Monday, 16 February 2026

The Plaster Busts of Caracalla and Marcus Aurelius at the Foundling Hospital Museum.

 

Slight return.

This post is inspired by conversations with Lars Tharp curator and Museum Director of the Foundling Hospital Museum.

It is a very much a work in progress - a series of notes and images.

https://www.tharp.co.uk/

https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk/


I have written about the busts of Caracalla previously - in relation to both the Foundling plaster version and a slightly later version manufactured by Messrs Coade of Lambeth.


For the Coade busts and its antecedants see -

https://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2026/01/coadestone-bust-of-caracalla-indented.html

For the Foundling Hospital Bust see

https://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2024/11/plaster-busts-at-foundling-hospital.html


...............................

A Coade Stone bust of  Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, 

known as Caracalla, Emperor 211- 217. AD.


 Suggested here as an adapation by John Bacon I of an earlier model perhaps by Roubliac.

 At the sale of an “Eminent Publisher retiring from Business” held by Mr. Christie on 24 February 1809 two of the lots were Coade busts of Venus and Caracalla.

 The intention this essay was to investigate whether there might be a direct link from the bust in the Roubiliac workshop included in Langford's sale catalogue of  May 1762, with the bust at the Foundling Museum, the life size plaster bust of Caracalla included in the 1777 catologue of Harris of the Strand (Catalogue illustrated here), and the Coade Stone bust of Caracalla of 1792 illustrated here.

If the Coade version was taken from a plaster - either from the Roubiliac sale version or a cast by Charles Harris - then it follows that the sculptor for the final finishing of the Coade bust was probably by, or supervised by John Bacon I.











........................

The Plaster Busts of Caracalla and Marcus Aurelius.

in The Court Room at the Foundling Hospital Museum.

 On carved wooden brackets 1747.

 Anonymous Casts, here suggested as perhaps supplied by Louis Francois Roubiliac.

 

This attribution was first suggested by Mrs Katherine Esdaile in her monograph - Life and Works of Louis Francois Roubiliac, published Oxford 1928. Page 141 and note 3.

 This book is no longer regarded as a totally reliable resource nevertheless it made an invaluable contribution to our current knowledge of Roubiliac until the works by Malcolm Baker.

................

 

The Roubiliac Sale of 12 May 1762 and the next three days -

I discovered this catalogue in a Collection in the Cottonian Library at Plymouth - there is another (not available on line in the Finberg Collection in the Print Room in the British Museum.


 The third day under the heading Antique busts etc in Plaster 14 busts in all - lots 36 - 49.

 Lot 46 was Marcus Aurelius and Lot 49 was a bust of Caracalla.









Mrs Esdaile states that a number of Artists at a meeting at the Turks Head on 7 December 1760, had agreed to appear on the 5 November in the following year ...........among those signing the paper recording the promise were Reynolds, Wilson and Roubiliac.


She goes on to say that the busts were presented on the same day and that they bore his signature and the date 7 November 1760. She had contacted the secretary Mr RW Nichols who had had the busts taken down and inspected but stated that any inscription had been obscured by the repeated coats of paint - (not unusual given that it was much easier to repaint this type of object rather than laboriously clean them - a fate of many plaster objects and their surroundings from the 18th century). My Italics.

 

In the ambiguous footnote she says " I have most unfortunately omitted to give my authority - an 18th century one - for my note: Foundling Hospital. Plaster Busts of M Aurelius and Caracalla L.F.R. Dec 7th 1760.

 She then states that "The historian of the Foundling Hospital however states that the busts were presented by Richard Dalton (Print seller art dealer - in 1754? ) but though this would exclude Roubiliac from the list of donors of works of art to the Hospital they may have been his work. (this does not exclude John Cheere either) my Italics!.


The Court Room at the Foundling was the most elaborate interior in the Hospital and was used for meetings of the court of governors. 

It is richly decorated in an amalgam of the Palladian and the Rococo: almost all the wall decorations including the marble fireplace and over mantle frame, the picture frames and adjacent plaster decoration are in the Palladian style with occasional rococo detailing, while the plasterwork ceiling, given by William Wilton, (father of the sculptor Joseph Wilton) is in a much more free-flowing rococo.

