Charles Sargeant Jagger

London, Royal Academy, Summer Exhibition, May 1932, no.1417;
London, The Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, Charles Sargeant Jagger Memorial Exhibition, War and Peace Sculpture, 1935, 21 May - 20 June 1935, no.27, illustrated in the catalogue, and touring to Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, Lincoln, Wakefield, Halifax, Dunfermline, Rochdale, Perth, Hull, Doncaster, and Stockport.

 

Ann Compton,The Sculpture of Charles Sargeant Jagger, The Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries, Hertfordshire, 2004, no.80, illustrated p.77.

 

There are some very minor spots of light surface staining on the thighs of the central figures and some very minor staining in the bottom left corner of the relief otherwise in excellent original and clean condition. Mounted on a bespoke painted wooden relief backboard.
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Conceived in 1930, Scandal was commissioned by Henry and Gwen Mond for the drawing-room of Mulberry House, London. It is a remarkable image, both in concept and execution.

The couple had met in 1918 following Henry's involvement in a motorbike accident outside the studio shared by Gwen and her lover Gilbert Cannan. The triangular relationship lasted until Cannan went to America in 1919 and Gwen and Henry were married. A promising writer and dramatist associated with the Bloomsbury and Garsington circles (he is the subject of Mark Gertler's Gilbert Cannan and his Mill in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum), Cannan showed increasing mental instability, and it was a condition of Gwen's marriage to Mond that he provided for Cannan. After a breakdown in 1923, he was in care for much of the remainder of his life.

When Henry and Gwen came to redesign the interior at Mulberry House, Scandal was to be the centrepiece of the drawing room, surrounded by marvellously stylised murals on silver leaf by Glyn Philpot. Using the low relief seen earlier in No Man's Land, the central naked embracing figures represent the Monds, surrounded by caricatured images of scandalmongers shocked by their relationship (some of which are modelled from friends of the couple). By making their own history public and in such a direct way, Scandal blatantly thumbs its nose at the conservatism of society between the wars.