Site Introduction | Art Gallery Index
The Singer | Applause | Folly | Peace | Topless Female Statues | Linos

Egyptian girls

Edward Onslow Ford
(1852-1901)
The Singer and Other Works
Extensively revised and updated September 2010 and August 2011
PS: If you came here searching for Ford cars you’re in the wrong place

The Singer | Applause | Folly | Peace | Topless Female Statues | Linos

Introduction
Skip Introduction
Some of Ford’s statues spend most of their time locked away in basements, which I have always believed is a criminal waste. Consequently I was only ever able to view them in the form of photographs, some of them almost a hundred years old, or not at all.

Then in the summer of 2010 the Tate Britain Gallery in London had an apparent rush of blood to the head, and opened a (sadly temporary) display area for “The New Sculpture” of the late 19th century. This included three of Ford’s statues, along with Pandora by Harry Bates. I was thrilled to be able to meet some of my favourite statues in the flesh (so to speak) for the first time, and I wasted no time photographing them in the round, including many angles that weren’t in the official photos. Conditions for photography were less than ideal (glass cases, artificial light and a total ban on flash), resulting in some grain, soft focus and stray reflections. Nonetheless, I don’t think my pictures came out looking too horrible, and you can now view the best ones here.

Versions of my photos here have also been posted on
my Flickr account, under the username Ketrin1407.

The Singer (1889)
Found photos

An Egyptian slave girl, naked but for a headdress, stands beside a tall harp...an image that, together wiith Albert Toft’s Spirit of Contemplation, inspired my adult story “The Singer”. Do not follow this link if you find erotic content offensive.

Astonishingly, these four photographs were the only pictures of The Singer that I was ever able to find, apart from a couple of tiny images accompanying its official description on the Tate website. Even from these few pictures it was clear that The Singer, with its beautifully observed figure, ornate decoration and gilding and carefully strung harp, was a remarkable piece of workmanship. Even so, seeing the real statue for the first time gave me an even greater respect for Ford’s skill.

Tate Britain Gallery, London, August-September 2010.

The following 30 photos are by Leem. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify these images under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license can be found in the Wikimedia Commons entry “GNU Free Documentation License”.

Astonishingly, for most of its life The Singer’s polychrome glory was hidden beneath a layer of uniform brown varnish, which was apparently still there when the vintage black and white photographs above were taken. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the Tate’s restoration experts removed the varnish, and through painstaking research into Ford’s original materials and methods were able to restore the original colour scheme. Judging by the vintage photographs a couple of small features have been lost to the ravages of time: the curled spike on the ibis’s crown at the base of the harp, and a feature at the tip of the harp itself. These ommissions don’t really detract from the statue’s aesthetic value, though it would be nice if they could be replaced.

The statue originally stood on a tall pedestal so that viewers had to look up to see her face. In the 21st century she just has to make do with a glass and plastic display case like all the other Tate statues.

Thanks to the Tate’s restorers, we can admire all the detail that Ford lavished on the creation of this statue. As well as all the multicoloured decoration on the harp, every string has to be precisely placed so the girl appears to be playing it. The fabric of the girl’s headdress is precisely delineated; her metal coronet is also finely-detailed and set with coloured stones. Even the ibis-head decoration at the front has realistic mottling on its skin, while the ribbon at the back falls in convincing folds. And that’s before I even mention the other ibis decoration at the base of the harp with its pharaonic headdress and crown, or the patterned reliefs on the statue’s pedestal. The figure of the girl herself shows the same precise attention to detail not only in its modelling but in the way her expression, pose and body language capture her intense concentration and nervous energy. All in all, I might dexcribe The Singer as a tour de force of the sculptor’s art, if I were the sort of person who used pretentious phrases like that.

Applause (1893)
Tate Britain Gallery, London, August-September 2010.

The following 9 photos are by Leem. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify these images under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license can be found in the Wikimedia Commons entry “GNU Free Documentation License”.

This 1893 companion piece to The Singer doesn’t seem to appear in many vintage art books, at least not the ones where I found the older photos of The Singer. Unlike The Singer, which was part of the original Tate collection, Applause is privately-owned and hardly ever gets displayed, so her appearance at the Tate in the summer of 2010 was a rare opportunity for me to photograph her. Admittedly these images suffer from the same problems as my other Tate pictures, but apart from one small image on the official Tate website and a few more on Flickr, these may be the only photos you’ll find of her anywhere.

