The Design of the Monument
After the political tumult that had produced the motion for a monument, it was another three years before the process began of executing the artwork that commemorated Dundas. Four sculptors were invited to submit designs in the summer of 1798. They were the four leading sculptors of the day, John Flaxman and Thomas Banks, the most respected and senior neoclassical sculptors, JCF Rossi, one of a younger generation of committed intellectual classicists, and John Bacon Sr, easily the most commercially successful of the competitors. Bacon had recently completed statues of John Howard and Samuel Johnson for St Paul’s.
All four were members of the Royal Academy, which had played an important role in persuading St Paul’s to admit sculpture, and the institution had some measure of oversight in the design of the monuments to Howard and Johnson. The Academy, under its president Benjamin West, expected to have a decisive role in choosing the designs for these monuments, too, and the Secretary to the Treasury, Charles Long, seems to have informally assented to this at a Royal Academy dinner in 1796. The Royal Academy, indeed, formed a committee to deal with monuments, consisting of Banks and Bacon Sr along with the history painter James Barry, the architects Dance and Wyatt, and the book illustrator and history painter Robert Smirke. John Bacon Jr later recalled this committee working in conjunction with two Members of Parliament to determine the placement of monuments in St Paul’s.
In the event, though, the monument competition was organised and run by the Treasury, and the successful design chosen by the King. The Dundas design was chosen at the same time as the St Paul’s monument to Captain Faulknor, and the recently voted monument to Captain Richard Rundle Burges, who had died at the Battle of Camperdown under Admiral Duncan in 1797. A monument to James Harvey and William Hutt, who died under Admiral Howe at the Battle of the Glorious First of June in 1794, was also chosen at the same time.
The brief for the sculptors was simply that of the parliamentary motion, to commemorate Dundas’s ‘eminent services rendered his country particularly in the reduction of the French West India Islands which occasioned a gross insult to his remains in the Island of Guadeloupe’ (The National Archives, MPD 1/78). Bacon Sr, Banks and Rossi delivered a drawing, and Flaxman two models. Banks offered to carry out the monument for £5250, Rossi for £3675, whilst Flaxman offered a choice of a freestanding monument for £5040, or a wall monument for £4725. Bacon, who was perhaps the only sculptor whose workload was big enough to be able to slice off his own profits, offered the cheapest estimate of £3150. Flaxman’s design (untraced) seems from the textual description to have seized upon the visual possibilities offered by the West Indian context:
A Maj Gen Dundas, for an insulated situation in St Paul’s Cathedral – the principal figure to be 7ft 8ins high, the whole height of the monument to be nearly 25 feet; General Dundas is represented with Military Wisdom and Courage raising and supporting the British flag, the animals and plants are natives of the West Indies
B Is the same subject accommodated to a mural situation, the price 4500g
(ibid.)
Flaxman’s design seems to have been a direct reference to Dundas seizing the West Indian islands. Rossi, on the other hand, in a drawing dated 2 July (untraced), opted for references both to the West Indies and to the violence:
Monument to General Thomas Dundas – the lion trampling on a disabled wolf, alluding to the actions of that officer in the West Indies, represents a magnanimous power triumphing over a ferocious enemy – the two figures below represent Britannia and the British Colonies of the West Indies to whom (if executed) the appropriate symbols will be given. The medallion grouped with the trophies on the base is intended to receive the portrait of the general in bas relief.
(ibid.)
Bacon Sr’s winning design (Fig. 12) was Caribbean in flavour, and extraordinary in its corporeality and violence. In contrast to the final executed monument, it was a busy, complex and novel design.
Fig. 12: John Bacon Sr, Design for the Monument to General Thomas Dundas, The National Archives, MPD 1/78, pencil and pen, 1798 (M. G. Sullivan, reproduced courtesy of The National Archives, UK).
At its heart was the feminine figure of Britannia, with her lion, accompanied by ‘Sensibility,’ and the putto with an olive branch. ‘Sensibility’ was a newly–invented allegorical figure, used by the Bacon workshop on the earlier monument to Sarah Winford in Warwickshire, where a similar figure holding a tender pot plant is carved in relief as a pendant to piety (Fig. 13).
