During the 19th century in London, England, an increased interest developed in publicly displaying plaster casts.  Collecting them was not only an attempt to improve art and architecture in England, but also to educate the nation and “silently, but surely raise the standard of taste in the community.”  In 1881, George Gilbert Scott desired to establish an educational museum in London, the Royal Architectural Museum.  By 1903, the museum had to close its doors and the collection was divided.  The majority of the works went to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  That museum became an important leader in the collecting and displaying of plaster casts.

 Also becoming prominent in the art of collecting and displaying plaster casts was Paris, France.  During his travels in Europe, Napoleon had plaster casts made when he was unable to acquire the original sculpture work.  The locations for France’s grand collection became the Ecote des Beaux-Arts and the Musee de Sculpture Comparee.

Un coin d’atelier de sculpture [1880]
by Édouard Dantan [1848-1897]
Musée des Avelines, Saint-Cloud

France was also responsible for the first shipment of plaster casts to the United States that arrived in February, 1806.  Napoleon authorized the first shipment, which aided students in their drawing classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  Between the mid-19th century—to the early 20th century, New York, Chicago, and Pennsylvania became the leading states to collection the plaster casts in the United States.

Upon his death in 1883, Levi Hale Willard bequeathed a large sum of money to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.  The money was intended to start a collection of “models, casts, photographs, and other illustrative of the arts.”  As a consequence, in 1886, donor Henry G. Marquand requested that sculptural casts were added to this collection.  The collection at the Metropolitan grew rapidly and they were exhibited in the large hall—presently known as the front hall.

By the mid-20th century, plaster casts were beginning to fall out of favor in museums.  The largest reason for the change in attitude was because museums began to focus their acquisition upon works by the original hand of the sculptor.  In 1949, the Art Institute of Chicago destroyed some of their plaster cast collection; maintaining that the casts were too expensive to restore, and created a fire hazard in storage.  Other institutions and museums followed suit.  Presently, the works that are housed in the storage spaces for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are largely being donated to universities across the United States.

The trend in the history of collecting and displaying plaster casts both rises and falls, as many trends do.  Over the course of thousands of years, the authenticity of ancient sculptural works both rose, and fell in popularity.  Presently, the perception regarding ancient works—whether they are replicas or not—is changing again.  Appreciation for the antique is again on the upswing!

The History of Plaster Casts
George Mason University
History & Art History Departament

Enrico Cantoni [1860-1923] worked with the sculptor Edouard Lanteri modelling and sculpting the human figure

Edouard Lanteri [1848-1917]
Edouard Lanteri was a French-born British sculptor and medallist whose romantic French style of sculpting was seen as influential among exponents of New Sculpture. Lanteri's sculptures were mainly modelled in clay before being cast in bronze, though he would also work in stone. He produced portrait busts, statuettes and life size statues.

As of 1880 he taught at the National Art Training School in South Kensington (later renamed the Royal College of Art) and in 1900 became the College's first Professor of Modelling (1900-10); in this role he was involved with the architectural and decorative sculpture for Sir Aston Webb's Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Source: Wikipedia