Burning Bright: Essays in Honour of David Bindman

The spring term of 1975 at Westfield College, West Hampstead, saw a small group of second-year undergraduates from Westfield and UCL specialising in the ‘Baroque period’ assemble for David Bindman’s class on English and French Sculpture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Günter Kowa1 and Carol Blackett-Ord (née Scott-Fox)2 were amongst them. I still have my notes from this inspiring course and the essay I wrote on the use of drawings and sketch models in English sculpture. David took us to the Foundling Hospital, St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey to view sculpture in the context of architecture and painting. He invited the V&A curator Charles Avery to introduce the French eighteenth-century sculpture in the V&A’s Jones galleries; bronze portrait reliefs by Bouchardon of Louis XV and the Dauphin were compared with contemporary French portrait medals, extending our interest in and engagement with decorative art and our understanding of the curatorial viewpoint. David’s typed class hand-out ‘Sculptures in the V&A for special study’ singles out, under ‘French’, Houdon’s busts of Voltaire 3 and The Marquis de Miromesnil, Pigalle’s bust of J.R. Perronet, Pajou’s bust of M.J. Sedaine, Clodion’s Cupid and Pysche, Falconet’s Allegory of Sculpture and Bathing nymph and Lemoyne’s bust of The Comtesse de Feuquères, masterpieces which have all been selected for the V&A’s new European Galleries which open in December 2015.