One of the largest “Wally-birds” ever made, this rather meditative example testifes to an unusually fourishing period in the history of the Martin brothers’ pottery. A measure of commercial success in the early 1880s gave Robert Wallace Martin the opportunity to develop his grotesques and experiment with tobacco jars in the form of strange—but very human—birds. An account of the Martins’ work, written by Holbrook Jackson for T.P’s Magazine in 1910, discusses Wallace’s bird-jars and proposes humor as their chief motivation and achievement. He comments: “Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear thought along the same lines as Wallace Martin; they dreamed similar dreams, only Wallace Martin has dreamt them in clay.” But did Wallace have a hidden agenda? When, as a young assistant, he had worked for the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Alexander Munro in the early 1860s, he might well have met both Carroll, one of Munro’s intimate friends, and Lear who sometimes dropped by the studio. He might too have become aware of, perhaps even browsed through, Thomas Wright’s book A History of Caricature and the Grotesque, published in 1865, which contained a lengthy chapter on medieval carvings. It was also in 1865 that Wallace joined the Plymouth Brethren who totally rejected any sort of ecclesiastical organisation. So he would have read with delight Wright’s assertion that medieval grotesque art ofen carried an anticlerical message, either overt or hidden. “The popular feeling against the clergy,” Wright stated, “was strong in the middle ages, and no caricature was received with more fervour than those which expressed the
immorality or dishonesty of a monk or a priest.” Moreover, at Munro’s studio, Wallace would have heard, if he had not already known, about an instance of such lampooning in modern times, for amongst the ornament of the new Oxford Museum (for which Munro made statues of several leading scientists) the stonemason O’Shea had caricatured members of the university Convocation as parrots. Some of Wallace Martin’s birds are modeled as tonsured monks, while others caricature pillars of the establishment such as judges or generals. There is, more ofen than one had perhaps realized, a subversive element in these tobacco jars, an element Wallace would have been loathe to disclose to the mostly middle-class readers of T.P’s Magazine. Who knows which parson, magistrate or major-general has been morphed by Wallace into this magnifcent, giant bird?
The Central Hall of the newly opened Natural History Museum, London, circa 1882. © Natural History Museum, London/Science Photo Library. The present lot, possibly a whimsical interpretation of a penguin, was produced by the Martin Brothers shortly afer the opening of London’s Natural History Museum in 1881. Leading the momentous project, the natural scientist Sir Richard Owen sought to house the British Museum’s natural history collection in what he described as a “cathedral to nature” that was accessible and free to the public. The Romanesque building, designed by the architect Alfred Waterhouse, features extensive ornamentation throughout, illustrating extinct and living animals in sculpture and relief carving, and fora and fauna, including the 162 botanically-decorated tile panels of the museum’s Hintze Hall. The collection of the museum refected the expanse of the nineteenth-century British Empire and the accompanying new discoveries from this global exploration, which captured the attention of the British public, and seemingly that of Robert Wallace Martin.