Prince of Art Nouveau
The Duke of Clarence Memorial – Alfred Gilbert’s tribute to Queen Victoria’s scandalous, spectacularly stupid grandson
The sinuous, entangling, architectural forms known as Art Nouveau first writhed their way through Europe at the turn of the 20th century.
Their tendrils barely touched England’s shores. They flourished in Scotland, but Charles Rennie Mackintosh was careful to straighten their twists and turns. For the English architectural profession, it was the Arts and Crafts movement that then reigned supreme.
Because that movement loathed sham and loved honesty, the fashion for Art Nouveau’s ‘squirm’, as they called it, was denounced. The criticism was sneering: because such an outlandish style supposedly obscured all architectural construction, with its ‘fidgety, vulgar obtrusiveness, it was quite destructive of all dignity and repose’.
Even Alfred Gilbert, master creator of curvilinear forms – responsible for the whirling merbabies and fish beneath Eros in Piccadilly Circus – loathed the term Art Nouveau, calling it a ‘duffer’s paradise’!
There were colourful counterblasts. Architect Charles Harrison Townsend retorted that the Arts and Crafts cry for simplicity was due to omission – ‘with a negation that is a poor substitute for invention, a cowardice pretending to be courage’. Oh dear, oh dear.
He himself boldly grasped the nettle with the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Horniman Museum – both in London – and St Mary’s Church in Great Warley, Essex, all of them writhingly related to their Art Nouveau counterparts abroad.
When it comes to Art Nouveau, the beauties of Barcelona are hard to beat. Let us give particular praise to the Metro entrances throughout Paris, designed by Hector Guimard between 1900 and 1913. With gloriously swooping forms of cast iron and glass, 141 of them huzzahed their arabesque presence in the city.
Some have been destroyed, but the remaining 86 are now protected as historic monuments.
The style is so rare in England that coming upon it invariably gives a
heart-stopping surprise. It is always a shock to see such diverse delights as the Philharmonic Dining Rooms in Liverpool, of 1898-1900, rich with its sweeps of brass decoration.
Otherwise, there is the smotheredwith-colourful-tiles (Edward) Everard’s Printing Works in Bristol of 1900, today being transformed into a deluxe hotel.
What about Harrods Food Hall, with its wealth of ceramic scenes of hunting and herding, designed by W J Neatby in 1901? He was the head of the Doulton architectural department – his work is loved and lauded to this day.
A royal tomb is our finale: Alfred Gilbert’s memorial to the Duke of Clarence in the Albert Memorial Chapel, within the walls of Windsor Castle.
It’s a colossal, filigreed masterpiece of breathtaking beauty, with a grille (around the sarcophagus) of bronze, aluminum, marble and ivory, with semi-precious stones, mother-of-pearl and paint.
The memorial was designed to be a great deal more splendid than the man it honoured. Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale (1864-92), known as Eddie, was Queen Victoria’s grandson and heir to the throne, who I fear was considered a dullard.
According to James Pope-hennessy, he was as ‘heedless and aimless as a gleaming goldfish in a crystal bowl’. One tutor described him as ‘abnormally dormant’ while another doubted the wisdom of his going to university: ‘I do not think that he can possibly derive much benefit from attending lectures at Cambridge, as he hardly knows the meaning of the words to read.’
Queen Victoria described his life as dissipated. His reputation was indeed rent through with sexual scandals – although largely unproven: with male prostitutes and chorus girls (one killed herself by drinking carbolic acid). There was even the unproven suggestion – though with such startling smoke that there must have been at least some spark of fire – that he was Jack the Ripper.
Maybe it was simply his suffering from gonorrhea that gave rise to such rumours.
It took Gilbert a full 36 years to master the tortuous twists and turns of his great, black, bronze grille, with its 12 ‘saintly guardians’ standing over all. They join a virgin, 12 saints and 12 pairs of angels, whose wings and robes follow the flow, all surrounding a sarcophagus of Mexican onyx.
They are protecting the Duke’s effigy, clad in the bronze and brass uniform of the 10th Royal Hussars.
His face and hands of white marble can be seen through the grille (pictured, right). Photographs show him to have been particularly fetching in this attire during his life, and so he will remain for eternity after his death – at the age of 28 from pneumonia.
Gilbert’s use of marble, as well as of ivory for the hands and faces of all the languorously graceful figures, is particularly haunting.
Elizabeth of Hungary’s bronze face (pictured, right) is painted to look like ivory; her robes of tin and bronze are painted red, high-lit with gold and inlaid with decorative gems.
St Elizabeth, an ancestor of Prince
Albert, was Landgravine of Thuringia and a Christian queen with a pagan husband. When concealing food intended for the poor beneath her cloak, she was waylaid by her husband, asking her what she was hiding.
‘Only roses,’ she replied, as her cloak fell open, revealing the miraculous blooms tumbling to her feet. They are painted red, as are the roses on the figure of the Virgin.
St Elizabeth’s face is said to be the likeness of Nina Cust, a grandee writer, editor, translator and sculptor, who was also a member of the group of intellectuals known as The Souls.
A great stone angel – deemed by Queen Victoria to be ‘quite lovely’ – soars above, holding a crown over the Duke.
Beneath him stand the Virgin and St
George, who is cast in aluminium, again with ivory face and hands. Gilbert wrote that it took four years of ‘steady work’ to complete this figure. Each of the 20 pieces of armour was made separately and would be wearable if cast to human scale.
Gilbert worked night and day on this important royal commission, commemorating the man who, had he lived, would have been King of England.
Here was an unparalleled chance for the sculptor to become the greatest of his day and he took it with obsessive zeal, working for many years, doom-riddenin-terms-of-financial-reward – until he collapsed from a nervous breakdown.
It wore him out. Gilbert was declared a bankrupt in 1901 and retired, a broken man, to Bruges. Only in 1927 was the last figure put into place.
The Albert Memorial Chapel was restored for Queen Victoria in 1869, set a-shimmering by George Gilbert Scott, with marble and mosaics by Henri de Triqueti. Alfred Gilbert beautifully beat this flamboyance at its own game.