Ralph Brown

Description

Occasionally Sculpture at Goodwood helps an artist to revisit work from the past that was either not completed or which the artist felt was achieved not quite as he would have wished at the time. Meat Porters was Brown's response to a commission offered by Harlow Art Trust which was installed in the town's Market Square in September 1960. Brown had been working on the subject for three years. A concrete version, Sarcophori, had won the second prize for sculpture at the John Moore's Exhibition, Liverpool, in 1959 and had also enjoyed great acclaim elsewhere. Predictably the sculpture, depicting a flayed carcass of an ox being carried by two naked men, caused a stir in Harlow, but it was reported that the commissioning body greeted the unveiling of the concrete maquette with a universal gasp of delight. The Harlow sculpture was subsequently made from a new mould taken from the repaired model originally used for the concrete and a further resin cast.

Brown kept the concrete sculpture in his studio, and over the years slightly modified the form. It was from this version that Goodwood's edition was cast, and whilst it bears an overall resemblance to the Harlow piece, in detail there are differences. Whereas the Harlow sculpture is grey, the yellow-pink colour of skin is strong indeed and underlines both the brutality and curiously tender qualities of the sculpture. It brings to mind Rembrandt's painting The Slaughtered Ox 1655, and surgeons' illustrations of flayed bodies of that time. Only one bronze was made of the original edition, enabled by a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, thereby making the sculpture for Harlow more permanent. It is interesting to note that this sculpture, once vilified by the local populous, was in 1998 listed by National Heritage as a protected monument - one of only eighteen twentieth-century sculptures to be designated as such.