Alfred Gilbert at the Logic of The Fold

Katie Faulkner - Courtauld Institute of Art

Katherine.Faulkner@courtauld.ac.uk

Just before I begin my paper proper, I wanted briefly to position the work I am presenting
today within my project as a whole. As Caroline said, my thesis examines the role of
dress, drapery and decoration in sculpture in Britain at the end of the nineteenth and the
beginning of the twentieth century. A new generation of sculptors emerged from the
Royal Academy Schools in the late 1870s and 1880s. Christened the New Sculpture
movement by contemporary critics, they were influenced by the naturalism of French
sculpture, as seen in the work of Rodin and Dalou, as well as a re-evaluation and
rediscovery of Italian Renaissance sculpture and casting techniques.

This paper is taken from a chapter on Alfred Gilbert, the member of the New Sculpture
movement who has received most recent scholarly attention, Richard Dorment published
a biography of Gilbert in 1984 and also curated exhibition at the Royal Academy,in 1986.
David Getsy and Jason Edwards, two of the leading scholars on the New Sculpture
movement, have also written extensively on Gilbert, most notably Edward’s book
‘Alfred Gilbert’s Aestheticism: Gilbert among Whistler, Wilde, Leighton and Burne-
Jones’, published in 2006. Outside of the world of art history, Gilbert is probably best
known for his Eros, or the Shaftesbury Memorial, in Piccadilly Circus.

This paper begins in 1887, just after Gilbert had completed the first stages of work on the
Shaftesbury Memorial. He had recently returned from Italy and was about to embark
upon one of the most prolific and frenetic stages of his career. 1887 was also the year of
Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. As a pupil of the sculptor-in-ordinary to the Queen,
Joseph Edgar Boehm, Gilbert was well aware of the rewards a successful association
with the royal family could bring. The commission from W. Ingham Whittaker, High
Sheriff of Winchester, for a memorial commemorating the Queen’s r fiftieth year on the
throne, seemed like a gift to the ambitious young sculptor.

Gilbert’s plans for the Jubilee Memorial were first revealed in 1888 when he exhibited a
plaster model of the monument at the Royal Academy. Claude Phillips, a French critic
particularly interested in sculpture, analysed the model in great detail in his review of the
exhibition:
But, while the sculptor has, in his admirable likeness of the Queen, adopted a picturesque
mode of treatment in the modelling of the flesh, and has, with a view to decorative effect,
displayed in the superbly-modelled robes an unsculptural exuberance of fold rivalling
that which was the chief characteristic of Bernini and his school he seeks—and seeks in
vain—to fuse these elements of his design with a throne, which, not withstanding its
richness of adornment, is of a severely monumental character. 1

Here Phillips draws a visual comparison between the model for the memorial and the
work of Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). The characteristic that
Philips believed that Bernini and Gilbert shared was ‘an unsculptural exuberance of fold.’
The fact that Philips highlights these exuberant folds and links them with Baroque
sculptures is the starting point for this paper.
Phillip’s was not the last to interpret Gilbert’s work in relation to the art of the past. The
curator of a1936 exhibition of Gilbert’s work at the Victoria and Albert Museum, E.
Machell Cox, went as far as to mark the progression of Gilbert’s work as ‘falling into
three periods’; the first, ‘strongly influenced by Florentine work of the fifteenth century,
but as moving towards the more baroque forms of the sixteenth’; the second, ‘a fully
developed baroque, sometimes in an Italian, sometimes in a Gothic or a Flemish idiom’
and the third, ‘in which his special qualities were capable of their highest development …
the evolution of a composite and personal baroque’.2 This reference to the Renaissance
and Baroque periods makes logical sense in the context of the critical discourse that built
up around Gilbert and other members of the New Sculpture movement in the late

