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Title:
Getty Entrance Sculptures
Object name(s):
Sculpture; British
Brief description:
The National Gallery’s Getty Entrance is surmounted with a figure of Victory, framed by another full-length, draped female figure in each of the niches to left and right. This pair of flanking winged figures carry attributes to identify who they are: both clasping a palette and paintbrushes, they symbolise the art of painting fostered inside the building. All three statues are the work of the British neoclassical sculptor Edward Hodges Baily, although he made them not for the National Gallery but for the Marble Arch, a monument intended to celebrate Britain’s defeat of the French in the Napoleonic Wars. When the figures were repurposed to adorn the nation’s public art gallery in a cost-cutting exercise, their original military accoutrements of spear and shield were transformed into more appropriate brushes and palettes.
Collection:
National Gallery
Current location:
Not on display
Material:
Portland stone
Object name:
Sculpture; British
Object production date:
1826-32
Date - earliest / single:
1826
Date - latest:
1832
Object production date:
Date - period:
1825-49
Object production person:
Edward Hodges Baily
Person's birth date:
1788-03-10
Person's death date:
1867-05-22
Object production place:
8 Percy Street
Other number:
GROUP161
Other number type:
object number
Other number:
0UY2-0008-0000-0000
Other number type:
PID
Other number:
H213-H215
Other number type:
display number
Other number:
H213-H215
Other number type:
Display Number
Other number:
group2161
Other number type:
sort number
Responsible department/section:
Contextual Collection
Right note:
To encourage the use and reuse of the National Gallery's collection data, they are released under the following dedications and licences: Structured data (as opposed to narrative texts) are released under a Creative Commons Zero dedication (CC0): https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/. Descriptions, notes and all other narrative text content are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Images are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 licence (CC BY-NC-ND): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Persistent shareable link for this record: https://museumdata.uk/objects/ca68f6a6-911e-3086-a68f-cbe1c95fcb37

Use licence for this record: CC BY

Attribution for this record: https://museumdata.uk/objects/ca68f6a6-911e-3086-a68f-cbe1c95fcb37, National Gallery, CC BY

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