International sculptor Philip Jackson celebrates Midhurst with very special gift

The weather stayed fine for an unveiling ceremony attended by more than 250 people. Downton Abbey and Paddington star Hugh Bonneville read a passage from Dante’s epic poem The Divine Comedy and gave a short address about the arts and the importance of Dante. The sculpture is sited beside the South Pond in Midhurst. Former Mayor of Chichester Richard Plowman was MC for the day.

Philip explains: “This goes back to 2018 when Harvey Tordoff, who was at the time the chairman of the Midhurst Society, rang me and asked if I would be prepared to put one of my working models into Midhurst and rotate it every four months so that I had effectively a continuous exhibition in Midhurst. I thanked him and said I was very honoured but it wouldn't work because working models are used to go to the foundry and they're not bronze and they will get broken. But I spoke to my wife Jean and we decided that because I had lived in and worked in the Midhurst area for 40 years that I would offer the town a bronze sculpture on the proviso that no one objected to it. The last thing I wanted to do was to force a piece of sculpture onto a community that didn't want it. The town council accepted the idea and the question was then what should the sculpture be. At the time I had a small sculpture called Dante Looking For Paradise, and around about that time The Times did an article about the best places to live in England and Midhurst came out on top. The journalist referred to it as a little bit of English paradise and I thought that that would be the perfect hook. Then I thought about Dante and then I thought about Dante finding paradise in Midhurst! Everyone went along with that and I made the sculpture and we had it cast and it has now been unveiled. Harvey Tordoff was the person who nursed it all the way through. You would not believe all the rigmarole that you have to go through to get something in place whether it is London or Midhurst. Harvey is a quiet and very determined man who did a wonderful job.

“I'm very pleased with the way it went and I'm very pleased that it seems to have been accepted by everyone. Because we spend a bit of time in Europe I was conscious that Dante is a cultural figure of enormous stature in Europe, and in Europe most people would be able to tell you who he was. But in this country there is something about the channel that he has perhaps not come over here so I thought it would be really nice if the sculpture promoted an understanding of Dante. At the unveiling we had Francesco Bongarrà who is the director of the Italian Cultural Centre in London. He and his family are steeped in Dante. He was absolutely thrilled by it. He thanked everyone from Italy. He almost sees as a gift to Italy.”

Also in attendance were representatives from the Ravenna-based Friends of Chichester and the Chichester-based Friends of Ravenna: “Dante was a very renaissance figure. He was everything really but because of his political activities he was exiled on pain of death from Florence. He was a Florentine and it was the most devastating thing. He wandered Italy for a time and settled in Ravenna and died in Ravenna and every day still they read a passage from the Divine Comedy in Ravenna.”

Chichester is twinned with Ravenna.