1
Claude Phillips, ‘Sculpture at the Royal Academy’, The Magazine of Art, January 1888, 367.
2
E. Machell Cox, Models and Designs by the Late Sir Alfred Gilbert R.A., exhibition catalogue, Victoria
and Albert Museum, 1936, 10.
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Critics such as Philip Gosse and M.H.
Spiellmann, whose influence is still current in the field, likened the work of Gilbert and
his contemporaries such as Hamo Thornycroft to the Florentine Renaissance bronzes of
Donatello and Benvenuto Cellini.3 This was motivated in no small part by a desire to
distinguish the New Sculpture from neo-classicism, which was the prevalent style of
sculpture Britain up until the 1860s. By the 1880s neo-classicism was seen as staid,
sterile and of little relevance to modern life.
But the labelling of Gilbert’s work as Baroque has significance beyond drawing a
distinction between the old neo-classicism and the New Sculpture. The affective qualities
ascribed to the Baroque folds in Gilbert’s work by Phillips and others are suggestive of a
deeper meaning of this categorisation. The fold in Gilbert’s work can be seen to relate to
a specific subjectivity at the turn of the nineteenth century and to new understandings of
how subjects came to be and know the world. As Jonathan Crary has explained, there was
a generalised ‘crisis of in perception’ in the 1880s and 1890s. The notion of attention was
‘central to a range of social, philosophical, and aesthetic issues’. According to Crary,
‘attention’ became a model of how a subject ‘maintains a coherent and practical sense of
the world’ at the turn of the century. Explanations of attention at the end of the nineteenth
century arose directly from an understanding that a ‘full grasp of a self-identical reality
was not possible’ and that human perception, which was subject to changing physical and
psychological temporalities and processes, provided at best ‘a provisional, shifting
approximation of its objects.’4
It is possible to see the folds of drapery and their relationship to the sculpted body as a
representation of the shifting and provisional nature of subjectivity as it was understood
at the end of the nineteenth century made material. One understanding of this relation of
fold and subjectivity is offered in Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque,
first published in French in 1988 and translated into English in 1993.5 The figure of the
3
See Edmund Gosse, ‘The New Sculpture, 1879-94, Art Journal 56 (1894), 138-42, 199-203, 277-82, 306-
11 and M.H. Spielmann, British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-Day, (London: Cassell and Company,
1901). Sculptors and critics took a particular interest in Cellini after John Addington Symonds translated
his autobiography, the Vita di Benvenuto Cellini into English in 1887.
4
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, (Cambridge, Mass:
MIT Press, 2000), 2-4.
5
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Conley, T. (trans.), (Chicago: University of Chicago
fold allows Deleuze to critique typical accounts of subjectivity that presume a simple
split between interiority and exteriority and the mind and the body. Deleuze uses the fold
to disprove this split; the inside is nothing more than a fold of the outside. To illustrate
his notion of the fold, Deleuze looks to material examples, such as drapery, sculpture and
architecture.
At this point, it is pertinent to ask how relevant Deleuze’s late twentieth century
constructivist philosophy is first to an interpretation of artwork completed a hundred
years before and second to art history more widely. The Fold is not explicitly about art or
architecture. But Deleuze finds the concept of the fold everywhere and therefore several
examples are drawn from these fields, for example he mentions Bernini and Paul Klee,
while one his key motifs is the baroque dome or cupola. Despite this the text has not been
widely referenced by art historians or art theorists. Mieke Bal, and more recently, Maria
Loh are notable exceptions.6 This is perhaps because when Deleuze does write about an
art object or architecture, the stylistic and aesthetic traits he discusses are so embedded in
the style and logic of his own writing that it is difficult to extract one from the other.
Regardless of these complexities Deleuze’s theories of the fold allow insights in Gilbert’s
presentation of consciousness and the process of becoming, as seen in the bronze folds of
Queen Victoria’s sculpted dress.
Deleuze’s conception of the self as a fluid entity, whose self-perception varies with the
surrounding and continual state of flux that acts upon it and it reacts to, has parallels with
Walter Pater’s characterisation and understanding of subjectivity. There are similarities in
the metaphors and language used by Pater in the nineteenth century and Deleuze in the
twentieth to describe the coming into consciousness. But fundamentally, the key idea
they share is that objects of ordinary experience are not fixed as they seem to be, but are
really constantly changing, subject to a ‘perpetual flux’ as Pater would put it or the
infinite folding of matter and souls for Deleuze.7 Jason Edwards has recently argued

