Private
Collection
Collection
Charles Sargeant Jagger
(1885 - 1934)
Design with starfish
Private Collection
Charles Sargeant Jagger (1885 - 1934)
Signed
bronze with dark patina on wooden base, height (excluding base) 15 3/4 in. (40 cm.)
Size:
Height – 0cm
Width – cm
Exhibited: London, The Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, The Charles Sargeant Jagger Memorial Exhibition, 21 May-20 June 1935, no. 14, illustrated p. 16, for sale at 50 gns, touring to Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, Lincoln, Wakefield, Halifax, Dunfermline, Rochdale, Perth, Hull, Doncaster and Stockport; Halifax, Bankfield Museum, The Art of the Jagger Family, 26 August-23 September, 1939-1940, no 3 (another cast), touring to Burton, Darlington, Lincolm, Rotherham and Sunderland; London, Imperial War Museum, Charles Sargeant Jagger War and Peace Sculpture Centenary Exhibition 1885- 1985, 1 May-29 september 1985 (another cast); Sheffield, Mappin Art Gallery, charles Sargeant Jagger, 19 October-30 November 1985, no. 40 (another cast)
Literature: Ann Compton, The Sculpture of Charles Sargeant Jagger, the Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, 2004, no. 75, p.126
Conceived in 1928-9, the present work is a cast of the working model for the monumental Portland stone figure for Imperial Chemica House, Millbank. The working model was cast in an adition of two, in 1935, with one further cast taken in 1937.
Unlike Marine Transport, which was accpeted virtually unchanged for the final sculpture, Chemistry underwent various changes before its final state. The original concept was for the figure to be prising open the harnd representing Nature to reveal its bounty, whilst in the present work we see this changed to a gentler process of mutual respect between the laboratory coat clad figure and the hand of Nature.
British sculptor. He was a highly regarded student at the Royal College of Art, London (1908’11), whose early sculpture showed a fanciful treatment of classical and literary themes. In 1914 he gave up the Prix de Rome to enlist in the army. He began work on No Man’s Land (1919’20; London, Tate) while still convalescing from war wounds. This low relief presents a stark vision of trench warfare. Corpses stranded on barbed wire are ranged across a ravaged landscape, while the solitary live figure of the look-out in the foreground, a surrogate for the spectator, uses them for cover. Jagger attempted to maintain such realism in commissioned war memorials, most successfully in the Royal Artillery memorial (1921’5; London, Hyde Park Corner; see Monument, public, fig. 4). His obsessive concern for detail, shared by the regimental committee who commissioned the work, reached its zenith in the stone replica of a howitzer, which surmounts his vivid representation of war as hard and dangerous labour. Although he remained in demand as a sculptor of monuments, it is for his war memorials that he is chiefly remembered. He received a Military Cross in World War I and was made an ARA in 1926.
