Hewn from trenches
The horrors of war helped a gallant Yorkshire soldier become the leading sculptor of his age, writes John Vincent.
The work shows a live soldier squatting in a dugout under a blanket of bodies.
No other British sculptor was better placed to depict the horrors of the First World War and to raise a memorial to those who lost their lives than Yorkshireman Charles Sargeant Jagger. When war broke out in 1914, Jagger, one of three artistic siblings born in Kilnhurst, near Rotherham, to colliery manager Enoch Jagger and his wife Mary Sargeant, gave up his scholarship at the British School in Rome to join the Artists’ Rifles before being commissioned in the Worcestershire Regiment in 1915.
Jagger served in the disastrous
Gallipoli campaign, in which British soldiers walked into a wall of fire and died in their thousands. The bravery of the survivors, while tormented by millions of flies feeding on bloated and putrefying corpses left unburied in no man’s land, was matched only by the blunders of their commanders.
After being shot through the shoulder at Gallipoli, Jagger was later gassed in the trenches, wounded once more in Flanders in 1918 and awarded the Military Cross for gallantry.
It is said that war seldom produces great artists, it more often destroys them. But his first-hand experiences of the sheer hell of war proved the making of Jagger as a sculptor and he soon established himself as the premier British exponent of his era, providing an uncompromising interpretation of the horrors that stalked the trenches.
Whilst convalescing from his wounds in 1919, he began work on No Man’s
Land, a full-size bronze now part of the Tate Collection in London. It depicts a “listening post”, a technique of trench warfare in which a soldier would hide among the corpses of comrades, broken stretchers and barbed wire of no-man’s land in order to listen to the enemy close by. The piece was described by artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) as “the best thing I have seen so far by any artist of the War”.
Now a smaller bronze relief of No Man’s Land, probably from an edition of seven cast in 1935, is listed to fetch £15,000£20,000 when it goes under the hammer at a Modern British and 20th Century
Art sale at Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury, Wiltshire, on May 11.
The work is not of the typically heroic type, showing one live soldier squatting in a dugout under a blanket of bodies and shattered war paraphernalia. But it is this unsparing treatment of the reality of war, combined with the elegance of composition, that makes Jagger the stand-out sculptor of his age.
Jagger was commissioned by the British War Memorials Committee to produce a large relief, entitled The First Battle of Ypres, and his most famous work is the Royal Artillery Memorial (1925) at Hyde Park Corner. Notable private commissions followed, he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1928 and his bronze statue of explorer Ernest Shackleton (1932) is outside the Royal Geographical Society in London.
But he paid a heavy price for his success. His relentless work rate and old war wounds contributed to his early death in 1934, a month short of his
50th birthday.