The Burghley House Medusa.
It is not clear if it is signed or dated.
Probably the first
recorded use of the Cavaceppi Type Eared Socle by Nollekens.
c. 176/23.
Carved in Rome.
The bust is a copy of a famous Roman sculpture known as the Rondanini Medusa.
Nollekens met Brownlow, 9th Earl of Exeter (1725-1793), in
1764 when the Earl was travelling in the company of Lord and Lady Spencer, the
actor David Garrick, and Lord Palmerston.
A later entry in the 1763 Burghley Inventory records: ‘the
drawing room, 3’d George room .. Head of Medusa in White Marble on the
Chimney’. Where it is still to be found.
Nollekens in Rome 1761
- 1770.
I have in the past written at some length on the portrait sculpture of Hewetson – in a series of 36 essays attempting to pin down all the portrait busts sculpted by him. He appears to have only used the eared socle once in his bust of Luigi Gonzaga di Castigleone in 1776. In these posts I have attempted to analyse how his socles were carved using a sort of template design, probably by his assistant.
See my post
on Hewtson - https://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-pair-of-anonymous-marble-busts-of.html
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Joseph Nollekens (1737
– 1823).
Nolleken’s
Studio, after he returned from Rome was in Mortimer Street. He was a very prolific
sculptor of statuary and in particular portrait busts and he operated a thriving
workshop employing numerous assistants until he died in 1823.
A favourite
book of mine, for many reasons and should be consulted by anyone interested in
18th and early 19th Century art, is the slightly
scurrilous Nollekens and his Times by the engraver and latterly librarian at
the British Museum, John Thomas Smith published in 1828 who worked briefly in he
Nollekens studio and was intimately acquainted with him. Smith was an executor of his will
Nollekens’
master was Peter Scheemakers who he was assistant to for four years and worked
as a journey man for a further three years before going to Rome.
Prince Hoare
another assistant of Scheemakers left Rome in 1749, after a sojourn of at least
seven years. In 1748 he was joined in Rome by another sculptor, Simon Vierpyl
(1725ca.-1810),
In Rome, Vierpyl worked as a copyist for patrons usually from Ireland, where he himself was to settle after leaving Italy in 1756. Vierpyl connected with other travelling British artists – such as Joshua Reynolds (who included him in his parody of the School of Athens of 1751, today in the National Gallery of Ireland) with whom he shared rooms in Palazzo Zuccari.
Among his acquaintances
was also the sculptor Joseph Wilton (1722-1803) who arrived in Rome on an unspecified
date sometime between 1747 and 1749, after training in France and Flanders.
Nollekens had been the recipient of the first prize by the Society of Arts in London in1759 and used the
premium to travel to Rome.
He spent
eight years in Rome from 1761 to 1770, arriving 11 August 1761.
In 1763 he won a prize from the Scuola del
Nudo in Campidoglio.
Nollekens
appears in a list of antique dealers and restorers drawn up for Giannangelo
Braschi and linked to the acquisitions for the nascent Museo Pio Clementino,
together with Thomas Jenkins, Piranesi, Bartolomeo
Cavaceppi and Giuseppe Angelini. (see Wilton-Ely,
p. 594).
For a long
time the Accademia di San Luca portrait bust of Piranesi (illustrated here) was
attributed to Nollekens assistant Angelini,
creator of the full figure statue of Piranesi set on the artist tomb’s in Santa
Maria del Priorato. Rome.
Angelini,
who from about 1770 was
to collaborate for some years with Nollekens in London, had worked alongside
Nollekens for both Cavaceppi and Piranesi in Rome (Kenworthy Brown; Wilton-Ely,
p. 593).
The sculptor
of the bust of Piranesi was identified as Joseph
Nollekens only in 1996, by John Wilton-Ely in an article in “The
Burlington Magazine”.
The
attribution of the portrait to the English sculptor is based on two sources:
the manuscript of the posthumous biography of Piranesi written in 1799 by the
Frenchman Jacques-Guillaume Legrand (Bibliothèque Nationale de France: NAF
5968) and the two-volume 1828 Nollekens and his
times by the English engraver John Thomas Smith, son of Nathaniel Smith one of Nollekens’ assistants, and
who was also employed for a short time in his London studio on Mortimer Street.
Nollekens
was documented as working with Bartolomeo Cavaceppi by 1764 restoring and
copying antique marbles.
In 1768 he
took part in the first Concorso Balestra.
His first
recorded bust was that of David Garrick (with
the eared support on the socle – illustrated here below) carved in 1764, when Garrick first
met him sketching in the Vatican.
‘It was
Nollekens’s first attempt at portraiture and it earned him twelve golden
guineas’. This bust is now at Althorp House, Northants. (Image below – note the
use of the eared support)
See I.
McIntyre, Garrick (London: Allen Lane,
1999), 5,
343 and note).
...............................
The Bust of Pirenesi.
Joseph Nollekens.
Lord Mansfield.
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Marble by Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823),
This bust was sculpted in 1779, the year in which Coote was
appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army in India.
For a brief biog and source of these photographs
Sir George Savile (1726-1784).
Two portrait busts by Joseph Nollekens.
Text below adapted from the V and A website.
Savile was a well-known independent Whig politician who had never held office. The bust is based on a death mask.
In
her London diary of 1786 Sophie von la Roche recorded a visit to the studio of
the sculptor Joseph Nollekens. She noted, '… Mr Nollekens had over six bust
portraits of the estimable Savile to complete for his friends, two of whom sent
for him with great dispatch on the death of Savile, so as to have an immediate
cast of his features. He showed us this mould, from which it is evident that
the good man had passed beyond all feeling … the veins were still pulsing with
the last beats of his charitable heart; pensiveness and spiritual suffering
still left their mark on the tender, manly features'.
.......................
Like his famous grandfather the Marquis of Halifax, Savile had a major impact on the political saliences of his day – American republicanism, Catholic emancipation and electoral reform.
His portrait hung in Benjamin
Franklin's house a decade before the American Revolution. A man interested in
evidence and rationality, he was Member of Parliament for Yorkshire from 1759
to 1783, a fellow of the Royal Society and a patron of the Westminster
Infirmary.
Another bust of Sir George Savile
Signed: Nollekens Ft.
Provenance
Collection Wentworth Woodhouse Mausoleum.
Earls of Mexborough (presumably acquired by John Savile, 2nd
Earl of Mexborough (1761-1830) who succeeded his father in 1778) bought by
Messrs Leonard Partridge, London, 1945; bought by the first Lord Fairhaven by
whom given to the Fitzwilliam Museum.
