Imagining Alternative Visions of Justice: An Exploration of the Controversy Surrounding Stirling Lee’s Depictions of Justitia in Nineteenth-Century Liverpool

I. Introduction

The sculptures depicting ‘‘The Progress of Justice’’ which appear on the side of St George’s Hall (1841–7) in Liverpool fuelled considerable debate in the popular press and art journals when the first of six related panels was unveiled in 1885. Concerns about the propriety and artistic value of the unclothed figure of Justitia have been treated by some commentators as a major example of how the nude became politicized in the late Victorian period. ¹ Other art historians have associated the scandal with the difficult birthing process of the ‘‘New Sculpture Movement,’’ as being implicated in the struggle for recognition of decorative sculpture as high art or as part of a backlash against Liverpool’s artistic awakening. ² Academics have also drawn attention to the part the controversy played in prompting an outraged William Conway, Professor of Art at Liverpool University, to establish the Arts Congress. ³ What is noticeable about all these accounts is that the debate only appears to have attracted detailed analysis by art critics and historians.

In this article I suggest that the controversy surrounding the bas reliefs is also worthy of analysis through a law and humanities lens which takes into account the legal, historical, cultural and political context in which discussion took place. Looked at from these alternative perspectives it could be argued that the bas reliefs also had the potential to provoke concern because they were mounted on the side of what was arguably the most architecturally sophisticated and symbolic court house of the nineteenth century. ⁴ The new middle classes who had acquired their wealth as a result of industrialization commonly utilized architecture, fine art and sculpture in order to glorify their achievements and the new social contract which evolved with the emergence of a capitalist economy. In an era marked by revolution and uprising unambivalent and authoritative images of law were particularly important in serving the interests of the elite by engendering a sense of stability and continuity. This is particularly true of images of Justitia and the notions of balance and neutrality with which she had become bound. The failure of the sculptor to produce an image of Justitia which relied on such hackneyed symbolism provides a fruitful insight into the possibility of a politics of public art and law. Negative reactions to the panels are suggestive of particular sensitivities surrounding images of law amongst the ‘‘merchant princes’’ of Liverpool which are worthy of more detailed analysis. A major thrust of the argument presented is that the bas reliefs served to distance the idea of justice from its association with austere neutrality which public artwork has made so familiar, by offering an alternative sensual and developing vision of law. In this way justice emerges as a critical project with a firm connection to dissidence.

II. The nature of the controversy

St George’s Hall was built to house two public concert halls and two Assize courts and was completed in 1854 to considerable critical acclaim. It is regularly referred to as one of the finest neo-classical buildings in Europe and is part of a precinct of grand public buildings which form an imposing cultural plateau in Liverpool. ⁵ Everything about the building was ambitious. This cathedral-sized building was designed by Harvey Lonsdale Elmes ⁶ at the tender age of 25 and was funded in part by public subscription. The great concert hall is an impressive 169 feet long and 74 feet wide, has the largest barrel-vaulted ceiling in the United Kingdom and a Minton tiled floor which includes 300,000 hand-crafted tiles. The ‘‘small’’ concert hall on the level above can seat 1,200 people and accommodate an orchestra of 60 and chorus of 70. The building was the first public facility in the country to incorporate an air conditioning system, and the musical organ in the great hall was the largest in the nation when installed. ⁷ Sharples (2004) reports that size was so important to those commissioning the work that Elmes was asked to surpass the dimensions of other great buildings such as Westminster Hall, St Paul’s cathedral and the new Birmingham Town Hall. ⁸ At a total expense of £290,000 the cost equated to just over 40 per cent of the magisterial Albert docks which had provided the foundation for the industrial wealth enjoyed in Liverpool. ⁹ The two Assize courts within St Georges are as lavish as their surroundings with their high roofs, wood paneled interiors and majestic red and grey granite columns supporting the roof. ¹⁰ When the courts were sitting the great concert hall was designed to act as a salle de pas perdu for litigants. Elmes’ intention was that each of the courts should be entered from the great hall through sets of highly elaborate and columned doors. The architect attached great importance to the judges from each court being able to see each other across the great hall when the two doors were open. This sightline, to which Elmes apparently attached great importance, was intended to evoke no less than memories of the vistas in Blouet’s restoration of the Baths of Caracalla. ¹¹

