Chapter 5 explores the controversy caused by the Palace’s exhibition of nude sculpture. It unpicks Owen Jones’s claims for Greek sculpture’s moral imperative through writings on beauty, morality, and art from Plato and J. J. Winckelmann, to nineteenth-century archaeologists. The chapter examines hostilities to the display of unclothed classical sculpture to the Palace’s new mass audience—especially its polychrome experiments—in the contexts of the artistic and social history of the nude, and Victorian ideas about class, gender, sexuality, and obscenity, to suggest why critics were so preoccupied with the displays of unclothed male bodies rather than the female nude. It offers an analysis of Greek sculpture in mid-century evangelical culture, and as it featured in ‘muscular Christianity’, showing the diversity of Victorian religious responses to ‘heathen’ sculpture.

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This book examines the debates that arose around the presentation of classical plaster casts to a mass audience at the Sydenham Crystal Palace, in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. It uncovers the social, political, and aesthetic role of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture in Victorian and Edwardian culture, assessing how classical art and architecture figured in debates over design reform, taste, beauty and morality, race and imperialism. A study in classical reception, it draws on diaries, autobiographies, scrapbooks, and pamphlets to analyse audience responses to classical sculpture, and to suggest how these responses figured in contemporary popular and scholarly understandings of the Greek and Roman past. It demonstrates the vital life of classical sculpture for audiences beyond the Royal Academy, high art criticism, the Country House, and the University, and suggests that other less ‘academic’ locations ought to be taken seriously as chapters in the history of archaeology. Focusing on the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, it provides the first in-depth analysis of this popular entertainment venue in South London. This ephemeral, now vanished edifice offers an alternative history of museums to the received vision of order, chronology, and permanence typified by the British Museum. Foregrounding the close connection between entertainment and education at the Palace demonstrates a much longer history of the commercial ‘heritage industry’ usually associated with the 1980s.

Amongst its cargo of dried fruit, herrings and hams, printed cambrics and sateens, 'fashionable London-made jewellery' , and 'stylish Winter jackets' , was a very carefully parcelled up oil painting titled Anguish (plate 1). 2 Painted in France by the Danish artist August Friedrich Albrecht Schenck, and first shown at the Paris Salon in 1878, Anguish depicts a ewe defending her dead lamb from a circle of predatory crows. The National Gallery of Victoria's (NGV) London-based art adviser, Alfred Taddy Thomson, had purchased the painting on behalf of the Gallery, and regarded it as particularly appropriate for colonial viewers. The painting rapidly became a hugely popular image; in 1906, it was voted one of the top five most beloved in the collection, and it remains popular today. 3 This article explores how Thomson's ability to purchase Anguish, his choice of this particular painting and the excitement surrounding its display in 1880s Melbourne, relate to the violent dispossession of Aboriginal people in colonial Victoria. 4 The acquisition and reception of Anguish, I propose, provides a stimulus to rethink approaches to histories of settler colonial art galleries.The collection and display of European painting and sculpture has occupied a marginal role in recent scholarship exploring the relationships between both museums and imperialism, and visual culture and imperialism. 5 Histories of art galleries founded in colonies of white settlement tended to situate these institutions as (often failed) attempts to replicate metropolitan models in colonial settings. More recent research has drawn on post-colonial approaches to explore the impact of local colonial contexts on the formation of museums and art galleries (such as, for example, the desire to develop a new national art form), presenting settler colonial art galleries as hybridized institutions. 6 These newer histories of settler colonial art galleries have not, however, explored the role played by sovereign Indigenous peoples in the creation of these local colonial contexts. Building on the work of art historians and anthropologists who have emphasized the entanglement of settler with Indigenous cultural production, I first offer a new history of the NGV that centres Aboriginal presences. 7 The remainder of the article focuses on the acquisition of Anguish, exploring the ways in which colonial frontier violence underpinned the formation of the NGV's collections. The reception of Anguish in 1880s Melbourne reveals the way in which a painting of a sheep resonanted with and consolidated emerging ideas about white identity. A different image of the NGV emerges: not a flawed clone of the National Gallery in London, mediated exclusively by white settler Australians, but inseparable in its origins from Aboriginal Melbourne, imbricated in frontier violence, and contributing to white Australian identities.

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