Lot 21: f - Charles Sargeant Jagger, M.C. , 1885-1934 agriculture bronze

signed and dated 1930 bronze

height (including base): 37.5cm.; 14¾in.; width: 18.5cm.; 7¼in.; breadth: 14cm.; 5½in.

VARIOUS PROPERTIES
Charles Sargent Jagger, born in Sheffield in 1885, recalled his discovery of sculpture as a child at Whitby Bay, 'a little man... was sitting on a boulder modelling a sphinx in the natural clay... I was so fascinated that my father asked if we might stand and look on. And from that moment I had the keenest desire to become a sculptor' (Charles Sargent Jagger, 'In the days of my youth', T.P.'s and Cassell's Weekly, 12 March 1927). In response to Jagger's enthusiasm, his father apprenticed the fourteen year old as a metal engraver to Mappin and Webb in Sheffield, the commercial nature of which he resented. Jagger found his joy in the day a week the national education policy required apprentices to attend Sheffield School of Art, where Jagger subsequently began evening classes. In 1906 he was made the School's Master of Engraving, an appointment which allowed him to terminate his apprenticeship and focus on sculpture. The only recorded sculpture from this period, Labour (1907, plaster relief, dimensions unknown, present whereabouts unknown), suggests Jagger's pre-occupation with the theme of the beauty of the working man began early in his career. The present work was executed over twenty years after Labour. In this time Jagger had been to the Royal College of Art and served during the First World War in the Artists' Rifles and the Worcester Regiment. His sculptures after the war were predominantly commissions for war memorials, the Royal Artillery memorial at Hyde Park Corner, unveiled in 1925, remaining as his best known work. The present work relates to a commission for the Imperial Chemical Industries undertaken by Jagger between 1928 and 1931, his most important commission following the Royal Artillery memorial. The commission consisted of four figures of industry, a chemist, a builder, a stevedore and finally, a farmer sowing seeds at the bottom of a rainbow. As with many of Jagger's commissions, where the monumental sculptures were designed to fit in with a specific architectural building, the focus is on the solid, static and symmetrical figure. The farmer is a figure of unyielding power and virtue, his muscular arms bulging forth from his shirt. Taken out of the context of the architecture, the muscular solidity of the present figure, and the subtle gradations of the relief are particularly striking.