Press, 1993).
6
See Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art: Preposterous History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999); Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: the architecture of art writing, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001) and Maria H. Loh, Titian Remade: Representation and the Transformation of Early
Modern Italian Art, (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 9. I would like to thank Sam Rose for
drawing my attention to this text.
7
Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, (London: Everyman, 1968), 75.
convincingly that the context of the Aesthetic movement, as exemplified and theorized in
the writing of figures such as Walter Pater, is essential to an understanding of Gilbert’s
work.8 Rather than placing the emphasis on the alternative sexualities embedded in
Pater’s texts, as Edwards does, here the ‘Conclusion’ to Studies in the History of the
Renaissance (1873) and Marius the Epicurean (1885) will be used as evidence to re-
construct a particular fin-de-siècle subjectivity, which is also captured in Gilbert’s
sculptures.
The specific notion of subjectivity as ‘physical life in [the] moment’, or a sensate and
sensual aesthetic experience of the world, is key to Pater’s writing but also to an
understanding of Gilbert’s sculpture.9 Contemporary critics such as Harry Quilter pointed
to the importance of sensual and physical experience in Gilbert’s work:
Gilbert, on the other hand, if the expression may be pardoned, is a pure sensualist; the life
of the body, of the flesh, the skin, the warm blood coursing though the veins, the grace of
the long limbs in certain attitudes, these are the things which form the substratum of his
art, and round which he weaves his most delicate fancies.10

Quilter saw the ‘life of the body’ as the material basis for the more immaterial and
delicate ‘fancies’ of Gilbert’s work. The minute perceptions of the flesh, the skin, the
coursing of the blood through the veins, the swift and graceful movement of the limbs,
noted by Quilter for Pater form a ‘subjectivity of knowledge’.11
An interesting link can be made between Pater’s subjectivity of knowledge and Deleuze’s
concept of coming into consciousness. As Birgit Kaiser explains, coming into
consciousness for Deleuze, as for Pater, relies on the accumulation of minute perceptions.
We constantly perceive and are constantly surrounded by many small perceptions. None
of these perceptions will stand out from among the others unless it meets another
perception, which is sufficiently different to it. This perception of difference produces a

8
Jason Edwards, Alfred Gilbert’s Aestheticism: Gilbert Amongst Whistler, Wilde, Leighton, Pater and
Burne-Jones, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 9.
9
Walter Pater, ‘Conclusion’, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988) 150.
10
Quilter, ‘The Royal Academy’, 64.
11
Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 79.
third element in relation to the first two perceptions and that exceeds them, crossing over
a threshold of attention and coming into consciousness.12 We can compare this crossing
of the threshold between the murmur of perception and consciousness to the processes of
mutation and intensification which transform material elements into ‘orderly intelligible
relationships’ in the following passage from Marius the Epicurean, when Marius
contemplates the philosophy of Heraclitus:
In this ‘perpetual flux’ of things and of souls, there was, as Heraclitus conceived, a
continuance, if not of their material or spiritual elements, yet of orderly intelligible
relationships, like the harmony of musical notes, wrought out in and through the series of
their mutations[…]13

For Pater, the organising of perceptions into consciousness is also a process of

accumulation. Perceptions relate to one another like the notes in a musical chord, each
different but contributing to a cumulative effect. It is the concordance of the perceptions,
rather than their difference that produces the orderly relationship, or knowledge. I am not
arguing that there is a neat fit between the theories of Deleuze and Pater but rather than
their theories of perception, consciousness and the production of knowledge speak to one
another and also to Gilbert’s sculpture.

Let us turn back to 1887 and the Jubilee Memorial. In the years after the death of Prince
Albert in 1861, Victoria increasingly withdrew from public life, but during the Jubilee
celebrations she became much more visible, in both person and image. Pictures of the
Queen were used on every kind of object from wallpaper to teapots. In towns and cities
across Britain and the Empire the Jubilee provided a great impetus to complete public
improvements; raise new buildings or monuments and inaugurate philanthropic
institutions.14

The rash of new buildings and monuments that appeared in 1887 can be seen as part of a

12 Birgit M. Kaiser, ‘Two Floors of Thinking: Deleuze’s Aesthetics of Folds’, Deleuze and The Fold: A
Critical Reader, van Tuinen, S. and McDonnell, N (eds.), (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 213.
13
Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1968), 75.
14
Walter L. Arnstein, Queen Victoria, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 171-3.
wider, late nineteenth-century trend of construction of grand, public buildings. As the
population became increasingly industrialised and urbanised, large ‘civic palaces’,
municipal, bureaucratic and commercial buildings, began to dominate town and city
centres. With increasing frequency British architects looked back to aristocratic Baroque
palaces as a model for their late nineteenth-century civic counterparts. The English
Baroque of Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh, was deemed particularly appropriate for
grand town hall and office buildings, capturing and exemplifying an ‘old fashioned and
traditionalist’ sense of Britishness.15 Cardiff City Hall designed by the firm Lanchester,
Stewart and Richards and built between 1900 and 1904, is generally considered one of
the finest examples of Edwardian Baroque. As the centrepiece of a grand civic complex
and dominating the skyline with 194-foot clock tower, the City Hall, sums up the
confidence and the ‘public pomp’ of a society and culture tied to the ideals and power of
Empire in an increasingly unstable period.16 The decorations are all symbolic, the Welsh
dragon on top of the great dome and each of the four pavilions featuring statuary
representing allegories of Welsh Unity, Patriotism, Music and Poetry, Commerce and
Industry and Science and Education.17

