Joseph Nollekens

J. T. Smith, Nollekens and his times, London, 1829, p. 247

Joseph Nollekens was the pre-eminent British portrait sculptor of his day, born into a family of painters of Flemish origin. He trained under Peter Scheemakers and went on to win several prizes at the Society of Arts, eventually raising the funds to travel to Rome 'to see the works of Michelangelo and the other great men' (Smith, op. cit., p. 3). In Rome, Nollekens worked under Bartolommeo Cavaceppi, restoring and copying antiquities, and he established a strong reputation for modelling and cutting marble. Returning to London in 1771, he was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in that year, and became a Royal Academician in 1772, quickly establishing a name for himself as a portraitist. The Romantic painter Henry Fuseli concluded that, 'in a bust he stands unrivalled ... [for] a group of figures, I should have recommended Flaxman; but for a bust, give me Nollekens' (Smith, op. cit. p. 233).

Nollekens executed a funerary monument to the Rt Hon. William Windham at Felbrigg Church after his death in 1810. Windham was a British statesman, soldier, and political thinker associated with the Rockinghamite faction of Whigs. Born into a prominent family, he was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford.

The original drawings for the Felbrigg monument are housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum (inv. no. E.4384-1920) and in the Sir John Soanes Museum (a herm bust version, inv. no. Vol 37/47). A second version of the bust, made by his student Sebastian Gahagan in 1821, is also at Felbrigg (inv. no. NT 1401965). Unlike the nude truncation of the present bust, the Felbrigg monument portrait features heavy drapery. According to John Kenworthy-Browne, the monument at Felbrigg dates to 1813, with the Soane drawing of the herm version dating to the same year (Roscoe, op. cit., p. 901). It is therefore possible that the present bust may be the first version executed by Nollekens as a posthumous portrait before the monument’s design was finalised as it is autograph and dated to 1811.

A bust of the Rt Hon. William Windham is recorded in Smith’s list of Nolleken’s sitters where he also separately records the Felbrigg monument (Smith, op. cit. p. 247-48). It is fair to assume that the bust referenced in Smith’s text is a second autograph example and thus the present lot, but as the monument itself also features a bust, it cannot be made certain that Smith meant to separate the two.

RELATED LITERATURE

J. T. Smith, Nollekens and his times, London, 1829; J. Kenworthy-Browne, 'Nollekens, Joseph (1737-1823), sculptor,' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004; I. Roscoe, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660-1851, London, 2009, p. 901