‘Death, like a sculptor’: archaeology, materials and text in Harriet Hosmer’s Pompeian Sentinel

Abstract

Harriet Hosmer’s lost sculpture The Pompeian Sentinel (c. 1877) marks a dramatic shift at the end of her artistic career, from highly idealized and beautifully finished white marble figures to experimental media and a more expansive stylistic approach. Displayed in London in 1878, Hosmer’s statue was a monument to a mythical sentinel, made famous through Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii. This article explores the implications of the work’s material, and its relationship to Pompeii’s most morbid artefacts, the plaster casts of the victims’ bodies made most successfully and famously by Giuseppe Fiorelli after 1863. Hosmer’s use of plaster and wax suggests a connection to the cast bodies through material and historical similarities, if not exact resemblance. Rather than arguing that Hosmer was attempting to replicate the casts exactly, this article explores the parallel myths and narratives, popular connections and material similarities between Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, the plaster bodies and the sculpture, including the scientific and archaeological debunking of these myths. It problematizes the use of narrative and critique in analysing an untraced work through a single fragmentary image, and uses material and textual histories to explore the absent work.