Dr Joseph Smith (1670 - 1756).
The Mural Memorial with a Bust.
by William Tyler R.A. (c. 1728 - 1801).
1756.
At The Queen's College, Oxford.
with some notes etc on William Tyler.
__________________________
William Tyler was a pupil of Louis Francois Roubiliac.
with some notes etc on William Tyler.
__________________________
William Tyler was a pupil of Louis Francois Roubiliac.
The Royal Academy have a copy of a brief autobiography.
see my post -
https://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2024/06/relief-with-diogenes-by-william-tyler.html?m=0
___________________________
___________________________
Joseph Smith was Provost of the Queen's College Oxford from 1730 until his death in 1756.
In 1731 he was instrumental in procuring through the offices of Arthur Onslow and John Selwyn the sum of £1000 from Queen Caroline for the finishing of the College buildings.
He was responsible for placing the statue of Queen Caroline by Henry Cheere in the rotunda on the High Street front of Queen's College.
For a brief look at the project for the statue of Queen Caroline on the front at Queen's see my previous post.
http://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/two-statues-queen-caroline.html
___________________________________________
For a very useful contemporary biography of Joseph Smith see
(Kippis's) Biographia Britannica: Or the Lives of the Most Eminent
Persons ..., 1763, - Volume 6. pp 3734 - 3744.
Available on line through Google Books.
____________________________
For a more recent history of the 18th century building work at Queen's College and the work of Joseph Smith
see - The Queen's College by John Richard Magrath D.D. 1921.
https://archive.org/details/queenscollege02magr
____________________________
For a more recent history of the 18th century building work at Queen's College and the work of Joseph Smith
see - The Queen's College by John Richard Magrath D.D. 1921.
https://archive.org/details/queenscollege02magr
____________________________________
Joseph Smith (1670 - 1756).
James Maubert (1666 - 1746) attrib.
Oil on Canvas.
126 x 101 cms.
Gift from the son of the sitter, Josephus Smith, LLD, 1761.
Image courtesy Art U.K. website
Joseph Smith was a student at Queen's; Chaplain to Caroline,
Princess of Wales, 1715 and Provost of Queen's, 1730–1756.
The papers on the
table on the left are inscribed ‘The Treaty of Ryswick, 1697', and lie on a
book ‘Smith, Devine Being'. His left hand holds the book ‘Beveridge's Thoughts'
which was published more than 40 times between 1709–1755. The South front of Queen's College is depicted behind the sitter.
Joseph Smith.
Attributed to James Maubert (1666 - 1746).
Oil on Canvas
74 x 60 cms.
Queens College, Oxford.
Gift from the son of the sitter, Josephus Smith, LLD, 1761.
Image courtesy Art U.K. website
Joseph Smith - List of Works.
Modern Pleas for Schism and Infidelity Reviewed, London,
1717.
A Modest Review of the Bishop of Bangor's Answer to Dr.
Snape, London, 1717. An early pamphlet in the Bangorian controversy, and unlike
others of January 1717, under a real name.[2]
Some Considerations offered to the Bishop of Bangor on his
Preservative against the Principles of the Nonjurors, London, 1717.
The Unreasonableness of Deism, London, 1720.
Anarchy and Rebellion, 1720.
A View of the Being, Nature, and Attributes of God, Oxford,
1756;
________________________
Front of Queen's College, Oxford.
Showing the Cupola with the statue of Queen Caroline by Henry Cheere.
Photograph by William Fox Talbot. 1843.
________________________________________________
Oxford Almanack, 1762.
___________________________
.jpg)
William Taylor R.A.
George Dance (1741 - 1825).
Pencil and red chalk.
24.7 x 19.7 cms
Christie's - Lot 128, 7th December 2016
Also included in this lot were portraits of the sculptor Joseph Wilton and Thomas Hardwick
Image Courtesy Christie's, South Kensington, London.
_______________________________
William Tyler R.A. (c. 1728 - 1801).
by George Dance.
249 x 186 mm.
dated 17 October 1796.