Perhaps superficially Gilbert’s monument to Queen Victoriacould be read as a

representation of imperial pomp and the power of monarchy. Like the statuary on Cardiff
City Hall, the statuettes on the Victoria’s throne are allegories for just and prosperous
rule; the winged Victory and the allegorical figures of Faith, Hope, Charity, the Law, the
Constitution and the Colonial Empire are placed in the niches around the throne. On the
back of the throne is the figure of Britannia with the crouched figures of History and
Science above. Although these statuettes are conventional representation of power and
monarchy, the other parts of the monument are highly inventive and original, and emulate
and adapt not the rational Baroque style of Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh but the
Continental Baroque of Bernini.

15
Colin Cunningham, Victorian and Edwardian Town Halls, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981),
152-3. See also Richard Fellows, Edwardian Architecture: Style and Technology, (London: Lund
Humphries, 1995), 20-22 and Robert Harbison, Reflections on the Baroque, (London: Reaktion Books,
2000), 198-199.
16
Harbison, Reflections on the Baroque, 198.
17
‘Cardiff’s New Municipal Buildings’, The Review of Reviews, vol. 34, no. 204, Decmber 1906, 613.
In contrast to the celebration and revival of the English Baroque, Continental Baroque art
and architecture was considered almost taboo throughout the nineteenth century. Evelyn
March Phillips, writing in The Fortnightly Review, encapsulated the turn of the century
attitude to the Baroque, describing itas: ‘that terrible baroque style! How is it possible
that anyone of cultivated taste should care to study it? With what dislike we turn away
from it! How antagonistic it is to all one's ideas of refinement in art!’18 Phillips is more
measured in his assessment of Bernini’s monument to Pope Urban VIII, although his
derisive tone continues:
The statue [of Pope Urban] is a deplorable piece of false and grotesque work--the arms
gesticulating, the drapery flying, the whole without repose or dignity. The monument has
more merit though it follows the florid taste of the day.19

The ‘false and grotesque’ flying drapery, the wildly gesticulating arms and the florid and
rich ornamentation that Evelyn March Phillips found so deplorable in Bernini’s sculpture,
resonates closely with Claude Phillips’ definition of Gilbert’s Queen Victoria as
‘unsculptural’, suggesting that this category is bound up with notions of the Baroque.
As Claude Phillips points out, the similarities between Gilbert and Bernini’s work
becomes clearest in the way they sculpt drapery. Although he was considered a virtuosio
in his lifetime, later writers found Bernini’s draperies unnatural, irrational and a poor
model for art students. By the nineteenth century, certain cultural critics found the
sensuality of Bernini’s work disturbing, especially in his female figures.20 Although
Bernini’s tomb of Urban VIII is certainly more august than sensual, there are ways in
which drapery ‘takes-over’ the body and instead the emphasis is on the ‘technical
dexterity and intricate knowledge’ of material.21 The bottom edge of Urban’s robe flutters
just above the ground as if suspended on a cushion of air. The heavy mantle is flicked up
over the knee, resting there securely. In both Bernini’s tomb and Gilbert’s memorial,
there is an unreality and irrationality in the behaviour and appearance of the sculpted
18
Evelyn March Philips, ‘Bernini and the Baroque Style’, The Fortnightly Review, vol. 80, no. 479, Nov.
1906, 833.
19
E.M. Phillips, ‘Bernini and the Baroque Style’, 843.
20
Gen Doy, Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 157.
21
Doy, Drapery, 174.
fabric.