Elmes had always intended that bas reliefs should adorn the building but his early death and the loss of the plans he had drawn up for the sculptures led to the launch of a competition in 1882 to find a sculptor who could design and execute the work. ¹² A comparatively young and unknown artist, Thomas Stirling Lee, was selected as the winner and after some discussion it was decided that the six panels dedicated to the theme of Justice should read as a connected series rather than the discrete sculptures originally anticipated. ¹³ Three years later the first of the bas reliefs was fixed in place under the personal supervision of the sculptor. ¹⁴ Despite some negative reactions to the panels ¹⁵ the Finance and Estate Committee of the City Council proposed that Stirling Lee be requested to execute the remaining reliefs at a rate of one a year. ¹⁶ The designs for the second panel were completed by July 1886. Councillor Rathbone was sent to London on behalf of the Council to approve the model and was accompanied by Sir Thomas Armstrong, the director of fine art at the South Kensington art schools. The model was approved by Rathbone and his recommendation to allow the artist to proceed was subsequently ratified by the Council. ¹⁷

The bas reliefs carved in Istrian marble measure six feet by five feet and stand fifteen feet from the ground on the outside of the Eastern elevation of the building. The first panel depicts ‘‘The Childhood of Justice’’ and shows Justitia as a naked child being led by Conscience, directed by Wisdom and followed by a young Joy. The second panel which Lee described as depicting ‘‘The Girlhood of Justice’’ shows a naked juvenile Justitia standing between Wealth and Fame. ¹⁸ The fact that she has turned her back on Wealth and has put up her left arm to resist the approaches of Fame appears to denote that the young Justitia is capable of resisting the attractions of Wealth and Fame on her journey to maturity. The clothing in which the figures appear and the stylized figures of Wisdom, Fame and Wealth draw inspiration from neo-classical sculpture which serves to complement the building on which they are mounted.

Sir James Picton, an architect and prominent member of the Council, considered the first panel to be of ‘‘considerable standing’’ but it transpired that his suggestion in March of 1885 that the style of the work had met with ‘‘universal approval’’ was misplaced. ¹⁹ Despite the ratification of the preliminary model for the second panel by the Council grumblings of discontent began to grow with some Council members being concerned about the suitability of the sculptures for public consumption. Against this backdrop, Rathbone’s report that Armstrong ‘‘thought the breasts required stiffening in order to look more monumental and virginal’’ proved too much for several members of the council. ²⁰ Opposition gathered momentum before the second panel had even been mounted and when the Finance Committee determined in August 1886 to terminate the contract with Mr Lee it was by a convincing vote of 29 to 3. ²¹ Criticism was also said to be evident amongst the rate-paying public and in 1888 the Liverpool Mercury reported the view that public reaction to the panels was best expressed as ‘‘indifference leaning slightly towards dislike.’’ ²² The affair was later described by William Conway as having provoked howls of disapproval, horror and commotion amongst the local populace. ²³

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The Childhood of Justice © Author.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

The Girlhood of Justice © Author.

Opinions about the sculptures grouped around two extreme positions characterized by the Liverpool Mercury as the Philistines against the art critics. ²⁴ Surviving Council Minutes are generally mute about the exact nature of concerns expressed but the press were diligent in their reporting of public debate. We are informed by journalists of the time that councillors counted amongst the philistines argued that the sculptures were ‘‘great abortions,’’ ‘‘sculptured monstrosities,’’ ‘‘inartistic,’’ ‘‘meaningless and offensive,’’ a ‘‘public outrage,’’ an ‘‘eyesore’’ and a ‘‘blister or disfigurement on the side of a much loved building.’’ It was even argued that the infatuation that certain members of the Council had with the panels was unhealthy. ²⁵ Some critics went so far as to suggest that the naked Justitia would encourage the sale of pornography. ²⁶

Objections to the fact that Justitia was unclothed in both panels featured strongly in the controversy. Councillor Yates expressed particular concern that colleagues had been tasked on behalf of the Council to find a design that represented Justice and had come back with a naked woman. ²⁷ The same newspaper reported that at a lecture by Mr. Hay to the Liverpool architectural society it was suggested that:

