The work of Charles Sargeant Jagger is widely considered as amongst the finest sculpture to emerge out of the atrocities of the First World War, with Wipers holding an important position as Jagger’s first public commission. In 1919 Jagger began work on Soldier on Defence for the Hoylake Memorial in Cheshire, a project that was to take until 1922 to complete, and part of a much broader national movement to commemorate the lives lost in the First World War. Monuments were erected in cities, towns and villages across the country by both recognised and newly emerging artists and sculptors. Wipers, the maquette produced for the final finished memorial depicts an archetypal British Tommy, with an unshakable dependability as displayed through his strong, un-flinching stance, with a discarded German helmet sitting by the figure’s right foot, a further reminder of the recent war. Inspired in part by the ancient Egyptian figures he had seen in the collection of the British Museum, Jagger presents the very ordinary Tommy as a solemn, watchful figure, especially suitable for a commission to commemorate the recently deceased. The sculptor developed his depictions of the Tommy further in commissions including the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner (1921-5) and the Great Western Railway War Memorial (1922), creating images that are both heroic and patriotic without overt tones of jingoism. Amongst his most popular sculptures, the first bronze maquette for Wipers was commissioned by H.R.H. Prince of Wales in March 1921, with a small number of further lifetime casts in both bronze and plaster made up until the sculptor’s death in 1934.

The present cast was given by the artist to Dr William Foxley-Norris (1859 - 1937), Dean of York (1917-1925) and then Dean of Westminster (1925 - 1937). Wipers held pride of place in the dining room at the Deanery, Westminster, standing amongst portraits of former Deans together with a cast of Jagger’s Artillery Captain which the Dean also owned. Foxley-Norris was himself an accomplished artist and alongside writing about the artistic decoration of ecclesiastical monuments, he became Chaplain to the Royal Academy in 1926 and was elected as an Honorary member; it is perhaps through this connection that he came to be friends with Jagger.