 Much of the carved work in the Court Room appears to have been supplied by the leading cabinet-maker, William Hallett senior (c.1707-81) of Great Newport Street, Long Acre. Literally a few yards around the corner from the Roubiliac workshop at the east end of the top of St Martin's Lane.

 

Hallett was a very significant figure in the cabinet-making world and had built up sufficient funds to make purchases at the demolition sale of the Duke of Chandos's great Edgware mansion of Canons in 1747 and then construct himself a new house on the site.

 While his son continued in business for a period, his grandson led the life of a gentleman and was painted in 1786 with his wife in the double portrait, The Morning Walk, by Thomas Gainsborough in the National Gallery.

 

 

William Hallett's charges included £3.15s on 12 November 1745 for 'an Oval Glass in a Carv'd Frame' (presumably the frame between the windows in the Court Room, with an egg-and-dart cabochon moulding surrounded by scrolling foliage and rocaille work), £5.10s on 16 December 1746 for 'Carving 4 Frees's over Doors' (the oak-leaf-and-acorn door friezes, tied with ribbons) 

and £3.10s in March 1747 for '2 Carved Bracketts to set Bustoes on' (now supporting busts of Caracalla and Marcus Aurelius). He also charged £11.4s on 15 November 1746 for '8 Carved Oval Frames for Pictures'.

 

 This reference might suggest that the brackets were prepared in 1747 to take existing busts or busts in preparation.











.........................



















.........................


Laurent Delvaux (1696 - 1778) and the Bust of Caracalla at Woburn Abbey.

Inscribed L DELVAUX sculpsit Romae 1732.

I don't think the Foundling Caracalla was modelled from this bust but was taken from the Cavaceppi Caracalla purchased in Rome for Lord Leicester by Matthew Brettingham.

Lord and Lady Leicester both sat to Roubiliac for their portrait busts.


 https://view.publitas.com/brun-fine-art/a-taste-for-sculpture-iv/page/86-87

 In 1732 Delvaux went to Brussels, taking with him a letter of recommendation from Pope Clement to the Habsburg regent of the Southern Netherlands, the Arch-Duchess Marie-Elisabeth. Shortly afterwards, on 28 January 1733, he was appointed her court sculptor, but in 1733 he also visited London for two months, taking with him a marble bust of Caracalla,

 ‘A fine and Just imitation… done by him at Rome’ (Vertue III, 66).

 Delvaux recorded in his Répertoire des Ventes, a notebook of business activities, a number of works left with Scheemakers to sell on commission. These were the copies of antiquities and five terracotta models. Through the good offices of John Sanderson, the Duke of Bedford's architect and a friend of Delvaux, Bedford bought the marbles in 1734. Sanderson bought the terracotta models and commissioned Delvaux’s portrait by Isaac Whood.

 In the Sculpture Gallery at Woburn Abbey are statues of a “CrouchingVenus" David' and Salmacis and Hermaphroditus," and a bust of Lucius Verus all by Delvaux . According to the catalogue of 1822 - his head of Caracalla was also in the gallery at that date. This was presumably the "bust of Caracalla cut in marble from the antique" which George Vertue calls fine and just imitation** and notes that it was "done by him at Rome, 1732, and brought to England with him** {Walpole Society Journal  Vertue Vol III page 66)from "By Heaven Inspired" by David Wilson British Art Journal



The Holkham Hall Marble Bust of Caracalla by Bartolemeo Cavaceppi.

There is a bust of Caracalla at Woburn by Laurent Delvaux


Bartolomeo Cavaceppi and Caracalla.


A undated marble version by Bartolemeo Cavaceppi (1716/1717 - 1799) is at the Getty Museum.
I believe it to be one of six from the Cavaceppi workshop in the Corso, Rome.

In the early 18th Century Caracalla's likeness was known from a bust in the Farnese collection in Rome and then Naples, believed to date from the 200s. 

The Sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi drew on this famous prototype for his marble bust of Caracalla. Carved during a period in which collectors bought sculptures all'antica, this bust was probably intended for an English collector's Neoclassical gallery.

https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103RSX

Cavaceppi was an excellent self publicist and it seems odd that the bust of Caracalla was not mentioned or illustrated in the 3 Volume overview of his restorations of Antique statues - Raccolta d'antiche statue, busti, bassirilievi ed altre sculture :restaurate da Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, scultore romano.