If the child Justice, in the first panel, had been provided with a short skirt, and the naked female figure in the second clothed in the fine classic tunic of the Greeks, veiling without concealing the beauty of the form, the idea of ‘‘purity’’ would have been better symbolized, the art would have been finer and public decency would not have been outraged. ²⁸

Supporters of Stirling Lee were, however, equally as vocal in their support of the sculptures and the artist. Influential publications such as The Builder and a number of prominent artists were particularly willing to rally to his cause. Critics of Lee were variously called ‘‘prudish purists’’ who voiced ‘‘the most stupid and ignorant abuse and had too little idealism to understand the meanings conveyed.’’ In one Council meeting Councillor Rathbone, ²⁹ who had chaired the committee that had awarded Lee first prize in the sculptural competition and approved the model for the second panel, quoted a letter from the renowned sculptor and friend of Lee, Alfred Gilbert, stating that the panels already executed were amongst the best of their kind in England. ³⁰ The Builder contended that the Liverpool public would find that the artistic merit of the completed series of panels was such that visitors would come out of their way to see them. ³¹

The handling of the matter by the City Council caused additional concern and prompted widespread condemnation by a creative community sensitive to cavalier treatment of artists commissioned to undertake major public works. The way in which Lee’s contract was terminated was such that the sculptor himself was later to refer to it as humiliating, ³² while others characterized it as being in bad faith or as casting a stigma on his artistic character. ³³ The Liverpool Mercury reported that in the course of one council meeting Councillor Rathbone argued that:

The council had encouraged a young man to put the whole of his thoughts, time and reputation in this work; and to break off the contract with Mr Lee now would be a more serious loss and injury to him in his profession. Why should they make this noise about £900 a year when they had really pledged the future of the young man to this work. ³⁴

Debate about the issue raged for some time at regional and national level. The City Council were severely criticized for their treatment of Lee in the course of an impassioned and unscheduled speech by Alfred Gilbert when the first ever national Art Congress was held in Liverpool in 1888. ³⁵ Resolutions asking the Council to re-consider their decision were subsequently passed by the National Association for the Advancement of Art and the Arts Congress in Edinburgh in 1889. ³⁶ The latter alone was signed by 35 sculptors, 145 painters, 28 architects and 12 art critics. ³⁷ Indeed, The Pall Mall Gazette remarked that if the Corporation did not respond to such pressure they ‘‘will manifestly prove themselves dead to all reason, and insensible to all taste.’’ ³⁸ The implications of Lee’s treatment were felt especially keenly by those engaged in getting architectural sculpture recognized as a form of ‘‘high’’ art. Reflecting on the affair in the year following termination of his commission, Lee talked of the artists’ vulnerability to:

… local committees and governments who destroy his designs, deface his ideas and render his intentions of beauty meaningless by unintelligent decrees, whose barren utilitarianism and vicious economy are utterly opposed to the purposes of art. ³⁹

Commentators were later to draw attention to the fact that Lee remained deeply demoralized by the public dispute surrounding his bas reliefs. Indeed Morris ⁴⁰ suggests that he was never able to produce an art work of the same intensity and vision as his Liverpool Justitias.

III. The New Sculpture Movement

The intensity of the debate was undoubtedly fuelled by the association of the sculptor and his panels with what was to become known as the New Sculpture Movement. ⁴¹ It was Edmund Gosse who, in a series of articles in the Art Journal, gave this label to a new generation of sculptors influenced by French artists such as Jules Dalou. Commentating on the ‘‘cold and lifeless apathy’’ and the ‘‘lowest depth of desuetude’’ into which British sculpture had sunk, Gosse characterizes New Sculpture as a revolutionary and fresh concentration of intellectual powers on a branch of art which had been allowed to grow dull. ⁴² Whilst there was considerable variation amongst leading artists of the genre such as Frederic Leighton, Hamo Thornycroft, Albert Gilbert, and Onslow Ford, three aspirations have been seen to unite them, all of which were regarded as innovative in their time. ⁴³ These were a repudiation of conventionalized neo-classicalism; the embrace of naturalistic treatments of the body and concern with the sculptural object as a modern site of meaning. ⁴⁴ For Morris this set ‘‘… combined French realism and technical dexterity with a very English sense of poetry and imagination to provide the core of the so called New Sculpture.’’ ⁴⁵ Such were the challenges posed by this movement that for some the new techniques they used for statuary began to present the same threat to the art canon as photography was perceived to be to painting. ⁴⁶ In the case of Lee’s panels the marked naturalism of his Justitias which suggested that they were directly modelled from life, their poetic realism, the surface details of the marble, and their contemplative gaze position the sculptures firmly within this new school. ⁴⁷

