From memorial to museum piece? John Flaxman’s monument to George Lindsay Johnstone

This article uses John Flaxman’s monument to the politician George Lindsay Johnstone to consider the importance of the smaller monuments in the Westminster Abbey pantheon and, more generally, the importance of the relationship between sculpture and space. It argues that the monument was originally conceived for the cloisters, where its size, iconography and epitaph accorded with a space that prioritized the local abbey community. When ultimately placed in the nave, these characteristics became deficiencies, twice encouraging the movement of the monument to other locations on the abbey floor. This article considers the monument’s removal to the triforium, a space increasingly used as a convenient repository for sculptural superfluities, as an expression of a mid-nineteenth-century re-evaluation that drained the Johnstone monument of any memorializing significance and deemed it distracting clutter. The monument remained in the triforium when it was repurposed as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries in 2018. The article analyses the recontextualization of the monument as a museum piece and argues that this would not have been unfamiliar to Flaxman, who regularly exhibited similar memorials in the gallery spaces of the Royal Academy before sending them to their final destinations.