Fig. 13: John Bacon Sr, Monument to Sarah Winford (d.1793), St Peter’s Church, Astley. ‘Sensibility,’ with her tender plant, is in profile on the right-hand side (courtesy of and © The_Senior_Crabbes via Waymarking).
Britannia places the laurel wreath over a bust of Dundas (a very approximate portrait in the original design, suggesting Bacon Sr had not yet got his hands on the Romney portrait), and the relief shows Britannia fighting away the forces of French darkness. All these elements, with some small modifications, survived into the final design (Figs 14 and 15).
Figs. 14 and 15: John Bacon Sr, Design for the Monument to General Thomas Dundas, The National Archives, MPD 1/78, pencil and pen, 1798 (M. G. Sullivan, reproduced courtesy of The National Archives, UK); Dundas – comparison of the monument to Thomas Dundas as designed (left) with its final form (right).
In this original winning design, though, the relief appears not on a pedestal, but on a sarcophagus, which has been smashed open to reveal the corpse of Dundas, whose feet emerge from the broken stone. The ensemble appears before a background obelisk with palm trees to suggest the West Indian location of both the victory and the defilement.
A remarkable feature is the tall, fluted, Doric column on the left hand side, which is surmounted by a smaller statue group of Samson Killing the Philistines (Fig. 13). This added another register to the British values that are shown on the left (Britannia, Sensibility and Peace) as it represented the desire of Britain for bloody revenge, but it also registered a set of religious values that overlaid the other symbolism in the monument.
Fig. 16: John Bacon Sr, Design for the Monument to General Thomas Dundas (detail), The National Archives, MPD 1/78, pencil and pen, 1798 (M. G. Sullivan, reproduced courtesy of The National Archives, UK).
The story of Samson, related in the book of Judges in the Old Testament (Judges 13 – 16), was a narrative of an Israelite Judge who was blessed by God with superhuman powers. Samson chose to marry a non–Israelite women from the Philistine tribe, from which a series of conflicts emerged, and it was evident that Samson’s love of the woman, and the violence that ensued from it, was part of God’s plan to diminish the Philistines. Samson first became aware of his superhuman strength when attacked by a lion on the way to asking the Philistine girl’s hand in marriage. He ripped the animal apart with his bare hands, and was startled to later see that bees had miraculously nested in the carcass of the lion and were making honey.
The families objected to the marriage and, after the marriage, gave the daughter to another man. Samson, when he heard of this, set fire to the grain fields and olive groves of the Philistines. The Philistines responded by burning the girl and her father to death in an act of retribution. Samson said ‘Though ye have done this, yet will I be avenged of you, and after that I will cease’ (15:7 King James Version) He then slaughtered many Philistines, and even escaped capture, through God’s strength, to slaughter a further 1000 Philistines more only with a donkey bone as his weapon (‘With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men’ (15:16 King James Version). God showed his approval by filling the jawbone with water after the massacre, to slake Samson’s thirst. Samson triumphed: ‘And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty years’ (15:20 King James Version).
The scene of Samson killing Philistines was well–established in sculptural iconography. Giambologna’s statue group of the same was in a British collection, and mass–produced by the sculptor John Cheere as a lead garden ornament. Vicenzo Foggini’s treatment of the work was also well–known, and both are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Figs. 17, 18 and 19).
Figs. 17, 18 and 19: Giambologna, Samson Slaying a Philistine, marble, 1560 – 1562 (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London); Vincenzo Foggini Samson and the Philistines, marble, 1749, (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London); John Bacon Sr, Design for the Monument to General Thomas Dundas (detail), The National Archives, MPD 1/78, pencil and pen, 1798 (M. G. Sullivan, reproduced courtesy of The National Archives, UK).
Bacon’s pen design draws upon the recognisable actions of a semi–naked warrior wielding a bone, serrated with teeth, above the cowering Philistines, who are about to receive their death blows. As a motif in church sculpture it was unheard of, and is clearly intended to convey a Christian allegory to the horrors of the West Indies. They suggest, firstly, that although it may be difficult to understand now, in the midst of grief, the violence is part of God’s plan. Furthermore, Christian soldiers will have revenge, and will triumph. The burning of the wife is referenced in the relief, where the savage (French) warrior uses a firebrand as a weapon of attack. The British lion perhaps has a residual association with the established iconography of Samson fighting the lion, the honey that emerges from the biblical carcass an echo of the sweetness of the sugar of the West Indies, whilst the sculptural foliage recalls the groves and fields that Samson burnt.