Image from the Royal Academy Website
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/portrait-of-william-tyler-r-a
________________________________________
For a good potted biography of William Tyler see -
http://liberty.henry-moore.org/henrymoore/sculptor/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=2764
I have lifted the following from the above website
________________________________________
For a good potted biography of William Tyler see -
A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660-1851
http://liberty.henry-moore.org/henrymoore/sculptor/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=2764
Tyler was an accomplished monumental sculptor and architect
and a founder member of the Royal Academy. From references in Joseph
Farington’s Diary his date of birth can be fixed as being between 1727 and
1729. Tyler’s family background is obscure although he described himself as the
‘son and grandson of a citizen [of London]’ (CLRO MSS 5.18 quoted in Roscoe
1997 (2), 181), and it is known that his mother died, aged 88, in January 1795.
His family must have been well-to-do, as Tyler was sent to Westminster School,
and was subsequently placed with the leading sculptor of the day, Louis
François Roubiliac, with whom he studied for ‘many years’ (ibid).
Tyler married when he was 22 and Joseph Nollekens RA later
recalled that in about 1760 he ‘lived in Dean Street nearly opposite Anne’s
Church, where his wife kept a shop and sold watch springs or something of the
kind’ (Farington, vol 4, 1316). Tyler must already have had an established
business as a sculptor by this time for in the early 1760s he applied for two
of the most lucrative commissions of the day. In 1760, in competition with his
former master, he submitted a design for the monument in Westminster Abbey to
General Wolfe (5) and in January 1762 he offered himself as a candidate for the
statue of George III in the Royal Exchange. In both cases the commission went
to Joseph Wilton RA.
Tyler played a role in all the fledgling art institutions of
the capital. In 1760 he was one of the sculptors involved in the programme of
arts connected with the Foundling Hospital, and he exhibited at the Society of
Artists exhibitions from their inception in 1760. In 1765 he became one of the
Society’s directors, and in December 1768 he was one of the 40 artists whose
names appear on the ‘Instrument of Foundation’ of the Royal Academy. The only
other sculptors to achieve the latter distinction were Wilton and Agostino
Carlini.
From 1763 to 1784 Tyler had premises in Vine Street,
Piccadilly. His earliest known work is a very competent multi-figured relief of
Diogenes, carved in several gradations (72). He appears to have specialised in
monuments of a modest size, sometimes working in collaboration with the
architects Robert Adam (10) and Henry Keene (27, 41). Working to Keene’s design
he carved the remarkable rococo monument to the 3rd Earl of Lichfield which has
two urns in a recessed oval niche, set in a convex frame of yellow marble and
surmounted by a white marble oak tree (27).
Several of his earliest known
monuments have expressive portrait busts in the manner of Roubiliac, for
instance the memorials to Joseph Smith, Samuel Vassall and Thomas Jones (2, 12,
18). His use of multi-coloured marbles and lively putti suggests he was also
influenced by Sir Henry Cheere and Sir Robert Taylor. Elements in Tyler’s
compositions were sometimes repeated: cherubs decorating an urn with garlands
appear on the monuments to the 4th Earl of Lichfield and the 2nd Viscount
Ashbrook (41, 50) and were later used by Nollekens. The detailing and finish of
Tyler’s monuments is always of a very high standard.
He also sent out chimneypieces, including one to a design by
Sir William Chambers for Milton Hall, 1772 (67). At this time Tyler’s business
must have been in difficulties, for Chambers wrote to Lord Fitzwilliam
enclosing Tyler’s bill and adding ‘If it is convenient to your Lordship, Mr.
Tyler will, I believe, be very thankful for the money as he told me in
confidence he was as poor as could be’ (Chambers’s Letter-Books, BL Add MS
41133).
In another letter Chambers passed on Tyler’s thanks to Lord Fitzwilliam
for looking after Tyler’s man, who had fallen sick when working at Milton
(ibid). In about 1773 Tyler embarked on a tour of Derbyshire and Yorkshire with
the painter Francis Cotes and the author Theodosius Forrest. An anonymous
account of the tour records that Tyler used the trip to find business, securing
a commission for a chimneypiece from Lady Rockingham at Wentworth Woodhouse
(68).
Some time after 1779 he appears to have gone into
partnership with his former pupil, Robert Ashton I, with whom he signed several
monuments (47, 48, 56, 57). Their greatest achievement together is the monument
to Dr Martin Folkes (56), which has a full-size seated statue of the dignified
scholar leaning on his publications.