It was the naturalistic treatment of the form that was at the heart of the controversy surrounding the Progress of Justice. As new generations of sculptors aspired to realistic treatment of their subjects critics expressed concern that instead of stimulating the mind of the beholder into pondering elevated notions there was a danger that new nude sculptures served instead to excite base bodily passions. Elevated academic theory of the time dictated that these were not the true ends to which the artist should aspire. ⁴⁸ Whilst sculptors of the idealized neoclassical nude effaced bodily detail or everyday poses in their attempts to circumvent such tendencies, proponents of the New Sculpture movement were keen to pay much greater attention to surface detail, mimetic rendering and variation of form which brought real bodies to mind. Beattie acknowledges that the Greek influences in Stirling Lee’s work were likely to have won him the competition for the decoration of the neo-classical St George’s Hall, but also suggests that the expectation that the first two completed panels would conform to the Victorian stereotype of the neo-classical carving could only lead to disillusionment. ⁴⁹ In many ways Lee’s early association with the New Sculpture Movement ⁵⁰ made him an unlikely candidate for the commission. His appointment undoubtedly had much to do with the patronage of Rathbone who had considerable local influence and was keen to promote avant garde art in a city which may not have been ready for it. ⁵¹ For Beattie, the placing of the first panel on the side of St George’s Hall meant that:

… an unfamiliar and unwelcome realism was discovered to intrude upon the solemnity of the processional figures. A naked girl-child, awkward and vulnerable, provided the centre point of the composition, echoing in expressive tenderness the qualities of Gilbert’s bronze statuette, Perseus Arming. ⁵²

With the unveiling of the second panel, in which the qualities of the first were not only respected but emphasized, Beattie (1983) contends that the spirit of the New Sculpture finally escaped the safe confines of the exhibition gallery to invade architecture and public space.

The sort of anxieties caused by the naturalistic treatment of Justitia were far from unusual. When viewed from a feminist perspective the polarized positions adopted by supporters and opponents of Lee could be seen as predictable. Smith has identified such a pattern as the norm in the many controversies relating to the nude in the nineteenth century and attempts to explain the ideological assumptions underpinning each extreme. In her words:

On the one hand, the nude embodied the ideal, the highest point of the pictorial artist’s practice; on the other, it was viewed as an active incitement to unregulated sexual activity. The proliferation of arguments both for and against the nude unleashed a whole sequence of debates over morality, sexuality and censorship… ⁵³

In her work on the symbolic importance of the nude within the Western tradition of high art Nead encourages us to resist the temptation to see particular scandals such as the ones caused by Stirling Lee’s panels as isolated instances. Instead she argues that they are more accurately understood as part of a recurring debate about gender, representation and power, to which one could add legal symbolism. For Nead, one of the principal goals of the artistic nude over time has been the containment and regulation of the female sexual body so that the forms, conventions and poses of art have all worked metaphorically to ‘‘shore up’’ the female form. ⁵⁴ The norms of the male-dominated art community have encouraged the artist to produce a hermetically sealed female body in which the threat of the flesh is disciplined by such techniques as repairing orifices or the omission of pubic hair. In short the emphasis has been on ensuring that the nude does not become naked. ⁵⁵

