Just when you thought royal statuary could get no worse – see, most recently, this – along comes another abomination. In case you're wondering – and you might well be – the couple pictured above are intended to represent Elizabeth II and her consort, the Duke of Edinburgh. The double statue was commissioned as a memorial to the late Queen and erected in Antrim Castle Gardens in County Antrim. As an Antrim councillor confessed to BBC News, 'We have to be honest, it does not resemble the Queen in any shape or form.' And talking of shape and form, the bodies attached (in a decidedly unnatural manner) to these bizarre heads seem to be articulated in some manner quite unrelated to human anatomy as commonly understood. And the statue stands not on a plinth, or even on the ground, but on a meagre stone slab set in a flower bed. As a result, the Queen and Duke look like two people of restricted growth who have somehow got lost in the flower garden and strayed off the path. The expression of complete imbecility on the Queen's face only reinforces the impression; the Duke is perhaps right to look worried. Even the corgis don't look right... You can read the full story, told in typically exhaustive style, on the BBC News website – link here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyl0xnrynzo
Thanks for a good laugh on a cold wet morning . Anna
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome, Anna.
DeleteDid the commissioning body have a Sinn Fein majority?
ReplyDeleteBernard Berenson distinguished between portraits, which he said the English did badly, and effigies, which he said they did well. But somewhere about the middle of the last century, the English lost the knack for effigies--compare the statue of Field Marshal Slim along Whitehall to the statues of the mediocrities of WW I nearby.
I'll add that the Americans are no better, and have also lost the knack for monuments and memorials. The monuments to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Franklin D. Roosevelt are pretty bad. The WW II Memorial is a handsome space, but makes no particular sense.
Thanks George. The answer to your question is probably yes. And you're surely right about a quite general decline in the quality of public statuary, especially when it's attempting something like grandeur. When ambitions are lower, good work is sometimes done, e.g. the John Betjeman statue at St Pancras and the Philip Larkin statue in Hull. I guess there is still hope...
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