Reception of the Monument
The iconography of Bacon’s monument to Dundas must have been publicly misconstrued, as in January 1806 Bacon wrote to the Times noting that the work had not been ‘fully understood.’ He furnished the paper with a longer explanation than that which appeared at the time of the public opening, and that he hoped would ‘render it clear to every one.’ In it he refers the viewer to the desecration of Dundas’s remains, something that was omitted from earlier press descriptions, and which was only obliquely referenced in the iconography. A colossal statue of Britannia, he wrote, was crowning the General. Britannia was:
attended by a figure emblematical of sensibility, to indicate the general feeling which took place at the savage treatment that hero’s remains received. Sensibility having as yet no established emblem in sculpture, is here represented by a youthful female figure, holding in her hand a sensitive plant. To the right of the last named figure, is the Genius of Britain, presenting an olive branch, in allusion to the object of her exertions in war, viz a just and honourable peace. Some military trophies are placed on the tomb, which is enriched by the alto–relievo representation of Britannia, in the act of protecting Liberty, who has fled to her for succour from Anarchy, emblematized by a maniac figure with a lighted fire–brand in his hand; and from Hypocrisy, here pointed out by a female figure, who is holding in her right hand a mask, descriptive of a smiling and amiable countenance, with which she is concealing her real features, expressive of the most ferocious and horrid barbarity.
(The Times, 7 January 1806)
In truth, few of these things could have been obvious to anybody outside the cognoscenti, especially given the novelty of the allegorical figures, and the absence of detail about the treatment of Dundas’s body, which may have already become an historical footnote after a decade of war. One writer, signing himself ‘E.A’ in 1806, wrote that anyone could comprehend Britannia crowning a bust of Dundas, but:
what are we to think of another figure, a female, who is standing beside Britannia, and regards with earnest attention a plant which she holds. A botanist might perhaps discover that this plant is the mimosa pudica, the sensitive plant; and, this being a tolerable emblem of sensibility, might infer that the figure personifies that quality. Thus the explanation of the design seems to be, that Britannia, prompted by Sensibility, decorates the bust of the hero; but what a frigid and flimsy allegory is this? Unless Britannia were sensible to the merit, and grateful for the services, of the warrior, would she raise his monument, and inwreathe his image? Then why is this unmeaning figure introduced? But leaving the consideration of the design, let us see how the artist has treated his idea – Britannia crowns the bust; and Sensibility, what does she do? Why, truly, unmoved in the presence of the divinity, regardless of the hero, her tender sympathies are engaged in contemplating a plant.
(Monthly Magazine, 1 January 1806, p.497)
Bacon later supplied an explanation for Maria Hackett’s guidebook in 1815, which at least perpetuated his intentions, although did not mitigate the sense that the allegory was forced and unmoving.
The Dundas monument, however, did not boast many admirers in the decades to follow. Dundas himself was little mentioned, except in connection with several claims against the British government for compensation for property that was destroyed or taken during the struggle for Guadeloupe. Such cases were still rumbling on in 1820. In 1843 John Bacon Jr, long in retirement, expressed himself aware of a general distaste for all the monuments in St Paul’s. He perhaps did little to make the case for them by pointing out that much of the insipidity and uniformity that the monuments were accused of, was the result of committees squeezing the life out of the designs that the artists had submitted. The ever–curmudgeonly G.L. Smyth gave a typically damning account of the Dundas monument the same year:
Of all this labour it can only be observed, that it is neatly executed, but most insipidly allegorical. An inelegant inscription throws no light upon the darkness which envelopes the subject it affects to commemorate.
(Smyth 1843, p.418)
Smyth is uncharacteristically amusing in his account of his efforts to find out more about General Dundas, whom he has never heard of, and cannot find any information about. Of this officer, he says, he has ‘no account whatever to offer’:
In those publications which are ordinarily devoted to biographical information, no particulars of General Dundas are preserved; and as the author of this book, one of the most private of individuals, is destitute of the fortune and influence which might enable him to step beyond the common path, and effect what no–one before him has executed, he can produce nothing from a theme which he has found singularly barren. It does certainly appear somewhat inconsistent, that the most public honours should be lavished upon a man, respecting whom no public record, generally inaccessible, affords intelligence.
(ibid., p.417).
Lewis begs that if someone with ease and money is able to tell him who Dundas is, then he would be very grateful, and hopes not to be judged too harshly for his ignorance.