This 3 Volume work was Published between 1768 and 1777.

Available on line at -

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/103171332

This bust of Caracalla and the Marcus Aurelius are almost certainly a product of the Cavaceppi wokshop although they lacks the eared support on the socle frequently used by him.


The Caracalla Bought in Rome by Matthew Brettingham and sold to Lord Leicester for £30 in 1749.

His account book notes carriage and custom house fees for a "modern coppye of ye" bust of Caracalla in November 1747.

Brettingham, who kept an account book when he was in Rome, listing thirteen statues and twenty-one busts sent to Holkham

see - “Matthew Brettingham’s Rome Account Book 1747-1754,” Walpole Society 49 (1983):


The Marble of Caesar Marcus Aurelius (161–180 AD) was also purchased in Rome in early 1754 by Matthew Brettingham for 10 crowns.

During his seven-year sojourn in Rome (1747-54) Matthew Brettingham not only dealt in casts and antiquities - he provided the Earl of Leicester, with casts and marble statues for Holkham Hall - but also commissioned actual moulds to be taken from famous Roman antiquities. 

The idea was that casts could then be made to order when he returned to London. 

He commissioned moulds for sixty busts, divided between Greek and Roman subjects, and twelve moulds of full-size statues. 

This was something of a speculation and probably not a financial success. As far as I can gather these moulds ended up in the possession of John Cheere at his works at Stone Bridge, Hyde Park Corner.

His casts went, chiefly, to houses at which his father was architect. Apart from Holkham, Richmond House and Kedleston, it is known only that he sold plaster busts to Lord Egremont, and a few of them survive at Petworth.

Very likely, his moulds passed to John Cheere soon after 1760, for during the next decade we find Cheere supplying plaster and lead statues from Brettingham's rather distinctive repertory to Croome Court and Stourhead, while undocumented examples areseen in other houses such as Syon.


Some of these plasters are at Holkham and a group of these busts are also at Keddleston,

Many casts provided by Brettingham were in Charles Lennox, the 3rd Duke of Richmond's Gallery at Richmond House, Westminster which opened in 1758 - the gallery building was dismantled in 1778 - 82 during remodelling and later destroyed by fire in 1791, though the collection of casts was saved and later sold by Christie's.

 See the article in the British Art Journal (Vol. 10, Issue 1) by John Kenworthy Brown.


 In the Petworth Archives (Bundle 626) there are receipts for eight plaster busts dated 24 June and 19 Sept 1759. Also, in 1759, the elder Brettingham sold 'two plaster bustos from Italy to the Earl of Buckinghamshire for his house in Dover St 

Goodwood Archives, Box 36/20. Brettingham's receipt, dated 13 Nov. 1756, is for the following casts: Petus and Arria , £30; Dying Gladiator , £20; Meleager , £20; Apollo Belvedere , £20; Flora , £20; St Susanna , £18; Callipygian Venus , £12; Apollino , £8; Camillus from Wilton survive, but only for smaller objects


I would like to suggest that Cavaceppi Caracalla is the bust of Caracalla which Louis Francois Roubiliac used as the model for his bust of Caracalla - Roubiliac made busts of various classical luminaries including Marcus Auelius  (see the 1762 sale catalogue below)




..................


The Charles Harris of the Strand Catalogue of 17

Page 12 Busts - Large as Life - 2 Guineas each.




.......................

A plaster version of a bust in marble by Louis François Roubiliac of the prominent Palladian architect Isaac Ware is at Kenwood House. Two marble versions are known in the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Detroit Institute of Art. A mould for Ware’s bust was recorded in a sale held after Roubiliac's death, suggesting the production of a plaster cast like that at Kenwood.


..................................


The Plaster Busts and Moulds at the Roubiliac Sale of May 1762.


Published here to show the extent of the Roubiliac Plaster Replica business.



















For a Plaster bust of John Ray at the V and A see -





.............................


Plaster Busts of Handel in The Harris Correspondence of the 1740's.


Handel's friend James Harris (1709-80), who seems to have been involved in procuring from Roubiliac plaster busts of Handel for the Countess of Shaftesbury (Lord Shaftesbury, another friend of Handel, was Harris's cousin); for Charles Jennens, the wealthy patron of the arts, librettist for four of Handel's oratorios (including Messiah), and the composer's friend; and possibly for Harris himself. 

