MAY/JUNE 2025
In 2021 Edinburgh decided to recognise suffragette and women’s medical campaigner, Dr Elsie Inglis (1864-1917), with a memorial on the magnificent Royal Mile. Among other things this would help redress, they said, the heavy imbalance in numbers between male and female statues in the capital city. Inglis is a worthy choice. She had an impressive career with lasting consequences in hospital provision for women, especially during maternity, and a distinguished record as a medic working in the Balkan sphere during the First World War, which arduous service contributed to her early death.
An open contest was announced and quickly abandoned with the commission awarded to Alexander Stoddart, an accomplished and serious Scottish sculptor with already five statues in Edinburgh including two, David Hume and Adam Smith, on the Royal Mile itself. Planning permission is now being sought with the project’s cost estimated at £300,000. There is no doubt that Stoddart is a sound choice and will make an imposing, lasting memorial which also functions as a work of sculptural art – this can’t be said for most statues in these days when ‘Public Art’ is reduced to maudlin light entertainment or is doomed from the outset by box-ticking quotas.
The choice of Stoddart (his preliminary idea is illustrated here) has not gone down well. He is a controversial figure with views on contemporary culture which set him at odds with State Art and its robotic, social engineering apostles. The main problem advanced by opponents is that he is a male sculptor and the subject is female. How pathetic, you might think, but these days this men-for-men, women-for-women, colour-for-colour attitude has assumed an irrational significance which too often ignores ability. The ‘modern woman’ seems to believe she enjoys copyright over all aspects of women in history. Some in this campaign called for “a child-friendly design”. Why should an important memorial be aimed at a child? Children are an irrelevance when considering art; if they mature and are educated to be sufficiently interested in artistic affairs they’ll catch up later.
The decision was denounced with special vigour by one Natasha Phoenix as “anti-feminist”. She also claims Stoddart should be excluded because “he has no links to feminism or to Inglis”. Not many can have ‘links’ to Inglis not least because she died 108 years ago. Phoenix calls herself “a feminist sculptor” and falls into the trap of presuming to know what Inglis herself would have thought because she happens to share the same gender. She makes portrait heads which, when they are not unexceptional as likenesses, are at best average for the genre. Additionally, she is miffed that she spent many hours working on her own submission. “It’s incredibly important”, she insists, “that women’s stories are told through the female gaze. When men create sculptures of women, they often portray them through the patriarchal lens, whether intentionally or not.” It would have been instructive here for her to have cited an example or two of sculptures reduced in impact by the sculptor’s ‘patriarchal gaze’ so we knew exactly what she meant. You don’t have to be a woman to recognise the distinction and contribution of Elsie Inglis.
Let us take two well-known examples among London’s sculptures in which male artists depict eminent women. Where does ‘the patriarchal gaze’ affect, for example, George Frampton’s memorial figure opposite the National Portrait Gallery of reforming nurse and heroine Edith Cavell (1865-1915). I can’t think of any more dignified, defiant female figure in all of 20th century British sculpture … the surrounding pile of granite bombast is another matter. Every time I walk past this carving it moves me as I recognise its simple beauty and remember Cavell’s astounding courage. In Victoria Tower Gardens, appropriately hard by the Houses of Parliament, stands Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) arguing her justified cause without histrionics. Unveiled in 1930, it was the work of Arthur George Walker (1861-1939) who also produced the bronze of Florence Nightingale for Waterloo Place, that enclave of impressive sculptures. Compare this to the statue by Hazel Reeves of the same Emmeline unveiled in 2018 in Manchester’s St Peter’s Square (the Pankhursts were a Salford family), where the small figure stands on a chair and harangues an invisible audience. The one commands with gravity the other screeches for attention: I don’t believe this can be claimed a triumph for ‘the matriarchal gaze’ over the patriarchal one.
Cavell and Pankhurst are memorials to individuals who contributed significant public benefits. Are they less revered for having been sculpted by men? I can’t imagine how they might be improved, unless Lysippos were miraculously reincarnated. Would these works feel so different if sculpted by a woman? I don’t believe so. And is the recent addition to Parliament Square of Millicent Fawcett by conceptual artist Gillian Wearing really better for having been ‘designed’ (!) by a woman, even though blokes at Pinewood Studios, where it was made, might have actually been involved in making it? For ‘the matriarchal gaze’ here read computer-scanned, nerveless, sloganising and dead weight … subtle as Trump.
When we refuse to select sculptors on artistic grounds but by silly gender prejudice we lower the bar and end up with what has happened, the proliferation of insulting, third-rate trash – a plethora of toys, ornaments, sentimental slop and that scourge of modern towns, the colourful animal ‘sculpture trail’.