Raphaelite group for which any art produced in the age of Reynolds was immediately suspect. There are three testimonials to John Flaxman to be found on buildings in Glasgow, erected in the 19th century (The Queen’s Rooms, La Belle Place; The Athenaeum, Nelson Mandela Square; The St. Andrew’s Halls/ Mitchell Library), that on the Athenaeum comprising a full statue of the man. His work was recommended by Canova himself as, in the case of bas-relief work, more advanced than anything the Italian’s own hand could attain. The composition of the Moore statue is second to none, the figure’s contropposto being perfectly contained within the frame of the “martial cloak around him”. Naturally, purely aesthetic qualities are ineffable – but in my opinion (it is, I venture, an informed opinion) Flaxman never worked a shape in the form of a man to rival this. The first statue to be erected in George Square, its removal was attempted before today – by some thugs who tried to topple it shortly after its erection. This reflex, to remove by one means or another, under one pretext or another, all imagery and every icon, is common to all base-natural peoples, zealots and modernists. It is the job of civilised communities to protect these helpless subjects, not to collude in their expulsion, if not destruction.

Other statues in the Square bring real distinction to this concentration of artworks. The statue of Lord Clyde is by John Henry Foley (1818-1874), an Irish sculptor whose most famous work is the colossal Daniel O’Connell Monument in O’Connell Street, Dublin. Notwithstanding the disastrous modern history of that street, and the dated “updating” recently imposed upon it, the Irish have had the sense not to remove, even for a second, that great work of art. George Square’s Lord Clyde is no meagre specimen of the work of this titan of mitigated realism; a work of tremendous spirit and energy, albeit with a variegated outline much to be contrasted with the chastity of Moore’s profiles. Foley made the central figure of Prince Albert on his Memorial in London’s Kensington Gardens.

Three statues in the Square are the work of the Baron Carlo Marochetti (1805-1867) a sculptor of Piedmont, resident first in France, then in England. These are the Victoria and Albert equestrians and the statue of Oswald. Marochetti’s statue of the Duke of Wellington is the one the abuse of which Glasgow has taken to its heart like a class delinquent (I mean the infernal traffic-cone at which our foreign visitors are aghast and about which we as hosts are perfectly mortified; what does the treatment of this statue indicate about Glasgow and its “authorities” in general?) Marochetti is not a slight force in world sculpture. He produces the alter of the Church of the Madeleine in Paris - France’s greatest temple -the frieze around the Arc de Triomphe also in that city, and he casts the Lions in Trafalgar Square from the original models by Landseer. His is also the statue of Richard the Lionheart outside the New Palace of Westminster. He is a controversial figure in Victorian sculpture, for he represents a Franco-Italian style against which many Scottish sculptors protested; they preferred a manner derived from the chaste neo-classicism of Thorvaldsen and other northern European sculptors. The concert of the Victoria and Albert equestrians is an exquisite highlight of the Square’s statuary; they ought to be re-positioned as they originally were, riding southwards and flanking the Scott Column.

The Scott Monument, George Square, Glasgow, is the first memorial to the Singer of Marmion and Author of Waverley ever to be erected. Its authorship is interesting, for it combines the talents of two individuals of great importance to the history of Scottish sculpture in the 19th century; John Greenshileds (1792 – 1835) and Alexander Handyside Ritchie (1804-1870) The former was a stone-mason who extended his work from that of a carver into the fields of clay modelling. This is of crucial importance in the development of the Scottish School of sculpture; the leap from the directly carved form to that secured by the preparatory clay model and plaster-cast. This leap commences the story of Scotland’s national school of sculpture – as the leap from direct stone to modelled prototypes always does, in any society. It was from Greenshield’s original model of Scott that the younger man, Ritchie, carved the final figure – and Ritchie was a genius. He was the finest architectural sculptor that Scotland ever produced, and had been a favoured student of Bertel Thorvaldsen while in Rome. Thorvaldsen was the most famous artist in the world. The removal of this Column (by David Rhind) and its figure will signify to that world that Glasgow is heedless of its finest things – and greedy for “living room” when once it was able to accommodate the images of the Dead, by the Dead, at its heart. The City will show itself a vitalist barbarian when once it was a civilised being. The column is in poor repair; the last thing it needs is dismantling and the colossal disturbance to its fabric that such an operation would entail. It has very fine Grecian detailing.

