Response to “The Bible in Clay: George Tinworth’s Fountain for the Paris International Exhibition 1878”

This response to the paper “The Bible in Clay: George Tinworth’s Fountain for the Paris International Exhibition 1878” presses the distinctions Maddie Hewitson makes between nineteenth-century art’s harnessing of the Bible and of Greek and Roman antiquity. It raises the question of whether French and British visitors understood these antiquities in the same way and argues—contra Hewitson—that the tethering of Biblical art to Scripture makes it less “liquid” than many artworks in the classical tradition. Tinworth’s fountain tests this tethering by privileging water and flow. As with world fairs themselves, its power arguably lies as much in the unpredictable flood of opportunity as in the “anchoring of innovation”.