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Lot Essay
In 1977, as Britain marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession, Lynn Chadwick began giving the title Jubilee to his pairs of striding, cloaked figures, a name that, as Michael Bird notes, ‘also acknowledges the work’s stagey, ceremonial nature’ (M. Bird, Lynn Chadwick, Farnham, 2014, p. 150). Conceived in 1984, Maquette III Jubilee III returns to this celebrated theme. A man and a woman advance side by side, their cloaks swept out behind them, as though moving together in a procession whose occasion remains just out of view.
Chadwick had explored the coupled figure since the 1950s, developing over the following decades a distinctive visual code in which a cube denotes the male head and a pyramid the female. The choice was a matter of balance as much as of identity: ‘I made the female head a pyramid so that the tip of the pyramid was just slightly higher than the male one, but the mass of the female one was slightly lower than the head of the male, so as to balance it not only from the point of view of gender but from the point of view of masses’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in E. Lucie-Smith, Chadwick, Stroud, 1997, p. 98). In the present work, that balance extends to the bodies themselves: where the male figure is broad and angular, its torso divided by a vertical split that reads as the opening of a garment, the female figure is softer and more rounded, its gently rounded form giving way to the sharper geometry of the legs beneath.
From the mid-1970s, Chadwick began to clothe his striding figures in billowing cloaks, which quickly became among the most expressive features of his sculpture. Here, the drapery fans out in crisp, faceted planes, the only sign of a wind that otherwise goes unseen, and yet it lends the pair a powerful sense of forward motion. As Lucie-Smith observed, these figures seem to generate their own atmosphere: ‘where they are it is always windy, however still the weather’ (op. cit., p. 111), a quality that sets them apart from their surroundings rather than allowing them to merge with them. The cloaks also serve a structural purpose, carrying the weight of the bronze outwards and away from the slender legs, so that form and function are held in careful equilibrium.
Chadwick’s figures, poised between stillness and motion, recall the work of two of his most celebrated predecessors, in whose sculptures the human figure carries a quiet resolve. Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, commissioned exactly a century earlier, in 1884, shows heavily robed figures moving forward with grave, ceremonial purpose, while Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man (1960) reduces the human stride to its barest essentials. Chadwick brings these qualities together, yet translates them into his own geometric language, reducing the human head to a cube and a pyramid while the cloaks take on a sweeping life of their own.
Small sculptures such as this one would lead towards the monumental Jubilee IV of 1985, yet the maquette possesses an intimacy of its own. As Rungwe Kingdon, whose Pangolin foundry cast much of Chadwick’s later work, has written, ‘in their dignity and self-contained understated energy, Chadwick’s couples are a unique expression of the most fundamental human unit and a reminder of our most intimate and trusting moments’ (quoted in exhibition catalogue, Lynn Chadwick: The Couple, Pangolin, London, 2011). Few works in Chadwick’s oeuvre express that idea more eloquently than the Jubilee figures, of which the present maquette is a particularly accomplished example.
Chadwick had explored the coupled figure since the 1950s, developing over the following decades a distinctive visual code in which a cube denotes the male head and a pyramid the female. The choice was a matter of balance as much as of identity: ‘I made the female head a pyramid so that the tip of the pyramid was just slightly higher than the male one, but the mass of the female one was slightly lower than the head of the male, so as to balance it not only from the point of view of gender but from the point of view of masses’ (L. Chadwick, quoted in E. Lucie-Smith, Chadwick, Stroud, 1997, p. 98). In the present work, that balance extends to the bodies themselves: where the male figure is broad and angular, its torso divided by a vertical split that reads as the opening of a garment, the female figure is softer and more rounded, its gently rounded form giving way to the sharper geometry of the legs beneath.
From the mid-1970s, Chadwick began to clothe his striding figures in billowing cloaks, which quickly became among the most expressive features of his sculpture. Here, the drapery fans out in crisp, faceted planes, the only sign of a wind that otherwise goes unseen, and yet it lends the pair a powerful sense of forward motion. As Lucie-Smith observed, these figures seem to generate their own atmosphere: ‘where they are it is always windy, however still the weather’ (op. cit., p. 111), a quality that sets them apart from their surroundings rather than allowing them to merge with them. The cloaks also serve a structural purpose, carrying the weight of the bronze outwards and away from the slender legs, so that form and function are held in careful equilibrium.
Chadwick’s figures, poised between stillness and motion, recall the work of two of his most celebrated predecessors, in whose sculptures the human figure carries a quiet resolve. Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, commissioned exactly a century earlier, in 1884, shows heavily robed figures moving forward with grave, ceremonial purpose, while Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man (1960) reduces the human stride to its barest essentials. Chadwick brings these qualities together, yet translates them into his own geometric language, reducing the human head to a cube and a pyramid while the cloaks take on a sweeping life of their own.
Small sculptures such as this one would lead towards the monumental Jubilee IV of 1985, yet the maquette possesses an intimacy of its own. As Rungwe Kingdon, whose Pangolin foundry cast much of Chadwick’s later work, has written, ‘in their dignity and self-contained understated energy, Chadwick’s couples are a unique expression of the most fundamental human unit and a reminder of our most intimate and trusting moments’ (quoted in exhibition catalogue, Lynn Chadwick: The Couple, Pangolin, London, 2011). Few works in Chadwick’s oeuvre express that idea more eloquently than the Jubilee figures, of which the present maquette is a particularly accomplished example.