The allegory is far from neat, though: is Guadeloupe represented by the wife, genuinely loved by Britain (Samson), but taken by a usurper and then sacrificed? Is Dundas the wife and father cruelly murdered by Philistines, and who must be avenged by a British Samson? Or is Dundas to be identified with the warrior Samson, fighting the Christian fight? Whatever the specific references intended, the moral was certainly that an avenged, powerful Britain, with God’s support, would defeat their enemies and rule over the West Indies for much time to come.
If the Tory government wished the Dundas monument to be a work that reinforced their vision of French Terror and British colonial goodness, then John Bacon Sr was assuredly the best choice of sculptor. Bacon was a profoundly religious man, closely connected to the evangelical movement and one of its London hubs, Whitefield’s Tabernacle. He was also a staunch conservative. According to contemporaries the French Revolution stirred him to patriotic action, he expressed his hatred for Jacobinism, and he began drilling his sculptural apprentices to form a militia to fight in the event of a French invasion. He was also said to have upbraided a preacher at his church who had referred to ‘equality’ in a sermon (Farington, vol. 3, p.765). It is unclear what Bacon’s thoughts on slavery were, although his church embodied a range of views: the founder George Whitefield had vociferously preached for the alleviation of the conditions of enslaved people, whilst opposing full abolition. The congregation included black and white churchgoers, it was the final resting place of the writer Eloudeh Equiano, and counted several abolitionists among their number, but Bacon’s views aren’t recorded. In the Dundas monument, the issue of slavery seems subjugated to a Christian warrior aesthetic, unless the characterisation of the French state through anarchy and hypocrisy was intended to refer to the anarchy created on Guadeloupe and Martinique by the abolition of slavery, and the hypocrisy of the French in extending liberty to enslaved men that was subsequently denied.
Bacon’s evangelical biographer Richard Cecil detailed Bacon Sr’s quest to combine the art of sculpture with ‘true religion,’ and with a life of exemplary piety (Cecil 1801, p.1). He also describes Bacon, especially in old age, enjoying the posing of fables, allegories and conceits in conversation in order to make religious–philosophical points. Cecil owned that Bacon could also be prolix and impenetrable in his imagery. It is to be wondered if some of the less clean–cut connections that Bacon evokes between the story of Samson and the Philistines and the death of General Dundas, are a product of this tendency towards obscurity in his Christian morality tales.
After John Bacon Sr’s death in 1799 the Bacon workshop was taken over by his son John Bacon Jr, a remarkably creative artist who went on to produce the innovative monument to General John Moore in St Paul’s. Bacon Jr, according to Cecil, also shared his father’s ‘Christian glow’ (ibid., p.58). He went on also to act as a lay–preacher and shared his father’s patriotic conservatism. Henry Sibson, a former sculpture apprentice of Bacon Jr, was in the studio in the early years of the nineteenth–century, and later gave an (unflattering) account of Bacon’s fiery religious and political speaking. Sibson wrote:
I had had so much sickening of the disputes and wrangling in the studio upon the subjects of predestination and free grace, there was nothing else spoken of, for there was nothing else but a mania for the Bible Society at this time – George the Third had said some little time before, that he desired every subject of his, from the highest to the humblest, should have his Bible – and John Bacon was one of the foremost in the affair, he was very fond of public speaking, and it flattered his vanity to hear the buzzing whenever he entered any meeting late, which he always contrived to do, ‘Oh there is Mr Bacon’ from all parts of the room – and when the steam was fully up, he would writhe his body, and throw his right arm about saying from St Paul, as I heard him: ‘so fight I not as one that beateth the air.’ I thought to myself ‘Old fellow if you don’t beat the air I wonder who ever did’ – and another time he said ‘ we all of us know, that not very long ago, Buonaparte intended to invade this country, and his plan was to have been, as soon as he landed, to entrap all the women he could (but do you suppose Ladies as should let him) and then place them in line in front of his soldiers so that we men should not be able to free – but he didn’t – no, God would not allow that – now Ladies we wish to place you in the front line of battle with the Bible in your hands – to win by your smiles and graces – the poor benighted ones of God’s flock (cheers and clapping of hands all over the place, and he wiping the sweat from his face and elevated to the seventh heaven.
