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Maker(s):Leighton, Frederic, 1st Baron Leighton of Stretton
Culture:British (1830-1896)
Title:The Sluggard
Date Made:1882 model; 1890 cast
Type:Sculpture
Materials:Bronze
Place Made:Europe; United Kingdom; Great Britain; England; London
Measurements:Overall: 20 5/8 in x 9 in x 6 1/2 in; 52.4 cm x 22.9 cm x 16.5 cm; Base: 1 1/2 in x 5 7/8 in x 6 1/2 in; 3.8 cm x 14.9 cm x 16.5 cm
Accession Number:  MH 1985.4
Credit Line:Purchase with the Warbeke Art Museum Fund
Museum Collection:  Mount Holyoke College Art Museum
mh_1985_4_v1.jpg

Description:
Statuette of a standing nude male figure in contrapposto, stretching his bent arms as if awakening from sleep

Label Text:
Already a renowned painter, Frederic Leighton became an influential sculptor almost by accident. Like many other 19th-century painters, he sculpted small clay figurines to aid him in his paintings. One of these studies, Athlete Wrestling with a Python, was enlarged to life-size and exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1877, gaining him recognition as a sculptor. The Sluggard in this exhibition relates to Leighton’s second life-size sculpture (1886, Tate Britain, London), and is one of the numerous bronze statuettes cast from his preparatory sketch-model. If the Athlete shows a powerful Olympian hero at work, The Sluggard suggests languor, sensuality, and passivity. Both works quickly became a clarion call for the “New Sculpture” in England, a stylistically diverse movement marked by innovative reconsiderations of classical sculpture.

-Robert Chesnut (Class of 2016), University of Massachusetts Amherst
A Very Long Engagement: Nineteenth-Century Sculpture and Its Afterlives (July 29, 2017 - May 27, 2018)

Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=MH+1985.4

Research on objects in the collections, including provenance, is ongoing and may be incomplete. If you have additional information or would like to learn more about a particular object, please email fc-museums-web@fivecolleges.edu.

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