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Alfred Drury and the New Sculpture

To what extent was Alfred Drury (1856-1944) a key figure in the New Sculpture of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods? How has the New Sculpture movement been interpreted?

In his 1894 article defining ‘the New Sculpture’, Edmund Gosse dismissed Drury as ‘a mannered Kensington student, somewhat under the influence of Dalou’. While Susan Beattie’s classic book of 1983 had reclaimed a more central role for Drury, in line with the views of other late Victorian critics like Alfred Lys Baldry and Marion Spielmann, he remained a neglected artist by comparison with contemporaries like Alfred Gilbert and George Frampton. This neglect necessitated primary research to establish the basic facts about Drury’s life and oeuvre; research supported by a grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies of British art, which paid for a campaign of archive visits in London, Leeds, Nottingham, Bradford, Sheffield and Bristol.

Drawing on the Drury family collection, and loans from other private collections, the exhibition displayed most of the major small-scale works by Drury, along with works by his teacher Dalou, and contemporaries Rodin and Leighton. Its installation was supported by an exhibition grant from the Henry Moore Foundation. A related display of Drury’s collection of Alfred Stevens drawings ran concurrently at the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge in Canterbury. The catalogue, supported by a grant from the Leeds Art Fund, presented original research on aspects of Drury’s art by leading scholars and included an article by Thomas presenting new findings concerning the artist’s public works. The Studio 3 Gallery exhibition was organized to coincide with an exhibition about Drury’s The Age of Innocence at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds; Thomas was an invited speaker at the international symposium on Drury held at the Institute in association with this exhibition (2013).