Victorian sculpture continues to challenge us. Despite Victorian studies’ masterful readings of painting and photography, three-dimensionality demands alternative approaches to appreciate nineteenth-century sculptural aesthetics and its place in Victorian culture. The articles assembled in this issue offer innovative readings of a range of encounters with Victorian sculpture, including the role of classical statuary in Victorian women’s writing; the church sculpture of Nathaniel Hitch; Queen Victoria memorials in New Zealand; imperialism and Henry Hugh Armstead’s Outram Shield; the reflexive influence of Robert Browning’s poetic and sculptural methodologies; the photographic afterlives of Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave; and the influence of chronophotography and motion studies in the movement from neoclassical to modernist sculpture in nineteenth-century Britain. Exhibition curators provide reflections on ‘Curating Victorian Sculpture’ in the second section of the issue, offering new perspectives on sculptors Alfred Drury and John Tweed. The third section, ‘Reviewing “Sculpture Victorious”’, features reviews of each incarnation of the exhibition held at the Yale Center for British Art and at London’s Tate Britain, and David J. Getsy’s afterword considers ‘Victorian Sculpture for the Twenty-First Century’, highlighting the significance of this issue of 19 for the field.

Introduction

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Reading Victorian Sculpture

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Curating Victorian Sculpture

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Reviewing ‘Sculpture Victorious’

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Afterword

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