(Sibson MS, unpaged)
Bacon Sr’s design for the Dundas monument was certainly intended to embody the necessity of Christian violence in the face of impious horror, but it also drew heavily on anti–French propaganda of the mid–1790s. The relief includes important tropes from the anti–revolutionary literature and graphic satire. There had been initial excitement in Britain at the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, when the upheaval was characterised by British radicals and Whigs as a long–overdue movement towards the English ‘liberty’ that characterised the British constitution. The events in Paris enthused radicals like Thomas Banks and Anthony Paston Cooper. However, a swathe of more conservative opinion followed the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and his subsequent writings, that regarded the French notion of liberty to be linked to a quite different beast from British forebears, and inextricably part of a culture of extraordinary violence. Burke, a Whig MP and political writer, found himself quite at odds with many pro–revolution Whigs:
The French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apprently, by the most contemptible instruments. Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies.
(Burke 1790, p.11)
Burke’s concerns, which were also shared by his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds, went on to become full blown condemnation of the revolution in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs in 1791. The language he uses to characterise the revolution was given visual form in Bacon’s relief:
What was done in France was a wild attempt to methodize anarchy; to perpetuate and fix disorder. It was a foul, impious, monstrous thing, wholly out of the course of moral nature.. it was generated in treachery, hypocrisy, and unprovoked murder.
(Burke 1791, p.10)
Burke lambasted his former political allies in the Whig party for their faith that this was just a messy stage in a progress to full–blown French liberty:
The present evil is only the means of producing future, and (if that were possible) worse evils. – That it is not, an undigested, imperfect, and crude scheme of liberty, which may gradually be mellowed and ripened into an orderly and social freedom; but that it is so fundamentally wrong, as to be utterly incapable of correcting itself by any length of time.
(ibid., p.11)
Fig. 20: Bacon, Dundas (detail).
Bacon’s relief characterises the French in precisely these terms, a figure of ‘Anarchy,’ no doubt embodying ‘foul impiety,’ and carrying the severed head of one of those killed in the ‘unprovoked murders.’ He was supported by ‘Hypocrisy,’ who is realised as a figure with an actor’s mask concealing a ferocious face, an appropriately disturbing combination of ‘levity and ferocity.’ Burke’s tropes soon became the currency of popular political discourse, especially conservative satire. Rowlandson’s The Contrast of 1792 (Fig.21) shows how far the contrast between British liberty and French liberty had become mainstream:
Fig. 21: Thomas Rowlandson, The Contrast, 1792, coloured engraving (© The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
British liberty, with her stick and liberty bonnet, promoted religion, morality, and justice. Whilst French liberty, with a severed head on a trident and flaming firebrands, promoted atheism, anarchy, treachery and cruelty, whilst clambering over the bodies despatched in the genocide it had unleashed. The central theme of Bacon’s relief is the claim of Britain to protect true liberty – a loyal and religious type of liberty, one associated with national prosperity and property – against the hypocritical murderous attacks of the French. Odd as it seems to present a failed and bloody colonial struggle over the control of a slave plantation island as a simple moral binary, Bacon’s monumental design starkly shows Britain as a brave but peaceable and sensitive nation, pursuing a Christian path against French monstrosity.
By the time Britain went to war with France in 1793, and the judicial violence in France had been systematised into the mass murder of the Terror in 1794, it was no longer safe to voice support for the revolution; especially following a series of repressive measures by the Pitt government to suppress radical societies in England. Both Thomas Banks and Anthony Paston Cooper found themselves the target of political denunciations, and had to roll back their democratic principles in order to avoid prison or worse. For both John Bacon Sr and John Bacon Jr, conservative loyalists, there were no complications in promoting a vision in which they staunchly believed, of British Christian patriotism fighting against the impieties of France. The design that won the competition for the monument to Major–General Dundas was an inspired and passionate statement of conservative Christian resolve to avenge itself with the blood of French heathens.