It is not known whether these busts were plaster versions of the rediscovered Sotheby's bare headed bust (which would therefore date it to 1741 at the latest) or of another bust of Handel by Roubiliac, such as that now in the Royal Collection (the latter dated 1739) the one with the hat. 

The letters (from which extracts are quoted below, as they are written, but with the addition of punctuation) are included in the James Harris archive, which itself is part of the wider Malmesbury collection at the Hampshire Records Office. (96) Some of the letters are from Roubiliac to Harris, and some are between Harris relatives and refer to the plaster busts of Handel by Roubiliac.

 

Roubiliac Plaster Busts of Handel in the Harris Correspondence from Music and Theatre in Handel’s World by Donald Burrows.

16. April 1741, Louis Francois Roubiliac (London). To James Harris. Salusbury G565/1.

“According to your order I have got a busto of Mr Handel ready to send you. I desire you would be pleased to let me know where I must direct it to and if it be necessary I put a colour on it or leave it white”.

 

In 1741 James Harris was involved with the purchase of busts of Handel (presumably in plaster from the sculptor Roubiliac subsequent letters show that he purchased one for the Countess of Shaftsbury, one for Charles Jennens and probably one for himself.

21 April, 1741. Thomas Harris, Lincolns Inn (London). To James Harris Salisbury

“Roubiliac I will call on this evening or in a day or two. Rawlins will make all the haste he can”.

P.S. I have seen Handel’s bust at Roubiliacs, and like it very well. What he meant by colouring was only making the whole of a light dun colour as the original you saw is: and what he says will keep clean better and I think it looks handsomer. If therefore you approve of that, write him word that you will have it coloured as the original is, and he says he will do it immediately”

 The P.S. was probably added after T.H. had visited Roubiliac in the evening, the postmark carries the same date as the letter. Rawling was presumably copying music for J.H.

 

18th June 1741.Thomas Harris, Lincolns Inn, (London) to James Harris. Salisbury

P.S. I called at Roubilliacs today about the bust for Lady Shaftsbury but found it was not coloured yet so it cant be sent till the carrier sets out next week.

 

27 June 1742. 4th Countess of Shaftsbury (St Giles) to James Harris Salisbury. Thursday I received the bust of Handel and am very thankful to my cousin Thomas Harris for negotiating this affair for me. I have disposed of it in a place of highest eminence in my room and please myself in thinking you will approve of it. I hope soon to have an opportunity of reimbursing my cousin T Harris for this and the expenses attending its coming down…….

 

10 July 1741. Louis Francois Roubiliac (London) to James Harris Salisbury.

 

I have reciev’d your obliging letter and in answer I shall acquaint you that Mr Hendels busto shall be near ready tomorrow so I hope you will be pleased to send how to direct. You know I have Mr Popes busto which I have likewise made after life. I also have Milton’s and Newton’s so in case any of your friends should want you will be pleased to recommend them; but bustos being works by which there is little to be got but reputation, I desire that you will let your friends know that my chief talent is marble work, such as monuments, chimneys, tables, all of which I will hope to do to the satisfaction of those that will do me the honour to employ me.

 

24 July 1741. Lord Guernsey, Powderham, Devon to James Harris, Salisbury.

 “As soon as I can inform myself who is Mr Jennens carrier, I shall beg the favour of you to give Roubiliac directions how to send the bust. I shall write this post to London for a direction & order an answer to be sent to me at Salisbury, so desire you will keep the letter till I come”. 

 

            A Bill for a Plaster Bust of Handel 1753.

 

A bill for a plaster bust of Handel and a plaster bust of Newton sent by Roubiliac to Baptist Noel, Lord Gainsborough of Exton Leicestershire (d.1751), paid in 1753, exists see - (DE3214 box 67/3 Leicestershire Records Offic


............................

A List of Some Further Roubiliac Plaster Busts -

By no means Exhaustive!



For the Plaster bust of Joseph Wilton by Roubiliac at the RA

..........................

For a Roubiliac Plaster bust of Milton see - 


....................
For a Plaster bust of Handel



........................


