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Lot Essay
First exhibited in plaster at the Royal Academy in 1898, Eve was an immediate success. The Times considered it to be the finest statue Brock had produced. Brock’s first statue of an undraped female figure, Eve is the perfect embodiment of the principles of New Sculpture. Benedict Read notes that the New Sculpture’s concern with the ‘detailed modelling of the flesh’ offered an irresistible temptation for a display of nudity and Jeremy Cooper comments that Eve succeeds in fashioning ‘that delicious combination of naturalism and spirituality found at the core of the New Sculpture’. Eve is not the temptress, but abashed with head bowed and arm placed protectively across her chest. Marion Spielmann saw not the conventional voluptuous rendering of the ‘First Mother’, but ‘one of ourselves in figure and nature.’
Shortly before he died in 1899, Sir Henry Tate purchased a lifesize (5 ft. 7 in. high) version in marble for the newly founded Tate Gallery (then known as the National Gallery of British Art). Eve was later shown at the Paris Exhibition in 1900 (where Brock was awarded with a Grand Prix d’Honneur), Glasgow (Kelvingrove) in 1901, Edinburgh (Royal Scottish Academy) in 1903, St. Louis Exhibition in 1904, and Dublin (Irish International Exhibition) in 1907.
The present lot is a very fine English lost wax cast and one of a small number of half size (89 cm. high approximately) reductions cast in bronze under Brock’s supervision. Another is in the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston. Brock also had a number of smaller replicas (probably 40.6 cm. high) made for friends including Rudyard Kipling, who wrote ‘It is splendid… I am taking it down to my home where it will be a chief treasure for me and my children.’
Shortly before he died in 1899, Sir Henry Tate purchased a lifesize (5 ft. 7 in. high) version in marble for the newly founded Tate Gallery (then known as the National Gallery of British Art). Eve was later shown at the Paris Exhibition in 1900 (where Brock was awarded with a Grand Prix d’Honneur), Glasgow (Kelvingrove) in 1901, Edinburgh (Royal Scottish Academy) in 1903, St. Louis Exhibition in 1904, and Dublin (Irish International Exhibition) in 1907.
The present lot is a very fine English lost wax cast and one of a small number of half size (89 cm. high approximately) reductions cast in bronze under Brock’s supervision. Another is in the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston. Brock also had a number of smaller replicas (probably 40.6 cm. high) made for friends including Rudyard Kipling, who wrote ‘It is splendid… I am taking it down to my home where it will be a chief treasure for me and my children.’