The categorization of Gilbert’s work as ‘baroque’, has also been noted by David Getsy,.
He specifically cites Cox’s exhibition catalogue from 1936, and isolates the phrase
‘licentious plasticity, which for Getsy refers to ‘both Gilbert’s struggle with the medium
of sculpture and the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century suspicion of his work.’22
Getsy formulates his own definition of Gilbert’s ‘licentious plasticity’ thus:
Gilbert increasingly emphasized metal’s malleability and freedom over the traditional
sculptural concerns with contour, mass, volume, plane and formal coherence – hence
“plasticity.” “Licentious” referred not to the lascivious or lewd, which his work was not,
but rather to his disregard for commonly accepted rules and to his overstepping of
customary limits.23

Getsy historicises Machell’s implicit disapproval of Gilbert’s turn to the baroque within
the modernist debate of ‘truth to materials’ and ‘direct carving.’ As he points out,
Machell, like many early twentieth century critics, saw Gilbert’s work as ‘inassimilable’
with sculpture proper due to it’s reliance on modelling and the diversity of his materials.24
Getsy pinpoints Gilbert’s progress into ‘licentious plasticity’ to the years 1884-6, just
before he received the commission for the Jubilee Memorial. According to Getsy, during
this time Gilbert was formulating a theoretical agenda that would define and shape his
later work
Getsy’s understanding of Gilbert’s ‘licentious plasticity’ has some equivalence with
Claude Phillips’ term ‘unsculptural’. Phillips describes the exaggerated folds of
Victoria’s dress and mantle as ‘picturesque rather than sculptural’, meaning that they add
an effect of weight and grandeur rather than purely representing corporeality.25 This can
be related to Getsy’s conclusion that Gilbert’s turn away from the body and towards
plasticity and ornament was a ‘break away from mere material and matter-of-fact

22
Getsy, Body Doubles, 88.
23
Getsy, Body Doubles, 88.
24
Getsy, Body Doubles, 87.
25
C. Phillips, ‘Sculpture at the Royal Academy’, 367-68.
expression in [his] art.’26 Getsy considers this break away, however, purely in terms of
form and materiality, whereas I believe this move away from naturalistic representation
of the body was a move towards capturing the immaterial: subjectivity.
When the plaster model for the Jubilee Memorial was exhibited at the Royal Academy in
1888, it was met with almost unanimous praise. The critics agreed that Gilbert had
attempted something entirely original. Claude Phillips was the only writer who overtly
criticised the work. What comes across most strongly in Phillips’s analysis is the
confusion and uncertainty he felt about the ‘unorthodox’ design and unusual ‘breadth and
freedom’ of treatment, the ‘want of homogeneity displayed in the style of its conception
and execution’ and ‘the imperfect fusion of its over-numerous component parts.’ Philips
concluded that ‘this very profuseness of splendour confuses the eye and detracts from the
monumental simplicity which is the primary requisite of a work of this class.’27

Other critics put this unconventionality and heterogeneity down to Gilbert’s unparalleled
inventiveness. As Harry Quilter put it, ‘like all other great work, it looks strange at first
sight. All art that does not is mere platitude in plastic form.’
One queries the propriety of being at once so realistic and so ideal; we fret at the delicate
detail here, we revolt from the breadth of treatment there. In one breath we say the Queen
cannot be so plain, in another that we are sure that she was never so dignified.28

The combinations of qualities Quilter which found strange, the realistic combined with
the ideal, delicacy and breadth of treatment, plainness and great dignity, perhaps suggest
that Gilbert had captured the many distinct yet inseparable facets of the Queen’s public
persona. Equally, the distinct, but here inseparable categories of portrait and monument
are fused together. The critics were confused. They realised that Gilbert had tried to
incorporate portraiture and monument into one sculpture, to combine real and naturalistic
likeness with fantastic ornament and inventive allegory. It was this odd combination of
portraiture, a portrayal of an individual woman, and the abstract characterisation of a
queen that engendered the anxiety that the monument was distinctly unsculptural.
26
Getsy here quotes Gilbert speaking on The Enchanted Chair, Body Doubles, 117.
27
Phillips, ‘Sculpture at the Royal Academy’, 367-8.
28
Quilter, ‘The Royal Academy’, 63.
 The monumental scale of the statue would seem to preclude the more intimate
viewing conditions usually associated with portraiture, however, several critics remarked
that the Memorial was remarkably like the Queen. An article published in the Newcastle
Daily Journal (a replica of the Winchester memorial was erected in Newcastle in 1903)
conveys the combination of monument and portraiture:
Mr. Gilbert, the artist in this case, has been on the whole very successful and the statue is
at once dignified and pleasing. If it be admitted that female figures in sculpture always
look best when the subject is represented as young, or in the prime of life, still this statue
will recall to those who gaze up at it the great Queen as she was known to the present
generation, and as she was in the summit of her glorious career.29