For a Plaster bust of John Ray at the V and A see -

They say 19th Century - given the marks from the piece mould I would agree



Posted by at No comments:

Monday, 9 February 2026

The Bust of the Countess of Pembroke and the bust of Princess Amelia at the Fitzwilliam Cambridge both by Roubiliac.

 


This post to be expanded upon in due course!


The Busts of Countess of Pembroke at Wilton House and Princess Amelia in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge.

 by Roubiliac 

I have already published at length on the 18th Century Sculpture at Wilton see -

https://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2024/08/portrait-sculpture-at-wilton-house-no-3.html

What I failed to notice was the similarities in her dress with that on the bust of Princess amelia at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
see -

https://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-marble-bust-of-princess-amelia.html

I have already written about the way in which Roubiliac replicates the dress on several busts. 


Most recently - on the bust of James Lawes on his monument in Jamaica (inscribed John Cheere 1736) and the lead bust of an anonymous man at the V and A.

https://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2025/04/a-monument-inscribed-by-john-cheere-in.html


There is so far no documented proof of later reports that Roubiliac was working for or subcontracting to Henry Cheere in his workshops at Westminster prior to 1738, but the evidence presented here strongly suggests a close working relationship with both of the Cheere brothers.

We do not know what Roubiliac was doing until 1736 with reports in the press of his busts of Farinelli and Senesino.



Another example which immediatly comes to mind.is the bust of Hawksmoor at All Souls College, Oxford which uses the same dress as several busts by Roubiliac - the bust on the William Withers monument at Wooten St Lawrence, Hampshire, the bust of Thomas Missing on the monument at Crofton and the bust on the Gounter Nichol Monument at Racton - 

https://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-bust-of-william-wither.html


The busts of Andrew Fountain at Wilton House, and its several variants, the bust of Thomas Winnington on his monument at Stanford on Teme, Worcestershire and the bust of John Bamber on the monument in Barking Church, Essex all use the same basic drapery.


The bust of John Belchier at the Royal College of Surgeons and Matthew Lee - both again use the same drapery - in this case open shirts.


The busts of John Ray (Marble Trinity College Cambridge and terracotta in the British Museum), Jonathan Tyers marble (Birmingham Museums and the terracotta at the V and A ) and the terracotta of Henry Streatfield in the Mausoleum at Chidingstone, Kent, again these busts all use the same drapery. see -

https://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2016/12/bust-of-john-ray-in-wren-library.html


.................................




Most if not all of the secular busts , which have been previously ascribed to Henry Cheere were probably not carved by him but were made in his workshop or sub contracted  - several very fine lead busts which have previously been ascribed to Henry Cheere were probably given the attribution based on the use of lead by his brother whose workshop at Hyde Park Corner set up in 1738.

Much of John Cheere's early working life remains a mystery until  1738 when he acquire (along with his brother the properties of the van Nosts at Stone Bridge on the North side of what became Portugal Row and later Piccadilly, at Hyde Park Corner.










Princess Amelia (1711 - 86) -Third Child (second daughter) of George II and Queen Caroline.

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

 Height, bust, 58.0, cm. height, socle, 14.8, cm. width, whole, 48.5, cm

Inscription: below her left shoulder; inscribed; L.F. Roubiliac Scit ad vivum

 Bought; 1955; T. H. W. Lumley, 

Provenance: The former owner told Mrs K. Esdaile that the bust had been given by William Waldegrave, 1st Baron Radstock, to his sister Lady Caroline Waldegrave, daughter of the 3rd Earl Waldegrave. Her mother had been a Lady of the Bedchamber to the Princesses Amelia and Caroline, and the latter had been left £4,000 in the Princess's will.

Purchased with the S.G. Perceval Fund.

 














................................

The Bust of John Lawes and the anonymous lead bust in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The V and A bust uses the socle with the slightly convex front palel typically employed by John Cheere in his plaster busts.






.............................

The Gounter Nichol Bust at Racton (left below) and the William Withers Bust at Crofton (right below.
Both use the dress on the Nicholas Hawksmore bust at All Souls Cambridge and the bust of William Withers onthe monument at Wooten St Lawrence.





Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, 5 February 2026

A very fine Marble Relief by William Collins in Bath Abbey.

 

The Good Samaritan tending to a wounded man while a Priest and Levite walk away.

