Do you recognise this statue? The photo was taken circa 1974 by a Resonance FM listener who dearly wants to know where this severely truncated work of art can be found. It occurred to me that the statue may never have been more than a pair of feet, so while not strictly dishonest, the text below the art-work is misleading.
I think it refers to a poem by Shelley
OZYMANDIAS
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away
I like that theory… if only we knew where it was.
We have another clue: The inquirer said the photo was taken by his dad who at the time was doing a shoot of London’s lesser-known landmarks for “Taxi” magazine.
Or maybe the plaque is also part of the statue… meaning that it is a kind of brain-twisting recursive statement.
There is a painting of the statue in Germany
(Google the inscription).
the statue is in one of the Embankment gardens/bits of scrub opp. N side of Chelsea Bridge, at least it was when I photographed it about the same year..
heart-rending aint it? ‘this is all that remains..’
it is/was opp N end of Chelsea Bridge..in the Embankment Garden/scrubland.. in early 70s