John Millais Despairs the Popularity of Hiram Powers's "The Greek Slave"

The Corcoran has never collected PRB work, but it does have in its collection one famous work that represented to the PRB everything wrong with the conventions of academic art. The Greek Slave was one of the undisputed "hits" of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Elizabeth Barratt Browning wrote a sonnet directly based on it. Millais singled it out as an example of degraded popular and critical taste. See p 27 of JR Piggott's Palace of the People for a description of the controversies in the popular press about American slavery that the sculpture set into motion. Fascinating!

Powers made a number of copies, at least six, because it was so popular. One of the copies was acquired by WW Corcoran, so sadly ours was not the actual one in The Great Exhibition.

The image on the left is not from The Crystal Palace, but from a gallery in Dusseldorf.