In the 1780s Tyler practised increasingly as an architect,
designing the Villa Maria at Kensington for the Duchess of Gloucester (now
demolished), and making alterations to a house in Hampton Court for the Duke,
for whom he also acted as an ‘agent’ (Farington, vol 3, 796, 14 March 1797). He
worked on two gaols, Maidstone and Dorchester, and designed the town hall in
Bridport. Colvin believed his finest work as an architect was the Ordnance
Office in Westminster, 1779-80, which was demolished in 1805. Tyler may also
have worked on a project in Derby, where he travelled with Sir John Soane in
1796. Nollekens told Joseph Farington that Tyler was appointed mason or
bricklayer to the Board of Ordnance by Lord Amherst (Farington vol 4, 1316),
for whose family Tyler also produced two church monuments (51, 58).
Tyler was a prominent member of the Royal Academy in the
1790s, despite suffering from fevers, rheumatism and diabetes. He played a role
in the attempted removal of Sir Joshua Reynolds as president in 1790 and
contributed many reminiscences to Farington’s projected history of the progress
of the arts in England. In 1796 he and his friend George Dance (whose portrait
of Tyler hangs in Burlington House) became the Academy’s first auditors. They
put the financial affairs of the Academy onto a more professional footing and
several of their reforms are still in force. In 1799 Tyler was presented with a
silver cup for his efforts. He wrote a short account of his own life for the
first volume of Dance’s Portraits of Academicians in 1798.
Tyler died in his house in Caroline Street, Bedford Square,
on 6 September, 1801. In his will he requested to be buried in the family vault
in the churchyard of Tottenham High Cross. He left £1,000 in shares to pay for
the apprenticeship of his son William Jackson, who was then ten years old and
lived with his mother Mary Jackson at Overton, near Ellesmere, Salop.
Despite
early financial difficulties, Tyler’s practice in sculpture and architecture
had ultimately been profitable: he left property in Upper Seymour Street,
Portman Square, Gower Street and Bedford Square, and a sum of £2,450 in named
and numbered gifts, including £100 to Robert Ashton II. He also left provision
for his sister, Mary.
On seeing the press report of the death of his ‘worthy
friend,’ Farington, wrote a brief tribute in his diary to a ‘cheerful’ and
‘good-humoured’ man whose ‘convivial and social turn of mind’ had done much to bring
harmony to an often factious Royal Academy (Farington, vol 5, 1618).
The reactions of other contemporaries were less generous,
for Tyler’s artistic abilities were not felt to be equal to his status as an
Academician. Nathaniel Marchant said he ‘was no artist,’ whilst King George
III, in conversation with Benjamin West after Tyler’s death, was baffled as to
how such ‘an odd man’ came to be an Academician at all (Farington, vol 3, 827;
vol 6, 2214).
The short notice of Tyler in the DNB (1885-1900) dismissed him as
a sculptor of little ability, and Whinney has subsequently called him
‘relatively unimportant’ (Whinney 1988, 269).
Gunnis however felt that Tyler’s
busts were ‘extremely well modelled’ and that his monuments had ‘great charm’
(Gunnis 1968, 404).
More recently Baker has provided a new biography for the
ODNB and he concludes that Tyler’s monuments are stylistically progressive and
show a high quality of execution, whilst Tyler himself deserves recognition for
his role in the institutions which shaped sculptural practice in the late-18th
century. (Inf. Roger Smith)
MGS
Literary References: Mortimer 1763, 28; Farington, passim;
Builder 1859, 849; Graves IV, 1905-6, 50; Graves 1907, 262; Gunnis 1968, 403-4;
Hutchison 1986, 28, 56, 245; Whinney 1988, passim; Colvin 1995, 999; Bindman
and Baker 1995, 170, 221, 336; ODNB (Baker)
Archival References: Forrest’s Tours, fols 22-56
Miscellaneous Drawings: Denison of Ossington Papers, Notts
Univ library, MSS and Special Colls, De 2 P/14-16, proposed designs for the
monument to William Denison with an estimate of £412 (unexecuted)
Will: PROB 11/1363/619, 19 September 1801
Portraits of the sculptor: Johan Zoffany Life Class at the
Royal Academy 1771-2, oil on canvas (Royal Coll); George Dance, Royal Academy,
Library0
__________________________________________
Samuel Vassall (1586 - 1667).
Marble Monument.
William Tyler
Kings Chapel.
Boston, Mass.
____________________________
Thomas Carew (ob 1766) & Mary (ob 1738) and Mary (ob
1757)
By Tyler (Gunnis).
Carew Aisle - North of Nave.
Crowcombe, Somerset,
__________________________________________
