Thomas Brock: Forgotten Sculptor of the Victoria Memorial

Frederick Brock, edited by John Sankey, Thomas Brock: Forgotten Sculptor of the Victoria Memorial Bloomington IN, Author House, 2012, 187 pp., $56.45, £23. ISBN 1-800-839-8640In 1986 the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired an undated and at the time anonymous typescript of the life of Sir Thomas Brock (1847-1922), whose text provides the foundation for this publication. In the course of his doctoral studies on Brock, the eventual editor, John Sankey, not only made good use of this resource but also established from a giveaway reference that the author was the sculptor's son Frederick (1880-1940). Although little is known about Frederick Brock, the lively and intelligent text makes it no surprise to learn that he was a published author with a clutch of novels to his credit. Why he abandoned the typescript in such a relatively polished state remains a mystery. The tone throughout is loyal, loving and, as Marjorie Trusted states in her foreword, 'adulatory', but never is it gushing or mawkish. Frederick Brock writes from the benefit of a lifetime's experience about his father's style, techniques, commissions, clientele and critics, adding insightful anecdotes in the process. The epicentre is Brock's studio in Osnaburgh Street, near Great Portland Street underground station (originally Portland Road), where he worked 'almost from the day of his arrival in London [1866] to within a fortnight of his death', aged 75 in 1922. There Brock produced an immense oeuvre of sculpture - totalling over 200 commissions according to Sankey's research findings - but this is to count immense multi-figure projects such as the completion of the Daniel O'Connell monument in O'Connell Street, Dublin (1866-82) and the Queen Victoria Memorial in The Mall, London (1901-24) as just one work each.Frederick Brock's probable motive for writing the biography was not so much filial piety as a desire to record and rehabilitate his father's reputation, which was already in decline by the later 1920s. It had still further to fall. When the belated opportunity came to redeem it, Susan Beattie delivered the killer blow in The New Sculpture (1983) when she dubbed Brock 'the great plagiarist' of that movement, quoting with apparent approval the Architectural Review's description of the Victoria Memorial as 'a mausoleum for the reputation of the sculptor'.1 This biography demands that the reader reconsider these views, and it is a tribute to Frederick Brock's advocacy, as well of course as his father's sculpture, that it is ultimately so persuasive. Brock's achievement is arguably a more impressive, climactic one than that of his contemporary Hamo Thornycroft, an infinitely more consistent one than that of Alfred Gilbert, a less 'crafty' one than that of George Frampton and, due to his longevity, a more sustained one than those of Edward Onslow Ford and Harry Bates. Specialist scholars post-dating Beattie such as David Getsy and Jason Edwards have not yet done Brock justice; the former perhaps because of the difficulty in shoehorning his work into a remotely convincing 'New Sculpture as Modernism' thesis, the latter because there is a telling dearth of the 'homocentric', let alone exquisite aestheticism, in either Brock's persona or performance.Indeed, there are no skeletons in the cupboard of this 'strong Conservative' family man. Brock's life, according to Frederick's first sentence, was 'a simple ... and considering the position to which he rose in the profession, a somewhat retired one'. The sculpture itself, whether early or late career, conveys Brock's aims and objectives immediately, unequivocally, intelli- gently and with utter confidence and competence. It allows the spectator less than fruitful scope either for Bloomsbury formalism or latter-day postcolonial handwringing. There is an aesthetic and iconographic end of argument rightness about it all, as the initially sceptical William Goscombe John acknowledged of the allegorical groups that Brock added to the corners of the Victoria Memorial. …