It was perhaps in response to this critique that in 1843 the Gentleman’s Magazine ran a long memoir of General Dundas by Henry J Bradfield, a Crown Magistrate in Trinidad. The article was occasioned by the move to install in Trinidad Cathedral the monument to the officer, that had originally been installed on Guadeloupe in 1794. The monument had been unearthed in a mason’s yard in Port of Spain in 1829, slightly damaged with a missing pilaster, and with no record of its arrival there. Bradfield supported its re–erection either in Trindad or in Britain, the latter being the preferred choice of the family. The Dundas family, notwithstanding the Major–General’s constant fears for their future, had survived early money worries to marry into some influential families, to retain Carron Hall, and to continue in the Army. The Major–General’s son, Lieutenant–Colonel Thomas Dundas (d.1860) had received his commission from Sir John Moore (who had served under Thomas Dundas Sr). The younger Dundas fought with the 52nd Light Infantry in Portugal at the Battle of Corunna, and elsewhere. The family was notable enough for the magazine to refer to the Dundas family as ‘so memorable in the annals of their country for deeds of arms’ (Gentleman’s Magazine 1843, p.156). Importantly, from a historian’s point of view, Thomas Dundas Jr gave Bradfield access to some of the extensive family archives, which included letters home from Dundas from numerous of his career postings. No doubt out of deference to the family who had allowed the access, the tenor of the article was to beatify Dundas and exculpate him from any stain of plunder, or mistreatment of Guadeloupians.
The article insisted upon Dundas as a ‘hero’ in public life, ‘chivalrous’ in private life, and to be contrasted with the ‘vindictive monster’ Victor Hugues, who treated his remains with such barbarity. Bradfield concluded his account of a ‘brave and devoted defender of his country’ and regretted that he could not do ‘sufficient justice to the memory of one so distinguished.’ Bradfield wrote that he was prompted to write this account by the monument in Trindad, and his horror at Hugues’ actions, concluding of Dundas that his:
monument in the cathedral of St Paul’s stands not only as a proud record of his services, but also as a sincere and patriotic tribute from a grateful country to one of her most distinguished sons and warriors.
(Gentleman’s Magazine, 1843, p.256)
The Gentleman’s Magazine piece obviated the type of criticism that had been levelled at the monument by Smyth – that of Dundas’s obscurity – and there seems not to have been any further doubting of Dundas’s qualifications to be part of the pantheon. The Illustrated London News complained in 1852 that our ‘hero’ only appeared in bust form, rather than in a full statue. In the later nineteenth–century a stereoscopic print was made of the monument, and the work was obviously notable enough for the commercial company to feel it was worth using it for its product. In 1891 extensive correspondence between Dundas and his family was published in a privately printed memoir by a later family matriarch, entitled Dundas of Fingask, Some Memorials of the Family, which again stressed the goodness of the Major–General, his family affections, and the respect in which he was held by his contemporaries. Dundas had a small entry in the Dictionary of National Biography in the 1890s, that was updated, but remains modest, in the 2004 edition.
Viewing and Conservation of the Monument since 1860
Bacon Jr’s monument to Major–General Dundas has stood in the same position in the North Transept since its erection in November 1805. However, the scene around it has changed. In 1860 the surveyor Francis Cramner Penrose changed the layout of the Quire to open up a single vista down the Nave to the altar, necessitating the removal of the famous monuments to Admiral Nelson and Lord Cornwallis from their original position in front of the choir screen. They were moved to their current positions in the centre aisle of the South Transept, necessitating the removal of the monuments that were already there. These were the monument to Captain Faulknor – Dundas’s pendant – and the Banks monument to Burges. The decision that was taken was to move Faulknor across the aisle to the North Transept to face Dundas, the position in which it stands today. This has the benefit of bringing the two monuments to men who died in the same West Indian campaign closer together, but it disrupts the visual unity that was given in the lateral view down the main aisle to the choir, where the two monuments bookended each other across the aisle in mirroring compositions. Moving Faulknor across the aisle also necessitated moving Banks’ monument to Westcott, which was removed to a bay in the Nave along with the monument to Burges. As the two monuments were, in truth, largely designed by Banks to complement each other, Penrose no doubt reasoned that they are a natural pair. However, both monuments now stand fully back–lit in front of windows, in positions that mean that the statues are very rarely wholly visible owing to the glare. At the same time, they have been reduced in height by Penrose’s removal of their base–plinths, meaning that the glorious reliefs are no longer at viewing height, but at the visitor’s feet. The moving in 1904 of Calder Marshall’s Righteousness and Peace from the Wellington Chapel to a position behind the Westcott creates an impossibly busy viewing plane and completes the insult.
