JUST INSIDE THE entrance to the first gallery in the new suite of rooms dedicated to the Middle Ages and Renaissance at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, an imposing triple window in limestone serves to introduce the contents of the galleries, conveniently dividing the display space and providing a notable and rare example of Romanesque non-ecclesiastical architectural sculpture (Fig.1). Originally forming part of a house at Trie-Château near Gisors (Oise) and acquired by the Museum in 1937, it had been in storage since 1983, and the new galleries presented a welcome opportunity to reintroduce the window to public display; its re-emergence also offers the chance to look afresh at the window and the circumstances of its acquisition. The extensive correspondence and memoranda on the official acquisition file at the Museum are unusually eloquent of the issues and complications surrounding a major purchase in the late 1930s; they are also particularly revealing of the central role played by the National Art-Collections Fund and the dynamics of the English and French art establishments at that time.

IN OCTOBER 1881 the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), London, purchased a relief of the Virgin of Mercy that had originally formed part of the tympanum above the main portal of the Scuola Vecchia, the old meeting house, of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice (Fig.9). The sculpture had been taken down from the abbey church of S. Maria della Misericordia, where it had been installed only in the mid-nineteenth century, and like many other monuments that were being removed from historic sites in Italy at that time, it was on the open market. The failure of the Venetian authorities to prevent the destruction or removal of such pieces was widely criticised in the press. In an extraordinary letter to The Times, published on 24th October 1883, the former curator of the Museum, John Charles Robinson, wrote a tirade against the Municipality of Venice, and listed a catalogue of works that he had helped to preserve by buying them for the Museum. Among them was the Misericordia tympanum, which he described as ‘intrinsically a work of high merit and importance, but it had infinitely greater significance in its original place. It is indeed a page torn from the record of Venetian art’. Given that it ‘lay in fragments on the ground’ when he saw it, the purchase ensured the sculpture’s survival, but, nonetheless, Robinson had eagerly colluded with others in keeping its destination secret from the vendor in order to get the best possible price.

THE LATE VICTORIAN and Edwardian era marked an Indian summer for ambitious church monuments of the recumbent effigy format. Examples include Edward Onslow Ford’s memo rial to Percy Bysshe Shelley (1893; University College, Oxford), Alfred Gilbert’s tomb to Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence (1893–1928; St George’s Chapel, Windsor), and their slightly later, lesser-known counterpart by Bertram Mackennal commemorating George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925), and his first wife, Mary Victoria (née Leiter), in All Saints’ Church, Kedleston, Derbyshire (1907–13; Fig.23).

THE LIVELY Peter Pan situated in Kensington Gardens (Fig.36), one of the best-known statues in London, is by the sculptor George Frampton, an artist whose work also registers with vis itors to the British Museum, as they pass through its north entrance under the watchful eye of his stone lions. But less well loved (if more prominently placed) is another monument by this Royal Academician: an awkward composition at the foot of St Martin’s Lane (Fig.35). The work is a memorial to Nurse Edith Cavell, the victim of a German firing squad in Belgium on 12th October 1915, who defied German military law as she assisted allied soldiers in their escape to the Netherlands in the First World War. Appropriately, for this memorial, Frampton created a structure as sombre as its subject-matter. But there are aesthetic conflicts within the work and these, as much as any sense of solemnity, hinder its appreciation. 

IN 2008 THE Victoria and Albert Museum, London, acquired an intriguing small bronze mask by the British painter Glyn Philpot (1884–1937). Entitled The dead faun, the sculpture was cast c.19201 and shows the face of a young male, his head inclined slightly to the right with his eyes lightly closed and hair falling forwards (Fig.41). The model for the bronze was George Bridgman, essentially an affable drifter, who met Philpot before the First World War and whose physique and good looks represented an ideal for the artist, who depicted him in many of his most memorable figurative paintings.