This article attempts to go beyond the confines of existing debate about the nude in Victorian art and the part played by the St George’s Hall scandal in the birth of a new artistic movement to consider some of the broader issues raised by controversial depictions of Justitia. In particular it seeks to explore the relationship between law, art, power and dissidence. Previous work on images of law has made us familiar with the various ways in which artwork has been used to promote concepts of justice which serve the political elite. Much less has been written about subversive representations of justice which serve to question or undermine dominant ideologies. This article attempts to encourage scholars to pay more attention to a link between law, art and subversion. In the sections which follow I argue that Lee’s work challenged the canon in a number of other ways which have not been voiced or fully explored in existing analysis. I focus in particular on the extent to which such representations undermine the larger political projects served by the symbolic courthouse on which the bas reliefs were mounted. It is suggested that by focusing on the way in which women were portrayed in Lee’s controversial bas reliefs existing accounts have tended to overlook the significance of who or what is being shown.

IV. Law, authority and art

Representations of Justitia in Western art are deserving of particular attention because, contrary to the feminist critique alluded to above, they tend to subvert expectations by connecting this particular female Virtue to power and authority. The fact that depictions of powerful women remain relatively rare means that they have become something of an anomaly in our cultural symbolism and remain far removed from the much-produced images of the forgiving maternal or meditating Madonna, or the suffering or victimhood of the female martyr. ⁵⁶ By way of contrast, Justitia tends to question the usual associations of modesty, demureness and nourishment with femininity (Pollock, 1989). It is also the case that, unlike the other Virtues, images of Justitia continue to have resonance in the visual language of the twenty-first century. Whilst Prudence, Temperance and Fortitude have long been out of fashion as sculptural decoration, images of Justitia continue to be found across Europe, South America and the common law world. Capers (2006) has suggested that from the Renaissance onwards standardized images of Justitia with a scale and sword became so ubiquitous in courthouses, law books and law schools that representations developed the weight of a ‘‘given.’’ ⁵⁷ In a similar vein, Curtis and Resnik have claimed that she has long stood as a modern quasi-religious, quasi-political icon. ⁵⁸

Justice is commonly shown carrying a sword and set of scales and since the sixteenth century often wears a blindfold. Symbols which have historically been associated with her also include a book, bundle of lector rods, a globe, serpent, dog or skull. ⁵⁹ While Justice is often represented by Solomon, Justitia is invariably female, a fact which allows us to trace the origin of modern images to the Egyptian Goddess Maat and the ancient Greek Titan Themis. The cultural resonance of Justitia is such that representations of this Virtue as commanding and authoritative can be traced back centuries and have appeared in a variety of forms including paintings, stain glass, pottery, jewellery, tarot cards, stamps, coins and product labels. ⁶⁰ Statues of formidable Justitias also abound and can be seen on historic and contemporary justice facilities and government buildings across the Americas, Australia and Europe. ⁶¹

In their seminal article on the topic Curtis and Resnik argue that the key reason why representations of Justitia have proven so popular in the public sphere is that the State has much to gain in appropriating her aspirations to higher ideals. In their words

Appropriately nervous about the implications of the judgments rendered by all too mortal judges, states have attempted to disassociate their justice from human fallibility – especially because in the name of justice, governments have applied force, restricted liberty, and even executed their citizens. ⁶²

It is certainly the case that art and architecture have long played a strategic role in supporting and legitimizing power structures and have been used unashamedly as the handmaidens of established states and emerging political elites. According to some commentators signs of the impartiality of justice, symbolized most obviously in her blindfold, were particularly important to the new, bourgeois culture of the early modern period which strove to leave behind the partiality of private feudal justice. Viewed from this perspective it was no coincidence that statues and fountains of blindfolded Justitia were placed in town squares and newly erected civic buildings in which a nascent public sphere was in the process of emerging. ⁶³ Narratives about the heroic artist who breaks new boundaries are common, but the lack of impetus for artists to violate the bureaucratic or political boundaries of their clients have also to be acknowledged in this context. The result is that intimate links often exist between law, power and images. Political powers have developed elaborate rules about visuality which Douzinas argues result in an economy of permitted representations. ⁶⁴