Some rare old engravings show the statue on a tall pedestal, just like her ‘sister’. It would be fascinating to see the two statues displayed that way, but I guess it wasn’t practical, even assuming the pedestals still exist.

As you can see, this girl also has a headdress and coronet, this time decorated with cobras (representing the Nile, apparently), and also sits on a sculpted pedestal. Although not as finely-detailed as The Singer, there’s still a lot to enjoy about this piece.

Dating from roughly the same period, French sculptress Jeanne Itasse’s Egyptian Harpist uses similar subject matter to Ford’s Egyptian girls. Unfortunately I’ve only been able to find one vintage photo of it, and it’s possible that it may not have survived the upheavals of the 20th century, which would be a shame.


Meanwhile, rounding off this look at the two girls, here’s a comparison of their faces in profile. You’ll notice that in both cases the camera chose to focus on the foreground, so their headpieces came out sharper than their actual faces.


Folly (1886)
Tate Britain Gallery, London, August-September 2010.

The following 7 photos are by Leem. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify these images under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license can be found in the Wikimedia Commons entry “GNU Free Documentation License”.

The spirit of Folly stands on the edge of a cliff beckoning us to follow.
And all too often, human nature being what it is, we do...

This was the only Tate statue I got to photograph that wasn’t in a glass case. There were still a few focus and exposure issues, but I don’t think the pictures came out too bad under the circumstances.

With none of the ancillary decoration of the other statues this is by far the simplest of the three Ford works on display, but no less assured in its command of facial expression and body language.

Peace (1887)
Found photos: old book engraving and three bronze reproductions


(1) Bronze statuette, colour (2, 3) Lifesize bronze; images by Sam the Sham and the Photos on Flickr, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, December 2007

The figure of Peace holds an enormous olive(?) branch and releases a dove - except in the upper left-hand bronze version, where the bird has evidently flown (possibly into the hands of an art thief). The two pictures at bottom centre and right are from Flickr, with links to the relevant pages. They were taken at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, which apparently isn’t too keen on photography. And I always thought Scousers were such a friendly lot.

Speaking of Ford’s command of facial and body language... in this piece the girl’s face wears an expression of almost ecstatic euphoria. Given her tender years, maybe it’s best not to explore that in any great detail.

Topless Female Statues
Remastered versions of old book engravings plus two found bronze images

Knowledge (c. 1898) (left) depicts a girl reading from a scroll on her lap. Several other sculptors used scrolls to symbolise knowledge: Albert Toft’s statue Education (picture not yet available) and Alfred Gilbert’s Mother Teaching Child (1881) (also shown at the Tate’s 2010 New Sculpture exhibition) (Flickr images) both depict parents teaching their children from scrolls, while elsewhere in this very Gallery you can see French artist Charles Jean Marie Degeorge’s statue of the young Aristotle looking very bored while studying a scroll.

I have no idea why the original versions of Music (second from left) and Dance (third from left) (both 1890) are wearing birds on their heads. I seem to recall reading that the originals had gone to India not long after they were completed. There were a number of bronze reproductions, which perhaps wisely discarded the bird hats. (Second right: bronze statuette of Dance; right: life-size bronze version of Dance in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Merseyside, UK, taken by mrmaclear on Flickr.) Another bronze copy of Dance found its way to the US via Germany. PBS’s Antiques Roadshow caught up with it in Wichita, Kansas in July 2008 and gave it an insurance value of US$20,000.

Linos (1884)

Five views of Linos (or Linus...no relation to the Peanuts character!) - three side views of bronze reproductions, a front view of the original marble(?) version with fig leaf added, taken from an engraving, and at centre, a rather dark front view of a life-size bronze version in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Merseyside, UK, taken by mrmaclear on Flickr.

Linos seems to have been a Greek god of melancholy. His expression, gesture and lowered torch seem intended to convey his feeling of dismay, although with a body like that you can’t help wondering what he’s got to be so miserable about.

The artist’s signature can be seen on the base in the big version of the left-hand image. The inscription on the front of the base in the second from left image reads [LINOS] in Greek lettering.

The End


Comment on this page
Site Introduction | Art Gallery Index | Return to Top of Page