The Good Samaritan tending to a wounded man while a priest
and Levite walk away.
AMarble Relief on the Monument to Jacob Bosenquet 1767.
by William Collins.
Bath Abbey.
William Collins (1721-93) was a pupil of the sculptor Henry Cheere (1702-1781). Working in marble, stone or plaster, he specialised in religious and mythological scenes. He was among the group that founded the Society of Artists in 1759, and used their exhibitions to showcase his bas-reliefs.
He was born in 1721 but nothing is currently known of his
family background. He became a pupil of Sir Henry Cheere and subsequent
payments to Collins in his master’s bank account suggest that he carved work in
sub-contract for Cheere’s thriving workshop.
Only seven apprentices to Henry Cheere are recorded in the London Apprentice
Records, (Sir) Robert Taylor in 1732, who had set up independently by the mid
1740's, but had property next to Cheere in Spring Gardens, Charing Cross.
Richard Hayward (1728 - 1800) joined him in 1742 after previously working with
Christopher Horsnaile I . William Collins (1721 - 93) worked with him supplying
elements for chimneypieces, William Powell and William Woodman both
subcontracted to him.
In December 1751 Collins was described in the London Evening
Post as ‘a figure maker at Hyde Park Corner’. The article was a puff for ‘Iron
Pear-Tree Water,’ a quack medicine which was claimed to have cured, in a mere
24 hours, a sore on Collins’s leg, that had troubled him for two years. The
miraculous recovery was confirmed by John Cheere and his assistants, and it is
possible that Collins was at this time working for John Cheere brother of Henry which produced multiples in plaster and lead.
After leaving Cheere’s workshop in c.1760, Collins pursued an independent practice as a sculptor.
By 1763, he had set up his own workshop on Channel-Row – also known as Canon Row – in Westminster - a few hundred metres from Cheere’s shop on St Margaret’s Lane.
The bulk of Collins’s exhibited reliefs appear to have been
intended for chimneypieces, and J T Smith was later to describe him as ‘the
most famous modeller of chimney-tablets of his day’ (Smith 1828, 2, 313).
Smith, however, considered Collins’s work to be lacking in nobility: ‘his
figures were mostly clothed, and exhibited pastoral scenes, which were
understood by the most common observer such as, for instance, a shepherd-boy
eating his dinner under an old stump of a tree, with his dog begging before him;
shepherds and shepherdesses seated upon a bank surrounded by their flocks;
anglers, reapers, etc’ (ibid). Several tablets with pastoral motifs have been
attributed to Collins (7, 8, 19, 20) and the similarity of Smith’s description
to a known design by Sir Henry Cheere in the Victoria and Albert Museum also
suggests that Collins may have been the executant of many of Cheere’s
chimneypiece tablets
When Henry Cheere died in 1781 he left Collins £100 in his
will.
Adam commissions: Collins supplied Adam with plaster casts
and bas-reliefs, which were installed in niches, over doorframes and above
chimneypieces. For Kedleston House in Derbyshire, Collins supplied decorative
roundels for the exterior. He also worked for Adam at Harewood House and
Nostell Priory in Yorkshire. The architect James Paine praised ‘the ingenious
Mr William Collins’, but relations with Adam were sometimes fraught. Adam
complained of his delayed production schedule, apologising to his patron Sir
Rowland Winn on the sculptor’s behalf: ‘Mr Collins promised me to have the
Tablet for the Library Chimney sent to my house, end of last week, but has
likewise dissappointed [sic] me as I have not yet got it from him.’
Collins’s most notable works were perhaps for Burton
Constable, where he was responsible for three full-size statues including a
youthful Mercury and Cupid, competitively rolling dice on a rock (1-3). A
design for the plaster oval of Pan and the Graces survives at Burton Constable,
marked ‘Collins’ by the owner, William Constable (37). If this work is by
Collins it demonstrates not only his developed skills in draughtsmanship, but
also his ability to compose original designs.
He died in 1793 at his house in Tothill Fields, Westminster, and was buried in the cemetery in King’s Road, Chelsea.
His entire estate, including properties in Bath and
Weston-super-Mare, was left to his only daughter, Elizabeth. The Gentleman’s
Magazine carried a notice of his death in June, adding that his ‘works as an
artist have been long known and admired in this country’ (GM, June 1793, 577)
Literary References : Mortimer 1763, 8; Smith 1828, II, 313;
Graves II, 1905-6, 62; Soc of Artists Papers, 1759-61, 116; Girouard 1965, 968;
Gunnis 1968, 111-2; Friedman and Clifford 1974, Appendix C; Clifford 1992,
41-2; ODNB (MB); Craske 2000 (2), 100, 112 n16; Baker 2000, 77; Bilbey 2002,
68-9
Archival References: Walton and Dunn Accounts, Burton
Constable, 1764; Collins/ Constable 1769
Will: Henry Cheere, PROB 11/1073/95; William Collins PROB
11/1233/303
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