The writer maintains that the faithful, naturalistic portrait of the Queen is rendered
dignified and pleasing by the monumentality-the viewer is required to gaze up at the
monument-and thus the whole is a successful encapsulation of the Queen at the ‘summit
of her glorious career.
Gilbert’s representation of the Queen is highly realistic. The Queen’s face and profile are
relatively straightforward and unadorned and as a result are the clearest to read. This is
ironic considering that the Queen did not sit for Gilbert, in fact she only became aware of
the work after its completion. Instead Gilbert modelled the Queen’s face from
photographs. It was the sculptor’s mother who posed for him in the robes of state.30
Gilbert told Isabel McAllister that he had satisfied the Queen and the Royal Family by
‘realising the same attributes of character and motherhood I found in my mother, and thus
got a more spiritual representation than if I had merely reproduced the Queen’s features
and form only.’31

It seems likely that Gilbert took Queen’s likeness and the details of her dress from
official cabinet photographs released in celebration of the Golden Jubilee, such as those
29
Newcastle Daily Journal, 25 April, 1903, quoted in Cecil Gilbert, The Studio Diaries of Alfred Gilbert
for 1900 and 1901, (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cecil Gilbert, 1900), 4.
30 Adrian Bury, Shadow of Eros: A Biographical and Critical Study of the Life and Works of Sir Alfred

Gilbert, R.A., M.V.O., D.C. I., (London: Macdonald and Evans, Ltd., 1954), 10.
31
McAllister, Alfred Gilbert, 126.
taken by Alexander Bassano (1827-1913). Bassano’s photographs were taken in 1882 but
were re-released in 1887 as an official Jubilee photographic portrait of the Queen.

As in Bassano’s photograph, Gilbert shows the Queen wearing a short sleeved, full-
length black silk dress with lace overlaid around the neck and sleeves. On top of her head
Victoria wears her ‘widow’s cap’, made of ruffled tulle, drawn together to form a thick
wedge of fabric. On top of this cap is a small and delicate crown, perched upon the
Queen’s head as if it were slightly too small. The dress is perhaps based on the dress she
wore to Prince Leopold’s wedding in 1882.32 The neckline of the dress is low and
emphasizes the broadness of the Queen’s chest. Gilbert has deviated here from the
photographs by creating crumpled and gathered forms in bronze and which stand proud
from the dress beneath rather than lying flat as the lace does in the photographs. The
Kohinoor diamond, which was set in a brooch after it was shown at the Great Exhibition,
is holding the layers of lace in place. The highly textured patterned surface of the skirt
could represent a further lace overlay. As in the official photograph, the Queen has the
Garter Ribbon attached to her shoulder. Due to her seated position, the bodice of the
dress is crumpled and corrugated in the middle and pulled tightly over the abdomen.

The skirt falls over Victoria’s lap and legs in heavy, stiff folds. The patterning of the
bronze, made to look like silk brocade, is disrupted by these folds, which stand proud
from the body in some places and are crumpled and crushed by the bulk of the mantle in
others. The mantle completely fills the space between her back and the back of the
throne. This is seen to an even more extreme degree in a wax sketch model for the Jubilee
Memorial to Queen Victoria, now in Birmingham City Art Gallery. In the model the
relatively miniature figure is entirely overwhelmed by the drapery. Dorment argues that
Gilbert corrects this in the full-scale monument by increasing the size of the figure and
lightening the mass of bronze, instead focusing on the numerous decorative parts.33

In the full size monument, the mantle is draped over the throne rather than being
32
Kay Staniland, In Royal Fashion: The Clothes of Princess Charlotte of Wales & Queen Victoria,
(London: Museum of London, 1997), 170.
33
Dorment, Alfred Gilbert, (1986), 128.
comfortingly wrapped around the Queen’s body. It spills over the edges of the throne and
onto the socle. On the left side, the mantle is folded towards Victoria’s body. It curls
around her left arm, standing up stiffly before opening out and folding again. The curved
and folded shape of the sculpted fabric echoes the folded shape of the Queen’s seated
body. On the right hand side the mantle is unfolded and lies away from the body, leaving
the right arm exposed. The mantle meets in a whorl of fabric just above Victoria’s right
shoulder. From here the tightly folded fabric falls straight down to the floor. The fabric
on the right hand side of the body is has far less volume and appears to be less protective,
almost seeming to collapse in on itself. The crumpled and collapsing nature of the mantle
is echoed in the large floor cushion, which is squashed and compressed under Victoria’s
feet.
Gilbert has not chosen to manipulate the folds in order to highlight and reveal the figure
beneath, but rather has allowed the mantle and dress to completely obscure Victoria’s
body. The exaggerated effects of gravity, and the folds this produces, seem to take
precedence over the expression of the human form. The realism of the Queen’s face is
contrasted with and subsumed by the fantastic arrangement of sculpted fabric. While this
contrast could be read as a binary discontinuity between body and fabric, it can also be
understood in the more fluid terms of the fold.

