Lot 1: Edward Onslow Ford , British 1852-1901 Peace bronze, dark brown patina, on red veined marble base

with a plaque inscribed: Published by Arthur L Collie / 39 B Old Bond Street / May 8 1890 LONDON. bronze, dark brown patina, on red veined marble base

measurements note 58.5cm., 23in.

Edward Onslow Ford exhibited his Peace at the Royal Academy in 1887 as a statuette and the life-size bronze in 1890 now in the Walker Art Gallery, Baltimore. A cast similarly inscribed and dated is in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford; another was in the exhibition Leighton and his Sculptural Legacy.

Arthur Collie published his edition of reductions in 1890 to praise from the Saturday Review: "No specimen in Mr Collie's gallery is more delightful than the 'Peace', a little nude female figure in a caressing and conciliating attitude, waving a palm branch... for the purpose Mr Collie has in view, namely the purchase of these little bronzes for drawing rooms, it is the 'Peace' with its exigious proportions, its extreme delicacy and finish and its exquisite thin golden patina, that we hold to be especially successful." Edmund Gosse illustrated a figure of Peace standing in an open corner cupboard in his seminal essay 'Sculpture in the House'.

RELATED LITERATURE
E. Gosse, 'Sculpture in the House' Magazine of Art, 1895; Leighton and his Sculptural Legacy, no. 24, pp. 54-5; Beattie, p. 153 & 188; Spielmann, p. 55; Read, p. 321, fig. 383