V. Law and the merchant princes

The nineteenth-century second generation industrialists who dominated Liverpool council while debate about Lee’s bas reliefs raged had a very specific role that they wanted art to play in the public sphere. St George’s Hall played a particularly important symbolic role in the newly emerging civic landscape of Liverpool and represents an excellent example of the manifestation of Victorian civic pride. In an era in which it was generally assumed that architecture helped form the character of inhabitants, early Victorian cities such as Liverpool had been criticized for failing to instill any inspiring vision of community through their buildings. In the midst of this debate wealthy industrialists began to react against the slur that the new cities could be labeled spiritual or cultural wastelands. As advocates and beneficiaries of industrialization entered public debate about the state of the new metropolis by gaining positions on city and town councils, they promoted alternative images of the industrial city as a symbol of progress. The shift they sought to maneuver was from a vision of the city as a cradle of social disorder to that of a cradle of wealth and new, formative and liberating social values. ⁶⁵

The political sphere increasingly provided a forum in which these new voices could be heard as well as offering a mechanism for the new urban squirearchy to legitimize their position and sources of wealth. Like other industrial towns Liverpool was presided over by men whose family wealth had been earned rather than inherited. Their expertise in managing large-scale architectural and public art projects soon began to be seen as a more important determinant of power than breeding. ⁶⁶ Under their guidance, the contribution of commerce began to be viewed as symbiotic with the idea of civilization rather than an anathema to the idea. In Liverpool this was made explicit when St George’s Hall was formally dedicated to Arts and Law. ⁶⁷ The association between law and trade is also made clear in the six panels celebrating the commercial successes of Liverpool which sit alongside the six panels depicting the Progress of Justice.

A host of specialist building types emerged over this period but law courts such as those contained in St George’s Hall were important to the capitalist project in a way in which the museum or art gallery was not. The Assizes had traditionally been held in county towns but the newly emerging industrial conurbations began agitating to be granted the right to host the Assizes from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Such applications were fuelled by the fact that the grant of Assize conferred a status which went beyond recognition of a new city as a seat of culture; it conferred symbolic status as a provincial seat of state sanctioned and regional power. The prestige was such that Graham has described the grant as akin to a coronation. ⁶⁸ Significantly, architecture played an important role in bids to attract the grant and the standard of accommodation which was available for the most important regional courts could be decisive in the decision making process. St George’s Hall, Liverpool (1841–7), Manchester Assize Courts (1859–65) and the Victoria Law Courts (1887–91) were all constructed in the years immediately following the acquisition of the right by new industrial cities and each set higher standards of accommodation than was the norm.

Commentators to date have failed to look at the controversy surrounding Lee’s bas reliefs in the context of the building they were designed to adorn despite the fact that such an analysis provides a powerful indication of the political work the sculpture was expected to do. Given the successes of St George’s Hall in helping to attract the Assizes and favorable comment to Liverpool it seems likely that the last thing the Council intended to do was undermine the messages conveyed by the authoritative monument to law and stability it had constructed at great expense. Neither does it seem likely in a city which had been troubled by labor and sectarian riots throughout the century that ambivalent images of law were intended to be presented for consumption by the thousands of local residents who walked past Lee’s bas reliefs every day. This suggests that there was much more at stake in Council debate about the bas reliefs than is hinted at by newspaper coverage. The leaky boundaries of Lee’s Justitias can also be seen as a metaphor for the fragility of the new elite’s position. The ambivalent, and even revolutionary, messages about law which the sculptor’s artworks conveyed very clearly posed a threat to their authority.

VI. Subverting the Canon

Subversive representations of justice in public places are extremely rare but the fact that symbols acquire power and resonance through repeated use means that it often takes a violation of their code to remind us of their significance. The celebrated controversy around Klimt’s depiction of Jurisprudence for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna in 1903, the outrage sparked by Stefan Hirsch’s mural Justice as Protector & Avenger at the federal courthouse in South Carolina in 1938, and the more recent rejection by the South African Constitutional Court of the symbol of Justitia in favor of the African tree sparked debate precisely because of the way they challenged the canon and dared to hint at the injustice of law. ⁶⁹ In this remaining section I argue that the controversy surrounding the Liverpool Justitias went beyond their depiction of naturalistic adolescent and unclothed bodies and that as a result the debate demands a more nuanced critique than has been undertaken to date. I contend that these sculptures also caused upset because of their alternative depiction of Justice as the province of the people and their association of law with morality in an age in which the concept of legal positivism was gaining in popularity.