There are two statues in George Square by John Mossman (1817-1890), the doyen of Glaswegian sculpture in the 19th century. These are the Peel and Campbell figures. The former is a work of extraordinary elegance by a sculptor who is often overlooked in his work as a modeller of free-standing statuary. Radically, the figure has no formal support-structure (drape, or tree, or suchlike device) and yet there is no loss of gravity owing to this “verist” touch. The suavity of the form matches the subtle movement in the figure, and all this is brought down to earth in an equally distinguished pedestal. The statuary pedestals in George Square are all, with the exception of the Oswald, works of architectural distinction – but this one for Peel is by the greatest of all Glasgow architects, Alexander “Greek” Thomson. You can see this just by looking at it. Glasgow has a swine of a record (this is a calumny against pigs) in respect of this greatest of all romantic-classical architects, having done away with more works by him than did the Luftwaffe during the recent unpleasantness with Germany. Is the next of his works to be lost to the City – in its proper context – to be this small gem? Mossman’s statue of Campbell is a commonly overlooked work, so different from the Peel but making up in monumentality what is loses in sartorial terms. The handling of the cloak is exemplary, and the figure has a resolved action, neither staid nor sprightly. Perhaps it is a perfect example of what a 19th century statue really is; its likeness is derived from the bust of the poet by Edward Hodges Baily, now in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow University. Campbell was thrice Rector of Glasgow, but died in dementia and poverty.

Next, the statue of Watt. This is a work by Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey (1781-1841) who is the leading sculptor in Britain in the first decades of the 19th century and of profound influence in the creation of the Scottish School of sculpture, owing to his early encouragement of Sir John Steell (1804-1891), Scotland’s national sculptor. Between his influence, and that of Thorvaldsen, the entire foundation of this country’s monumental statuary tradition is based - and Glasgow is lucky to be able to display prominently this distinguished form, at a smaller scale than many of Chantrey’s civic works, such as one might find in Edinburgh (unmolested) or London (likewise secure). It is a fine early bronze-cast, but the main thing to recommend the piece is the unsentimental pessimism of its pose and its manly refusal to “act up”. This work had, and has, immense influence on my own work as a civic monumentalist, for I have made a specialism of the seated statue, the first and finest example of which I found in the Watt in George Square. Chantrey’s works, being so distinguished, often attracts the hatred of empowered philistines, the first of which being his wife, who after his death took great care to smash many of his plasters to pieces. Thereafter the Ashmolean Museum’s record in the husbandry of  the remnant has been dubious, ending in an atrocious “sky-display” of its collection of Chantrey’s bust-plasters, the collection having been set out as an “installation” by some funded contemporist. Perhaps Glasgow will follow this tradition of tickled iconoclasm in its treatment of the Watt by Chantrey.

There is another seated statue in the Square, the Thomas Graham by William Brodie (1815-1881), an Edinburgh sculptor of great distinction who produced around five hundred portrait busts in his time, all of the highest standard. Brodie has another statue in Glasgow, that of the painter John Graham-Gilbert (1794-1866), whose personal collection of paintings formed the nucleus of Glasgow’s Municipal Collection. That is an interior, marble statue, on display at Kelvingrove - but George Square’s civic bronze shows Brodie in a more robust mode, producing a statue of immense continence of contour. It is a true and serious work, posing this scientist as a “natural philosopher” in the tradition of statues of thinkers. The tone is Epicurean, and the rhyme with the James Watt by Chantrey sonorous and uncontrived. This work, too, has had a great influence on my own efforts as a sculptor of seated figures. I could see it at any time of day or night, in the company of other informative works of statuary in the Square. It needs never to be shut up in any far-flung facility, or exiled to some outskirt “for its own protection”.

The statue of Gladstone is the most modern work in the Square, coming from the hand of Hamo Thorneycroft (1850-1925), an extraordinarily important sculptor of the so-called New Sculpture movement. This school saw a twin drive – to a higher realism than that to which the neo-classical school would extend, and to an integration of decoration in the substance of the actual sculpture itself, so that surfaces become flickery, shades become more exaggerated and decorative portions of attributes brought to the fore. The greatest mind amongst these sculptors was Sir Alfred Gilbert (1854-1934), but Thorneycroft excelled as the greater realist of the school. His most important statue is the General Gordon in London, a colossal work of great sophistication, concerning which a fine monograph has been written. His finest marble statue is that of Tennyson set in the vestibule of Trinity College Chapel in Cambridge. In the Glasgow Gladstone, Thorneycroft shows himself in complete charge of his medium; there are some exceptionally deep shadows in the work and a fine and nervous management of the statue surface. To conceal the missing finger of the subject, lost in a shooting accident, the sculptor has had the discretion to plant the stump between the pages of the book being carried by the figure. The pedestal is also particularly fine, perfectly in the idiom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This Gladstone cannot rival the Edinburgh Gladstone testimonial by James Pittendrigh MacGillivray (unmolested amid the Tram fiasco; they have worked around that work) yet it is an exquisite work in itself, appropriately placed in Glasgow’s heart. The city is lucky to have such a work, and wrong even to contemplate is displacement.

Finally, there is the statue whose presence in the Square makes something of a blot, even though its subject is beyond question. This is the Burns statue by George Edwin Ewing (1828-84). Ewing was a course sculptor, and his statue of Burns in George Square demonstrates his limitations. I mention this only to show that my ardent defence of the statuary of George Square is not one that blinds my critical faculties. Sadly, I am certain that not a single commentator or “design adviser” has sufficient knowledge of the Square’s statuary, or of statuary in general, to make such a judgement. The works are seen by them as a singularity to be disposed of en masse; not as works of art in themselves. This is what is overlooked when grand plans are put in play, through a process of “galvanisation” (I believe it is called) in which certain inconvenient constituencies are to suffer “re-location.”

