The unrivalled collection of post-Medieval British sculpture in the V & A Museum is catalogued and illustrated in its entirety for the first time.

The British School of Sculpture, c. 1760?1832 represents the first edited collection exploring one of the most significant moments in British art history, returning to centre stage a wide range of sculpture considered for the first time by some of the most important scholars in the field. Following a historical and historiographical introduction by the editors, situating British sculpture in relation to key events and developments in the period, and the broader scholarship on British art more generally in the period and beyond, the book contains nine wide-ranging case studies that consider the place of antique and modern sculpture in British country houses in the period, monuments to heroes of commerce and the Napoleonic Wars, the key debates fought around ideal sculpture at the Royal Academy, the reception of British sculpture across Europe, the reception of Hindu sculpture deriving from India in Britain, and the relationship of sculpture to emerging industrial markets, both at home and abroad. Challenging characterisations of the period as 'neoclassical', the volume reveals British sculpture to be a much more eclectic and various field of endeavour, both in service of the state and challenging it, and open to sources ranging from the newly arrived Parthenon Frieze to contemporary print culture.

Exploring the various forms taken by sculpture collections, this volume presents new research on collectors, modes of display, and the aesthetics of viewing sculpture, making a notable addition to the literature on the history of sculpture and art collecting as a cultural phenomenon.

This is an illustrated study of the reception of classical sculptures in the early modern period. Viccy Coltman contrasts the culture of British 18th century collecting, which integrated sculpture into the domestic interior, with the focus upon individual specimens by archaeologists like Adolf Michaelis a century later.

In Ancient Marbles in Naples in the Eighteenth Century Eloisa Dodero aims at documenting the history of numerous private collections formed in Naples during the 18th century, with particular concern for the “Neapolitan marbles” and the circumstances of their dispersal. Research has thus made it possible to formulate a synthesis of the collecting dynamics of Naples in the 18th century, to define the interest of the great European collectors, especially British, in the antiquities of the city and its territory and to draw up a catalogue which for the first time brings together the nucleus of sculptures reported in the Neapolitan collections or coming from irregular excavations, most of which shared the destiny of dispersal, in some cases here traced in definitive fashion.

From abolitionist medallions to statues of bondspeople bearing broken chains, sculpture gave visual and material form to narratives about the end of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery sheds light on the complex—and at times contradictory—place of such works as they moved through a world contoured both by the devastating economy of enslavement and by international abolitionist campaigns. By examining matters of making, circulation, display, and reception, Caitlin Meehye Beach argues that sculpture stood as a highly visible but deeply unstable site from which to interrogate the politics of slavery. With focus on works by Josiah Wedgwood, Hiram Powers, Edmonia Lewis, John Bell, and Francesco Pezzicar, Beach uncovers both the radical possibilities and the conflicting limitations of art in the pursuit of justice in racial capitalism's wake.