By robbing Justitia of the usual props associated with authority and high social status such as the sword, scale, book or sumptuous robe Lee draws us into a more complex account of law than we are accustomed to. Rather than being depicted as a strident and authoritative woman the artist presents us with a Justitia who is a vulnerable adolescent. Lee’s decision to represent Justitia as a child is clearly an unusual one in this context since the use of children to represent any grandiose abstraction tends to be rare in both sculpture and painting. ⁷⁰ The choice would appear to have been motivated in this case by the interest he shared with Alfred Gilbert in emergent female maturity ⁷¹ but the implications of his choice are considerable. The confidence of the mature Justitia with whom we are familiar is replaced by a girl who is in need of tutoring. She is being asked to make difficult choices but her journey is not an isolated one, nor her achievements those of one individual. Lee’s Justitia is led by Conscience and Wisdom but faces the challenge of Wealth and Fame tempting her from her proper path. When the artist was eventually allowed to complete the series we find that in only one panel of the six does Justitia stand alone and independent and that Virtue, Concord, Righteousness and Immortality all play their role in supporting her. A clear message being conveyed is that rather than possessing wisdom she is being instructed in it. The result is that we are presented with a Justitia not yet capable of authoritative judgments. Instead she offers us subjective insights into her journey to wisdom. We are exposed to images of weakness rather than strength and a reflexive adjudicator rather than one unthinkingly bound by formal and rational rules.

Regardless of whether it is a conscious undertaking by the artist, it could be argued that we are presented with a Justitia who represents the feminine domain of jurisprudence in which context is prized over certainty. This interpretation of the bas reliefs accord well with the intellectual challenges posed by the New Sculpture Movement. For Glaves-Smith one of the most important characteristics of this school was that the female form was frequently associated with the evocation of the life of the mind, fantasy and dream while the male form was commonly used to represent physical activity. ⁷² Far from being sexually accessible, as is suggested by those who focused on the naturalism of the naked body, the ‘‘reverie’’ of New Sculpture frequently placed the female beyond the spectators’ grasp in an attempt to hint at deeper meanings than had been conveyed in the mechanical production of statues in previous generations. The trance-like state of the child Justitia in Lee’s first panel and her open-eyed recognition of Wisdom evoke just such a sense of inner contemplation. The interpretation is also one which reflects the particular philosophy of art which Lee promoted. His writings on sculpture, which for some have proven more influential than the body of artwork he left behind, suggest that sculpture was essentially an affair of the spirit in which physical beauty was meant to symbolize the rare prize of human fellowship and communion. In a lecture Lee gave in 1889 he argued that sculpture should represent ‘‘the great thoughts of your philosophers, the dreams of your poets, the great victories of your warriors, the ever spreading influence of civilisation, its truth, its justice and its liberties.’’ ⁷³ Most significantly for the purposes of this article commentators have suggested that Lee’s symbolism was concerned with moral and civic instruction for the public rather than with the private fantasies of his New Sculpture colleagues such as Alfred Gilbert and George Frampton.

This last comment takes us on to a point which is particularly important for legal scholars. As a devout Anglican and revolutionary sculptor Lee believed that civic art could and must express religious conviction. His suggestion that law does not stand in isolation but is in need of guidance flew in the face of the arguments of contemporary legal philosophers who were emphasizing the isolation of law from other spheres. Reflecting on how Lee’s tender and optimistic account of the evolution of law must have been received in the hardened and cynical commercial sector Morris has suggested that:

… Lee’s benign conception of justice was entirely alien to the fashionable but bleak and totalitarian positivism of the great nineteenth century theorist, John Austin, for whom law was strictly defined as the will of the sovereign and was thus entirely unrelated to custom or morality, not to mention the eight Virtues which Lee had represented as the essential supporters of justice. ⁷⁴

Far from deriving her power from the establishment Lee also depicts Justitia as a child of the poor. His Justitia has been robbed of the regal classical robes which commonly denote high social status. Critics surmised that her low social status could be gleaned from the emaciated condition of the child figure and her distended stomach. In a paper written by James Boult for the first Arts Congress in Liverpool, but never delivered, it was contended that:

