Nineteenth-Century Sculpture and the Imprint of Authenticity

This article revisits the idea of the centrality of the artist’s touch to nineteenth-century sculpture, examining how ideological shifts and technological advancements together imbued the sculptor's touch with unprecedented import. The pursuit of the sculptor’s touch escalated with the perception that sculpture was becoming divorced from sculptors’ hands, particularly as it seemed more inherently replicable than its sister art by virtue of its capacity to be recast. Equally, the desire for the preservation of the sculptor’s ostensibly authenticating touch persisted in parallel with, or in response to, the development of a series of machines which threatened to eradicate the human touch from what had long been characterized as a mechanical art. The nineteenth-century experience of sculpture was certainly mediated by the desire to get ‘very much nearer to the actual touch of the artist’, as Edmund Gosse termed it, and this article analyses how and why this was the case