The Fire in the Stone : The Life and Architectural Sculpture of Thomas Vallance Wran 1832-1891

Abstract

Thomas Vallance Wran (b. Chichester 1832--d. Aden 1891) benefited from the revival of architectural sculpture and establishment of the Westminster Architectural Musuem by G.G. Scott in 1851 which exposed him to a new training regime based on the practices form the Cologne bauhutte mason's lodge, employing casts from nature and architecture. In England he contributed sculpture to buildings by R.C. Carpenter and J.L. Pearson, leading lights in the Gothic Revival, before emigrating to St Lawrence, Qld, in 1870 as a selector, later decamping to Sydney where he was quickly recognized as the foremost sculptor of buildings during the High Victorian construction boom. In Sydney during the 1870s and the first-half of the 1880s, Wran excelled himself in collaborations with the three leading architects, Thomas Rowe, Allen Mansfield and James Barnet.

Wran's sculpture on two four-storey Pitt Street warehouses in 1973 was the first to base itself on indigenous Australian fauna in a carnival of wildlife that sparked interest in developing and Australian decoration among members of the new Institute of Architects, some seventeen years ahead of Lucien Henry and others. Wran contributed sculpture to the Commercial Bank of Sydney (Haymarket branch), Colonial Secretary's Building, Great Synagogue, Founder's Hall Newington College, Stanmore, Good Shepard Convent and Refuge (484 Pitt Street), and General Post Iffice on 1 Martin Place.

Architectural sculpture was prized by architects because not only did sculpture contribute greatly to the aesthetics of their buildings, it served as a powerful symbol and narrative voice that added meaning and significance. Sculpture made the difference between building and architecture. From the beginning, the two arts were asymmetrical and inseparable. Wran benefited considerably from the renewed prestige and increased appreciation of sculpture which during the High Victorian era, was considered as the distinguishing factor between architecture and mere engineering construction, such that buildings were perceived as enlarged and oversized pedestals for sculpture withing the framework of Romantic Gesamtkunstwerk.

Wran, like most working-class workmen of the age, was an obscure and invisible figure. This dissertation sets out to remedy this and give him the recognition he rightly deserves as the creator of a series of sculptural masterpieces and and national treasures.

This dissertation also situates Wran in his time. Wran was an artist whose sculpture was increasingly consonant with its architecture. His sculpture is insistently rounded, plastic dynamic. Contrary to Ruskin who advocated pictorial flat sculpture, Wran sculpture is extremely plastic and round and leaps from the wall, whilst abiding by Ruskin's demand for truth and fidelity to nature, restless invention, and avoidance of repetition. In an age where so much sculpture was an imitation, whether of nature or from another epoch, which discouraged individuality, Wran's individual originality is exceptional. Wran sculpture is highly meaningful and wonderfully expressive.