Lot 119: CHARLES SARGEANT JAGGER

CHARLES SARGEANT JAGGER BRITISH 1885 - 1934 NO MAN'S LAND signed: Sargeant Jagger bronze, in associated frame 17 by 49.5cm., 6 3/4 by 19½in.

The collection of Henry and Gwen Mond;
Thence by descent

Charles Sargeant Jagger studied at Sheffield School of Art before receiving a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in 1908. He won the newly-established Prix de Rome for the British School at Rome in 1914, just weeks before war was declared. Jagger enlisted and joined the Artist's Rifles. In September 1915 he arrived at Sulva Bay in Gallipoli and experienced at first hand the horrors of trench warfare. In letter home to his sweetheart, Jagger wrote 'You biddie people at home have no idea what sort of a Hell this is. It strikes me as being the home of the damned.' No Man's Land was inspired by Jagger's experience in Gallipoli and later on the Western Front.

The relief viscerally evokes the mud, carnage and tragedy of trench warfare, as a rifleman reaches over the edge of the trench to see the crumpled bodies of his companions-at-arms. A close friend of Jagger's, Douglas Greenaway, was killed attempting to recover the bodies of dead soldiers from no man's land. Jagger himself showed extraordinary courage during the Battle of Neuve Eglise in April 1918 and was awarded the Military Cross.

In the autumn of 1918 the Ministry of Information (MoI) appointed Jagger as an official war artist. He immediately began work on this sketch for No Man's Land alongside another relief commissioned by the MoI. Jagger completed the full size relief in 1919, funded by the Rome scholarship which had been delayed by the war. A bronze cast of the large-scale version was presented to Tate by the British School at Rome in 1923.

The industrialist Mond family were great patrons of the arts. Henry and Gwen Mond became friends of Jagger as well as one of his key patrons. Among the works they commissioned was the well-known relief, Scandal in 1930. Henry acquired this bronze sketch for No Man's Land because it evoked his own haunting experiences in the trenches at the age of seventeen - after being wounded he had been accidentally buried, and was rescued when a burial party came to collect the dead the next morning. He kept the plaque on his desk throughout the remainder of his life.

Another cast of No Man's Land was sold in these rooms on 13th July 2007 for £60,000.

We are grateful to Ann Compton for her assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.

RELATED LITERATURE
A. Compton, The Sculpture of Charles Sargeant Jagger, Perry Green, 2004, cats. 22 & 23, pp. 11-25 & 111