A Marble Relief on the Monument to Jacob Bosenquet 1767.

by William Collins (1721 - 1781).

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. 

 He was among the group that founded the Society of Artists in 1759, and used their exhibitions to showcase his bas-reliefs. 

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




















......................

Collins - Beauchamp Chapel, St Mary's Church Warwick.





........................

William Collins. A List of works culled from -  

By no means complete.


15 March 1798;.Tame and Isis,  Chimneypiece tablet for the Margrave of Anspach Christie,  untraced.

A shepherd, Chimneypiece tablet nd Great Hasely Manor, Oxon.

c1773.  Female sacrificial figure, after a gem by Picart  Relief  Heaton Park, Lancs.

1760.  Satyr and traveller, model of a tablet  for a Chimneypiece. Exhib Soc of Artists, London,           untraced.

 1760.  Representation of Spring; boys with a bird’s nest . Exhib Soc of Artists, London,  untraced.

1760. Gypsies, model.    Exhib Soc of Artists, London, 81. untraced.

1761. A clown and a country girl, Chimneypiece bas-relief . Exhib Soc of Artists, London, 144. untraced

1761. Relief  A boy keeping sheep, large bas-relief .  Exhib Soc of Artists, London, 145. untraced

1762.  A lion hunting, bas-relief. Exhib Soc of Artists, London, 139.  untraced.

1762. Boys sliding, bas-relief. Exhib Soc of Artists, London, 140. untraced.

1762.  The fable of the fox and the cat, bas-relief. Exhib Soc of Artists, London, 141    untraced

1765 model for a tablet Chimneypiece. Oedipus interpreting the riddle of the Sphinx, Exhib Soc of Artists, London, 172. untraced

1765. Bacchanalian boys, a model for a Chimneypiece tablet Exhib Soc of Artists, London, 173.  untraced.

1766. Two Chimneypiece The fable of the fox that had lost his tail, two tablets. Exhib Soc of Artists, London, 204  untraced.

1767. Model of a Chimneypiece tablet.  Zephyrus and Flora, Exhib Soc of Artists, London, 205               untraced.

1768. Model of a Chimneypiece tablet - Anacreon and Cupid,  Exhib Soc of Artists, London, 144           untraced

 1772. The origin and progress of civilization.  Merly, Dorset, library ceiling  - destroyed.

 1768.  Statue - Satyr and dog. Burton Constable, E R Yorks, dining room.

1768. Statue of Mercury and Cupid playing dice  Burton Constable, E R Yorks, dining moom

1768. Statue of Bacchus.  Burton Constable, E R Yorks, dining room

 1769.  Chimneypiecewith tablet of ‘Sacrifice to Aesculapius and Hygeia’                                          Burton Constable, E R Yorks, dining room.

 nd‘ Two semicircular, four oval medallions’ Relief (sold with works by John Bacon RA)   Untraced.                 Forty-one ‘tablets and medallions in terracotta and plaster’ Relief (sold with works by John Bacon RA) nd. Untraced.

Pair of oval medallions.    Relief.   nd.  Untraced.

Four medallions.   Relief.   nd.  Untraced.

 1760. Oblong overmantel reliefs of ‘Mars tamed by peace’ and ‘triumph of Neptune’, and six large medallic trophies. Harewood House, W R Yorks, great hall.

1767    Chimneypiece -  Overmantel relief of putti, representing the arts (designed by Robert Adam)       for Nostell Priory, W R Yorks destroyed.

nd Chimneypiece  With a tablet depicting ‘the bear and the beehives’  Ancaster House, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London.                                          

1764. Chimneypiece tablet Bacchus and Ariadne, Adam sale, 1818 (lot 11). untraced.

nd. Chimneypiece tablet  of Cupid,  Adam sale, 1818, lot 20. untraced

1760. Romulus and Remus, frieze model, for  Chimneypiece  Brandenburg House, Hammersmith.            Exhib Soc of Artists, London, 78 Christie, London, 15 May 1798; untraced

1760. Medallions of Liberty, Agriculture, Commerce and Britannia (designed by Antonio Zucchi). Harewood House, W R Yorks, east and west wings

c.1760. Pediment sculpture of Ceres and Cupid, alto-relievo Sandbeck Park, W R Yorks.