Deleuze begins The Fold by stating that, ‘the Baroque differentiates its folds in two ways,
by moving along two infinities, as if infinity were composed of two stages or floors: the
pleats of matter and the folds in the soul.’34 These two levels are connected in an upward
continuity, the pleats of matter surrounding and enveloping the soul.35
Leibniz constructs a great Baroque montage that moves between the lower floor, pierced
with windows, and the upper floor, blind and closed, but on the other hand, resonating as
if it were a musical salon translating the visible movements below into sounds up above.36
Becoming or coming into consciousness depends on the resonance and translation
between these two floors, between the pleats of matter and the folds in the soul.

34
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Tom Conley (trans.), (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), 3.
35
Deleuze, The Fold, 4.
36
Deleuze, The Fold, 4.
 In Discourse on Method, published in 1637, Descartes divides ideas into four
categories, obscure, confused, clear and distinct. Obscure and confused ideas were
attributed to the faculties of sense or to the passions, whereas clear and distinct ideas
were attributed to reason. According to Descartes, only clear and distinct ideas were true,
because as long as an idea remains obscure or confusing it contains falsity and therefore
has no value to thinking and knowledge. Leibniz contested and revised these categories.
He argued that confusion and obscurity were not nothing, but only fall beneath the
threshold of attention and therefore escape our conscious notice. Obscurity and
confusion are not separable from clarity and distinction, nor can they be placed beneath
them in a hierarchical relationship. Rather, there is a constant movement in and out of
clarity and obscurity, which produces an infinite number of folds. As Leibniz states:
The division of the continuous must not be taken as of sand dividing into grains, but as
that of a sheet of paper or a tunic in folds, in such a way that an infinite number of folds
can be produced, some smaller than others but without the body ever dissolving into
points or minima.37
Leibniz and Deleuze’snotion of the fold and understanding of perception provides a way
of thinking of difference without entailing separation. 38

The folds of the mantle and the dress, which confuse and obscure our reading of
Victoria’s body can be labelled as matter or ground, where as the portrait head can be
labelled as image or knowledge. The ground is the basis for the image and as Deleuze
says, there is an upward continuity between the two. The eye meets the folds of the skirt
and mantle before travelling up to the naturalistic head. The relation between ground and
image is not deterministic; the ground is not the base for the substructure of the image.
Rather than a striated, external relation between the folds of the dress and the mantle and
the portrait of Victoria, there is fluid and spontaneous movement between them. This is
emblematic of the organisation of matter into knowledge in The Fold and as it was
understood in the late nineteenth century. As psychologists and physiologists probed
deeper into the study of attention and consciousness, the clearer it became that ‘attention’
contained within itself the conditions for its own undoing, and was in fact continuous
37
Deleuze quoting Leibniz, The Fold, 6.
38
Kaiser, ‘Two Floors of Thinking’, 209-212.
with states of distraction, reverie, dissociation and trance.39 If the portrait of Victoria can
be seen to represent that which is above the threshold of attention and consciousness then
the folds of the mantle and the dress, which threaten to overwhelm the face and body, can
be seen as the perceptions below this threshold, which constantly threaten to unfold the
organisation of thought and knowledge that has taken place.

The fold seems to be a recurrent and significant formal device in Gilbert’s work. Here I
have offered a reading of the fold in Gilbert’s sculpture through Deleuze’s notion of the
fold. The two infinities of the fold, the pleats in the matter and the folds of the soul, in the
inseparable distinctness, are useful to reading of Gilbert’s work as representative of the
late nineteenth-century understanding of subjectivity. The notion of experience, as Pater
wrote, was reduced to a shifting and fluid ‘group of impressions…ringed round for each
one of us by a thick wall of personality.’40

39
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 45-6.
40
Pater, ‘Conclusion,’, 151.