The statuary of George Square must remain present in the Square. These statues are the longest-standing residents of the precinct and ought not to suffer eviction on account of some devious creative initiative pursued in servility to a sports festival (2014) on the one hand, and a superannuated idea of civic-design progress on the other. The revolting expression “fit for purpose” has constantly been voiced by the advocates of statue-felling in Glasgow (they are few, but powerful), and by sounding this phrase they show that they embrace the functionalist ethic that destroys culture and reduces hitherto Categorical polities to wretched, Hypothecated entities, constantly grubbing for the return.  The “purpose” of George Square is the housing of monuments of distinction to historically important individuals intimately bound in with the making of the City. In serving this “purpose” George Square effects something important in the metaphysical line; its sets the Past at its centre. In the last century (the 20th) certain forces decided that the past was to be “irrelevant” and that the future (but not the distant future) was the thing. This amounted to a species of contemporism which valorised the present above all, and which set the world in a perpetual, revolutionary turmoil while confining it to a chronological provincialism – or, to put it differently, incarcerated the world in a Fortress Now - as tight a gaol as the Chateau d’If. Under the regime of Now, the statue was a particularly detested form, for it reminded the zealot contemporist of the Not Now, which is a thing he hates to contemplate. For Not Now means Not Him – and he is by nature a selfish little solipsist with himself at the centre of the Universe. And of course he is going to put himself at the centre of George Square, for he is more important than Sir Walter Scott, and his needs (to jump, shout, punch the air, grimace like Andy Murray on a good day, and to “celebrate”) are regarded more highly than are the needs of the statue, whose sole requirement is to stand, or sit, and slumber in a kind of peace. But the contemporist hates a peace, for he is by nature turbulent (Latin; turba, a crowd) and loves a disturbance above all. It was Ernst Roehm, the odious SA leader in Nazi Germany who said that he was “drawn to disturbances of every kind, owing to my being an immature and obnoxious person.” Such self-knowledge in a rank villain is salutary; do Glasgow’s civic leaders understand half of what this monster knew about the inherent menace in all activism? George Square’s statuary stands as a prophylactic measure against mob-rule (called, in Greek, ochlocracy) – as all statuary does, if it is done properly. This is why the statue is the most hunted form in modern culture – which is inherently immature and obnoxious.

Vitalist, unscrupulously optimistic cultures, cruel, bigoted and superstitious, all detest the grace-saving presence of the statue in their midst. Be certain, then, that the Taliban in Afghanistan target the rock-cut Buddhas of Bamiyan with exactly the same sense of resentment against their perpetual peace, as certain thrusters in Glasgow seek to expel the statues from George Square. There is a deep-seated, natural-barbarian instinct to topple, oust or deface the graven image, as fundamental to Nature’s plan as the cycle of rebirth itself. This is why both in the book of Exodus and in the second Sura of the Koran, the primal iconoclast, Moses himself, is pictured tearing down a statue (of the Molten Calf). Mythology, far from perpetrating untruths, give us the great, distilled truths of Nature, set in illustrated terms. Nature hates an image, but our job, as self-knowing, political human-beings, is to defy Nature’s banshee-cry, and PROTECT the image. It’s called Civilisation. Glasgow, by reversing its headlong career into this George Square adventure, might rise unique and admired from its current situation of disdain and disgrace. I find a particular fury about this proposed outrage among the young people I know (the institutionalised iconoclasm of the ageing groovers of last-century Modernism means little to these abandoned children); of course, by denying the Dead, you deny those Yet to be Born, and young people are acutely aware of the relation between the two, as metaphysical companions.

A statue is an embassy of the Dead amongst the Quick. Perhaps it is the most morally valuable thing any city can accommodate. Cities that seek to disperse their statues do so to quell the particular riot that statues perpetrate; a riot of peace, empathy, calm, diligence, philanthropy and tranquillity. They do this in the cause of Tents and Events, funded by Coca-Cola and fuelled by MacDonald’s, and they do it because they are sooks. Are you, Sir or Madam, so supine? Or do you have something Glaswegian in you? Then you must join the campaign to save these works by emailing yourself at Planning.Representations@drs.glasgow.gov.uk, expressing your disgust at Glasgow’s conduct. You must quote the heading 12/02178/DC Cleaning and Restoration of Statues in George Square ( a weasely title to be sure, but that’s the form), and you must put your full name, whoever you are, at the end of it, with your postal address and your postcode. And you have to do it before Friday 30th of November at 4.00pm, for so the subtle juggernaut dictates.

I am, Yours most sincerely,

Alexander Stoddart (Prof.)

Sculptor in Ordinary to Her Majesty The Queen in Scotland DL RSA (London) RSE