In Justice the sculptor has been evidently very successful in portraying a gutter child, very much neglected not only by the police and the relieving officer, but also by the Society for Preventing Cruelty to Children, who might surely find a cloth of some kind to cover her nakedness. ⁷⁵

The suggestion that the child Justitia was intended to be associated with the underclass is more than mere speculation. When Stirling Lee exhibited the first panel at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1886 the catalogue noted that the girl in the first panel was a child of the poor. ⁷⁶ In common with other artists of the time, and encouraged by social commentators such as Ruskin, it seems likely that Lee had an interest in attempting to dignify the activity of labour by investing it with associations derived from high art. His interest in the lot of the poor may also have stemmed from personal experience as we know that he was active in running youth clubs for the poor. Whatever the source of his interest it is clear that Lee’s Justitia does not glorify or romanticize the impoverished in the way that contemporaries such as Leighton did in The Mower. The challenge he poses instead is to suggest the active enfranchisement of the poor by their involvement in the administration of justice. One can imagine that the connection he drew between the lowly and Virtue is likely to have confused the middle classes who had come by the end of the nineteenth century to expect the much-reformed legal system as primarily serving their interests.

VII. Conclusion

The story of the bas reliefs on St George’s Hall did not end with the rejection of the second panel. After lengthy debate on the matter Stirling Lee was finally allowed to complete the series of six bas reliefs when Councillor Rathbone offered to defray the cost as a gift to the community. ⁷⁷ The decision was well received by those who argued that Liverpool had become the laughing stock of the art community. ⁷⁸ The agreement that Rathbone struck with the Council was that the panels would remain in place for at least two years without being covered in any way ⁷⁹ and that after that time the Council could order for them to be removed if it wished. The final panel was completed in 1894 and somewhat miraculously, given the furore they caused, they all remain in place today. ⁸⁰ Art critics have suggested that the remaining panels are noticeably less freely designed and more rigid and insipid than the first two and surmised that if right eventually triumphed it was at the cost of being tamed by the demands of those with an interest in political stability.

Debate surrounding Lee’s depiction of Justitia on the side of one of England’s most important nineteenth-century monuments to law provide us with an excellent case study of the fragility of the law’s relationship with art and its fear of the image. ⁸¹ The potential for tension between the two disciplines is clear. While art has largely been assigned by society to the realms of imagination, creativity and playfulness, law, by contrast has increasingly been assigned to control, discipline and sobriety. Douzinas and Nead have argued that the danger of art for lawyers is that images give visual form to invisible powers and make present what is absent and cannot be represented. They speak directly to the senses and ‘‘affect the psyche by addressing the labile elements of the self and avoid the calming intervention of logos, language and reason.’’ ⁸² In the same way that churches had once excluded icons the law was increasingly encouraged to banish figures and imagery and the fear of images, displaced into judicial hermeneutics, became the fear of plural meanings and diverse interpretations. ⁸³ For Jay (1999) the blindfolding of Justitia can be seen as a symbol of the shift towards the modern cult of the abstract norm in juridical positivism. At the same time as increasingly standardized statues of Justitia were appearing in the new civic landscapes of Europe artwork was also being removed from courtrooms, images were being taken from legal treatise and lawyers were increasingly dressing themselves in sombre robes.

Viewed in this way we begin to see how standardized artworks depicting Justitia are best understood as being symbolic of regulation rather than freedoms, state authority rather than common sense notions of justice and complicity rather than rebellion. The images of justice we have come to accept as a ‘‘given’’ do not challenge or question the political or legal elite; rather they reinforce their status as law givers. Some readers may view this story of Lee’s bas reliefs as an historical account which has little contemporary relevance but attempts to control images of justice abound. This goes some way to explaining the ongoing popularity of hackneyed representations of justice adorning contemporary justice facilities across the world. Standardized images of Justitia retain their popularity because they comply with a code which encourages us to aspire to the noble ideals of justice whilst accepting it as being synonymous with state authority. Lee’s controversial and unconventional images of justice provide us with the potential to tell different stories about how law might be imagined in the public domain.