Frederick Edward McWilliam, R.A. (1909-1992)

‘The Slade sculpture course in 1948 specified ‘modelling from the antique and the Life’, and included stone-carving and lettering. The year he joined the staff, McWilliam made an elm-wood carving clearly based on the reconstructed cast of Ariadne in the Museo dei Gessi, Rome. De Chirico had also used this figure, notable in his 1913 painting The Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour whose aura and strangeness derives in part from the statue’s location in an unstable space. McWilliam produced a frisson from the sculpture itself by reversing the position of the legs and creating a taut space in place of a torso to give the work a strong inner tension. Roman Matron thus offered a reinterpretation of both the antique and Surrealism’ (D. Ferran and V. Holman, The Sculpture of F.E. McWilliam, Farnham, 2012, p. 23).