Although the Dundas monument survived in position through this round of aesthetic changes, it was to suffer greatly during the Second World War, when a German Luftwaffe bomb landed a few feet from it in the North Transept, causing extensive damage. In 1958 a programme was instituted to repair and, in some cases, re–position, monuments that had been close to the blast. Dundas was spared removal but needed extensive conservation work. The estimate from J. Whitehead and Sons, mason–sculptors, recommended a total dismantling of the monument, and most seriously, a carving of a replacement head for one of the figures. There was also a hand that needed to be replaced and several fingers. Parts of the marble cornice and ashlar needed to be cut out and replaced, the monument needed to be re–erected, and the inscription repainted. The works would cost the sizeable sum of £788. Most of the work of conserving the monuments was completed by 1963.
The large crack across the neck of Britannia identifies this figure as that with a replacement head. It is a tribute to the skills of the Whitehead carvers, who must have copied from the damaged head or from detailed photographs, that the replacement head is barely noticeable to the onlooker (Fig. 45). Britannia’s left hand has an obvious break at the wrist, and must have been re–carved, whilst the replacement little finger of her right hand appears to have subsequently become detached again (Figs 46 and 47). Much more obvious are the new white marble panels in the base, which have not yet aged enough to blend into the whole (Fig. 48). Not mentioned in the estimate, but presumably from the same programme of conservation, is repaired damage to the upper arm of the putto on the right (Fig. 49).
Figs. 45 – 49: Conservation work on the Monument to Major–General Dundas.
One noticeable disjuncture in the appearance of the monument, however, is the different surface appearance of the different figures and details. Bacon constructed his work (as was his practice) from numerous separate pieces of marble that were carved separately and expertly joined together. The bas–relief was, for instance, carved separately and inserted into its drum, whilst Britannia was carved from a separate block and pieced into the composition, as can be seen from the joints at the base. In many cases these pieces of marble were not from the same block and thus exhibit different characteristics of veining and staining. The drum and Britannia are substantially whiter than the other pieces, creating a jarring impression visible from a distance. This may be owing to different marbles used in the construction, although it could also be a result of cleaning: the whole monument was cleaned by Whitehead and Son in the 1958 – 63 programme and it seems likely that Britannia would have needed to have been substantially cleaned in order to ease the transition from the new white marble head to the existing body, which may explain its different treatment. Why the bas–relief is so noticeably white remains a mystery. Perhaps the cleverest element of the design of the relief is the way in which it has been carved so as to incorporate the natural imperfections of the marble into the concept. The grey spots appear as if they are smoke emerging from the flaming brazier carried by Anarchy, making a virtue out of a blemish (Fig. 50).
Fig. 50: Bacon, Dundas – natural imperfections of the marble incorporated into the monument design.
Despite the best efforts of Dundas’s family to resurrect him as a national hero in the later nineteenth–century, he remains one of the more obscure choices for a national commemoration. His death by disease on a failed mission to the West Indies to secure a slave plantation colony is scarcely the stuff of lasting renown; whilst conversely his governorship of Guadeloupe was neither long enough nor brutal enough to warrant him the notoriety of General Picton. Dundas seems, from the evidence of his letters, to have been, rather, a different type of exemplar: a model soldier who was committed to doing his duty, even when he sorely doubted its efficacy. The brutal treatment of his corpse, which occasioned his monument, still seems the most notable aspect of his story, especially as it stands so at odds with Dundas’s simple sense of fair play and military honour.
Whilst Major–General Thomas Dundas has dropped out of the military canon, the monument to him by the Bacon workshop has continued to command the respect and interest of art historians. Alison Yarrington regarded it as the most interesting of the first three monuments to warriors erected in the Cathedral, and it has also featured as a case study in Holger Hoock’s accounts of St Paul’s, which recognises that the monument is of great social and cultural interest, as part of a changing culture of anti–French patriotism, and the artistic exploration of violent death and blood sacrifice. Ann Saunders, in a more formalist appraisal, described Bacon’s monument to Dundas as the most ‘graceful’ of the early wartime monuments. It is a typically well–chosen epithet, and not only for its religious overtones, which Bacon would surely have appreciated (Bowdler and Saunders 2004, p.277). The monuments of St Paul’s are executed on a scale that challenged the artists’ ability to maintain quality over a long period of execution, and over a large volume of carving, and there are few monuments in the Cathedral in this period that maintain such finesse, detailing, and workmanship in their execution, whilst maintaining an ease and flow in their composition.
By Greg Sullivan.
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