1761.The Marys at the sepulchre (designed by Thomas Lightoler). Magdalen College Library, Cambridge (formerly chapel).

c.1760. The Annunciation, altarpiece (designed by Thomas Lightoler). St Mary, Warwick, Lady chapel

nd Chimneypiece Shepherd and begging dog. Sandbeck Park, W R Yorks, ballroom.

c.1769. Relief  the saloon overmantel  Sacrifice of Venus and Sacrifice of Bacchus. Harewood House, W R Yorks.                    

1765.    Pediment sculpture, with a view of the old manor house, and statues of Divine Virtue, Peace and Plenty (designed by James Paine). Worksop Manor, Notts, garden (damaged).

1769.  Vintage, harvest, pasturage, ploughing and boar hunting, medallions. Kedleston Hall, Derbys, north front (National Trust).

nd. Chimneypiece relief  - Fox and pig, Langley Park, Norfolk .                        

 post -1771   Relief  of ‘harvest’ and ‘the vintage’. Kedleston, Derbys, dining room (National Trust)

c.1761. Chimneypiece Tablet. Shepherd and shepherdess,    Ref. VAM 1152-1882

 c1761. Chimneypiece Putti with a ram, relief tablet                                             VAM 1176-1882

Pan and the Graces, Bacchus and Ariadne (oval reliefs), medallions      Relief   1765-1769                       Burton Constable, E R Yorks, dining room

1760. Antique marriage  - Relief  - Harewood House, W R Yorks, little library overmantel        untraced

 1769. Four Bacchic Vases, Burton Constable, E R Yorks, dining room.

1769. Relief  of the four seasons. Burton Constable, E R Yorks, dining room.


Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, 4 February 2026

A Carved Wooden Bust of William Shenstone (1714 - 63)

 

                                                                           Sold Dreweatts 9 April 2025.


https://auctions.dreweatts.com/past-auctions/drewea1-10542/lot-details/a7e37fd0-ad3e-4683-8f13-b29800e3f817


The bust may be compared with the engraved front. to Shenstone’s Works, I, 1764; see J. Kerslake National Portrait Gallery, Early Georgian Portraits, 1977, II, pl.726. 

Shenstone had been considering a bust of himself in 1754 when he encountered a sculptor from Stratford making busts at 2 gn. each (M. Williams ed., Letters of William Shenstone, 1939, pp 409-10).



Born at The Leasowes, Halesowen, near Birmingham; contemporary of Samuel Johnson at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he studied poetry with lifelong friends Richard Graves the younger and Richard Jago; 

He published anonymously The Judgment of Hercules, 1741, and The Schoolmistress, 1742; Pastoral Ballads issued 1755, and other poems published, 1758, by Dodsley, who published the collected writings The Works in Verse and Prose of William Shenstone Esq.,1764-69; 

Shenstone had inherited The Leasowes, 1724, and devoted much care to laying out the grounds.


The poet and landscape gardener is depicted in the manner of the line engraving print to the frontispiece of "The Works of William Shenstone", set on later ebonised socle base approximately 23cm high overall 

 'A large, heavy, fat man, shy and reserved with strangers', the poet William Shenstone's first poems were published whilst he studied at Oxford, although he left without completing his degree. 

Of private means, in 1745 he inherited the farming estate of Leasowes. He retired there and continued to write poetry in a pastoral vein. Shenstone coined the term 'landscape gardener', and created one of the earliest and most influential landscape gardens, his ferme ornée. 

Diverting streams to create waterfalls he stage-managed the landscape to create views that unfolded from carefully chosen vantage points- a country estate laid out to be admired and walked through whilst retaining the sensibilities of a working farm. 

The venture impoverished him but led to acclaim among contemporaries. 

In his 1770 Observations on Modern Gardening Thomas Whately wrote of Shenstone and his work: "The ideas of pastoral poetry seem now to be the standard of that simplicity; and a place conformable to them is deemed a farm in its utmost purity. An allusion to them evidently enters into the design of the Leasowes, where they appear so lovely as to endear the memory of their author; and justify the reputation of Mr. Shenstone ... every part is rural and natural".

https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/7825/1/Hemingway17PhD.pdf





















......................................

Thomas Hull

by Unknown artist

1760s

765 mm x 616 mm

NPG 4625




.................................


