Go to Sleep
Copeland
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
1862 - 1865
Materials
Parian
Measurements
475 mm (H)230 mm (Diameter)
Place of origin
Stoke-on-Trent
Collection
Cragside, Northumberland
NT 1230989
Summary
Ceramic, Parian ware, Go to Sleep, after Joseph Durham (1814-1877), 1862-65. A young girl holding her dog in her arms and admonishing it to go to sleep. A Parian ware figure made by Copeland, offered as a prize in the years 1862, 1863, 1864 and 1865 by the Art Union of London, after a marble sculpture by Joseph Durham, exhibited in 1862 at the International Exhibition in London.
Full description
A figure of a young girl dressed in a simple shift, seated on a rock, holding on her lap her wriggling pet Skye terrier. With her right hand she admonishes the dog with the words ‘Go to sleep’, impressed on a ribbon on the ground before her left foot. On an integral circular base, stamped at front ‘ART UNION OF LONDON’. At the back, the Copeland stamp, the impressed ‘COPELAND’ mark in use from 1847 and up until c. 1958 (Robert Copeland, Spode and Copeland Marks, London 1993, p. 65, no. 202), and an unidentified date mark ‘A’ below an impressed cross. The original marble sculpture on which this reduction was based was commissioned from the sculptor by F. Bennoch and was shown in 1861 at the Royal Academy and then, in 1862, at the London International Exhibition. The blatantly sentimental subject was not entirely uncriticised even at the time of the sculpture’s making. In a report on the Royal Academy exhibition in the Daily News for 23 May 1861, the author wrote that ‘The Go to Sleep […] is a droll conceit very cleverly executed, but any attempt at the comic in marble is rather anomalous.’ Nevertheless the work evidently struck a chord with the public. In 1862 it was exhibited at the International Exhibition and was praised in the Illustrated London News in its supplement on the exhibition, ‘the execution of this little group is as fresh, pleasing and natural as the subject is quaint and original.’ (13 July 1862, p. 41; describing the subject as a boy, not a girl). The sculpture was chosen by the Art Union of London as one of its prizes for 1862, as well for the following years, 1863, 1864 and 1865. The Art Union has been described as ‘one of the most remarkable artistic phenomena of the nineteenth century’ (Elizabeth Aslin, ‘The Rise and Progress of the Art Union of London’, Apollo, 85 (January 1967), pp. 12-16, p. 12). Founded in 1836, it was a subscribing lottery, prize-winners in which were able to use their winnings to purchase a work of art. The Union flourished in its early decades but entered a long decline from the 1870s, eventually closing in 1911. From an early date, the Union began to commission for its members editions of works of art - prints, medals and small bronze or Parian-ware reductions ‘of some celebrated group or piece of sculpture to a size fitted for a drawing room table.’, as a committee suggested in 1842. The aim was to create ‘a very efficient instrument in diffusing a taste and love for art in many a family circle.’ Parian ware was especially popular from the 1840s onwards as a medium for small-scale reproductions of sculpture. Parian is a ceramic material, somewhat like biscuit porcelain, that approximated to the appearance of marble, and indeed was regarded at the time as ‘scarcely inferior to marble as a material for art… The characteristic of the statuary porcelain is lustrous transparency, and in this it rivals the best specimens of alabaster.’ (Art Union Magazine, November 1846). Joseph Durham was much praised for his early work and his facility as a naturalistic sculptor, but the quality of his sculpture declined steeply in his later life, as he fell victim to drink. As a young man he worked in the studio of Edward Hodges Baily, before beginning from the mid-1830s to exhibit under his own name. Durham won the competition for a memorial to the 1851 Great Exhibition which, after the death of Prince Albert in 1861, was turned into a memorial to the Prince (Prince Consort Road, London). As well as larger monumental works, Durham also specialised in more intimate and homely subjects for domestic settings, Go to Sleep being a prime example. Jeremy Warren March 2022
Marks and inscriptions
In ribbon, on base:: GO TO SLEEP On back:: DURHAM. Sc/1862 COPYRIGHT RESERVED COPELAND and cross and A
Makers and roles
Copeland, manufacturer after Joseph Durham, ARA (London 1814 - London 1877), sculptor
References
Atterbury, 1989: Paul Atterbury &c, The Parian Phenomenon. A Survey of Victorian Parian Porcelain statuary and busts, Somerset, 1989, pp. 34, fig. 47, p. 142, fig. 495. Copeland 2007: Robert Copeland, Parian. Copeland’s Statuary Porcelain, Woodbridge 2007, pp. 76, 105, no. GP30. Roscoe 2009: I. Roscoe, E. Hardy and M. G. Sullivan, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660-1851, New Haven and Yale 2009, p. 390, no. 12.