Shenstone.

Thomas Ross.

Given by Shenstone to his servant Mary Cutler in 1754 'in acknowledgement of her native genius, her magnanimity, her Tenderness, & her Fidelity'. The frame is probably original, a delicate variation on a Kent frame with projecting square corners and ornament worked in the gesso. More detailed information on this portrait is available in a National Portrait Gallery collection catalogue, John Kerslake's Early Georgian Portraits (1977),









................................

The bust appears to hen taken from the engravings below










The Engraving below Pub. 1764.






The Portrait of Shenstone by Edward Alcock.

 1760.

(1508 mm x 997 mm)

National Portrait Gallery.

Shenstone was sitting to Alcock by 7 December 1759and the portrait is several times mentioned in letters as, for example, in the detailed description to Graves, 8 January 1760.  By 9 February it was 'in a manner finished' but not content to leave well alone, the artist, according to Shenstone's letter to Graves, 2 May 1761, 'By way of improving the picture I meant for Dodsley ... has made it infinitely less like, and yet it must go to London as it is, for God knows when he can be brought to alter it.' 

 A version painted by the artist for Graves himself, referred to in the same letter, may be the portrait now in the City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham.


Provenance

Bought, 1868, from Henry Graves & Co; with H. Rodd of Great Newport Street, 1824; bought by a Mr Street and subsequently by a Mr Cribb by whom sold to James Watt, FRS, of Aston Hall, Birmingham; Aston Hall sale, 17 April 1849, lot 44, bought Norton, and later owned by Charles Birch; intervening history not known.



Alexander Pope’s garden became a popular resort for visiting poets and writers. According to Joan Edwards, Pope told Shenstone to contact Robert Dodsley, Pope’s publisher, to publish his poem ‘The Judgement of Hercules’ in 1741.250 

If Pope advised him about his poetry, he may have also invited him to view his garden at Twickenham while Shenstone was on his several sojourns to London. Considering Pope was one of Shenstone’s favourite poets - he had his works in his library and a bust of Pope in his house at The Leasowes.


https://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2014/03/lady-luxborough-and-william-shenstone.html


Henrietta St John Knight, Lady Luxborough was the half sister of Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, a close friend of Alexander Pope and executor of his will.

She had been banished to Barrells Hall, Wooten Wawen, near Henley in Arden, Warwickshire  in 1736 by her husband Robert Knight (created Baron Luxborough in 1745), for an indiscretion (probably with poet and clergyman John Dalton, Horace Walpole said the Rhymed till they chimed) and she never saw her husband again.

The two busts of Alexander Pope are mentioned in letters of 1748 and 1750. From these letters there is no doubt that William Shenstone owned a plaster bust of Pope. Lady Luxborough also owned a bust of Pope but she does not make clear what material it was made from -

This bust could be one of the marble busts by Roubiliac. Given the lack of headroom at Barrells Hall, this could have been the small bust or head now at Temple Newsam signed L.F.Roubiliac ad vivum 1738. Currently there is no record of this bust prior to about 1922 when a Mr ARA Hobson suggests that his father GD Hobson (of Sotheby's) acquired it.. Illustrated in a wall niche at I Bedford Square and illustrated in Country Life in February 1932, sold at Sotheby's 17 Nov 1933 - see Wimsatt


In a letter From Barrells Hall dated 28th April 1748.She mentions a head of Pope over a chimneypiece (page 22) and having Mr Outing sending Shenstone a bust of Pope made to look like marble, and mentions 4 more busts treated in the same way by Rackstrow for her brother Saint John.

 2 August 1750 she mentions Mr Moore of Warwick (plaisterer) “also to desire him to see your white bust of Pope, for I have a mind to have Lord Bolingbrokes painted the same”

 On Easter Sunday 1748, she wrote -The chimney in my study was not exactly in the middle of the room: which has occasioned my moving it 12” and consequently moving Popes bust to be in the centre. The lines wrote above it are put up again (which, you know, are out of Virgil).

 In another letter from Barrells of 13 August 1750, she mentions Mr Williams (of New Street, Birmingham) who was visiting Shenstone “I desired him not to forget to look at your bust of Pope; hoping he may be able to paint mine of my brother Bolinbroke after the same manner”. (page 215)

 

 








Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)