Details of Sculptor

Surname

Gott

Alternative Surname

First Name

Joseph

Initial of Surname

G

Year of Birth/Baptism

1785?

Flourished

Year of Death

1860

Biographical Details

A sculptor best known for his work on a small scale, he spent much of his career in Rome catering for his compatriots’ taste for portraiture and figures of animals. His work contrasts markedly with the austere neo-Greek works of his English contemporaries in the city, John Gibson RA and R J Wyatt.
Gott was born in London, the son of John Gott of 31 Ogle St, Marylebone, whose family came from Calverley near Leeds. His second cousin and foremost patron, Benjamin Gott, was a leading Yorkshire wool manufacturer. Joseph had some early schooling in Calverley, where he stayed with his paternal uncle Joseph Coates. He was apprenticed to John Flaxman RA in 1798, when he was 12. He left Flaxman in 1802 and entered the Royal Academy Schools on 29 March 1805, giving his profession as sculptor. The following year he won the RA silver medal for the best model of an Academic figure (20) and in 1808 the Society of Arts awarded him their greater silver palette for a plaster group, Samson slaying the Philistines (159). At this time he was living in Upper Norton Street, near Buckingham Street, Fitzroy Square, where Flaxman had his studio. Nothing is known of his activities in the decade from 1808, but he took a wife, Ann Maria, and their first daughter was born in the parish of St Giles, Camberwell in 1815. By 1819, he had moved to Lower Belgrave Place, Pimlico, where a second daughter was born in 1821. Eventually they had a son, Benjamin, whose lazy self-indulgence later caused his father considerable concern. In 1819 Gott won the RA gold medal for Jacob wrestling with the angel (21). Thereafter he became a regular exhibitor at the Academy, showing an eclectic range of works including ideas for monuments, statues of classical, biblical and Shakespearian subjects, animal groups, portrait busts and profile reliefs. Several of his early RA exhibition works appeared a year or so later at British Institution shows (21, 24, 26, 28).
Gott was helped at the outset of his career by the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Thomas Lawrence, who met him around 1820. Lawrence noticed his talent and in 1822 provided a pension so that Gott might travel with his family to Rome. He also gave Gott a letter of introduction to Antonio Canova, though Canova died before he could be of assistance. The Gott family stayed with the artist Joseph Severn at 18, Via Isidoro, where Mrs Gott took over the housekeeping, providing Severn with ‘an english pudding every day’ (Friedman and Stevens, 1972, 8). These comfortable domestic arrangements evidently suited Gott’s temperament, for there is no evidence that he fraternised with the group of British sculptors frequenting the cafés of Rome. Gott and Severn together designed monuments for the poets John Keats (†1821) and Percy Byshe Shelley (†1822), neither of which appears to have been executed (4, 5).
Gott’s first year in Rome was difficult for he had financial problems and contracted a fever which laid him low for several months. Lawrence again assisted him by recommending distinguished English tourists to visit his studio. Among the first were Elizabeth, Duchess of Devonshire and her step-son, the 6th Duke. The Duke, who was commissioning works for a sculpture gallery at Chatsworth, gave Gott an early lesson in the foibles of patrons. He went to the studio early in 1823, when the sculptor ‘was not recover’d from the fever, consequently had only sketches to show him, of which he spoke very favourably … but he said it was an invariable rule not to order Sculpture unless finish’d’ (Gott Letters, 27 February 1823, quoted by Friedman and Stevens 1972, 58). The patron’s approach softened when he returned to Rome at the end of the year, and he commissioned a bust. Gott took it upon himself to make it a colossal head of a Bacchante (126) intending it to match a head of Achilles which George Rennie was making for Chatsworth. Gott also sold the Duke one of his first groups of hearthside animals, A greyhound with her two puppies suckling (37).
Gott’s imagination was at its most fertile in his early Rome years. He appears to have been the only British sculptor in the city making terracotta models, many of which are likely to have been sold as independent works of art. He had difficulties in translating his small models into full-size marbles: in July 1822 he wrote to Lawrence that he was hiring a studio in the Via Gregoriana so that he might have space to translate a model of Venus dissuading Adonis from the chase to a full-size work (30). This failed to materialise and the studio was soon taken over by Richard Westmacott III. Another casualty in the translation process was an ambitious group, The madness of Athamas, a composition of at least 4 figures. The small model, which was later owned by Lawrence, was made in 1825 and was translated to a life-size working model and plaster cast, but had eventually to be abandoned (68).
Gott was particularly successful with his ‘fancy’ groups of children and animals, especially dogs, depicted in playful attitudes. Though inspired by Antique representations in the Vatican Museums, Gott’s animals were clearly modelled from life for they show considerable knowledge of canine anatomy. The repertoire was broadened to include foxes and kittens (92, 67), and his groups combining animals and children enjoyed particular popularity. His masterpiece in this genre, a series of four reliefs of putti with goats and greyhounds, was commissioned for the dairy at Syon House (144).
Gott travelled frequently to England to meet his patrons, secure new commissions and supervise the installation of monuments. In 1827 he assembled one of his first memorials, to Mary Williams at Walton-on-Thames (7). He went on to Leeds to meet Benjamin Gott and to discuss a monument for Gott’s sons, Benjamin and Henry (14), left unexecuted by Flaxman when he died in 1826. The two monuments are virtually identical, each having a seated mourning figure and a standing image of Faith holding a cross. Benjamin and Elizabeth Gott introduced the sculptor to their friends, the Banks, Fairfax and Ferrand families, all of whom followed Benjamin’s example by giving him commissions (9, 15, 50). Over the next decade Joseph was to complete 24 well-characterised images of Gott family members, including a memorable group of young Benjamin Gott with an Italian greyhound (54), another of Margaret and Jane Gott as Babes in the wood (57), seated and standing statues of Benjamin Gott (48, 112) and also his monument, a naturalistic reclining image in contemporary dress, which was commissioned by the subject in 1827, 14 years before his death (10). The sculptor's series of profile medallion portraits of Gott family members in terracotta, plaster and marble, are particularly penetrating: he took pains to reproduce the elaborate hair styles paraded by his fashion-conscious patrons, but did not idealise their determined faces.
Returning to Rome in 1828, Gott took a studio at 155, Via Babuino, which he kept for the rest of his life. The early 1830s were his busiest years, with busts, fancy groups and several monuments in hand, principally for Yorkshire patrons. He was back in Leeds in 1833 to install the monument to Thomas Lloyd in Leeds Parish Church, a dignified military memorial with a portrait-bust and an inscription tablet flanked by two finely cut figures of officers in full regimentals (12). While in Yorkshire he received further commissions, including a monument to a Bradford philanthropist, William Sharp, which has a draped female carved in the round, leaning against a pedestal supporting Sharp's relief portrait (13). Gott was a confirmed supporter of exhibitions as a means of advertisement: on this visit he arranged to show several works, advertised as being for sale, at the Carlisle Academy (65-67) and exhibited 7 more at Royal Northern Society in Leeds (69-73, 75, 76).
He returned to Rome via Paris and was visited shortly afterwards by friends of the Benjamin Gotts, Mr and Mrs William Allan, who ordered four ideal subjects for Benjamin Gott (78, 79, 81, 82). These included a statue of a Vintager (79) which was dispatched from Rome in December 1837 with the intention of exhibiting it at the Royal Academy in the following spring, but was shipwrecked on its voyage to England.
Gott’s period of great success ended abruptly around 1836; on 17 November 1838 he wrote to Benjamin Gott ‘I have had no orders for two years past, but perhaps that has been owing to the Cholera few people having visited Rome’ (Gott Letters, quoted by Friedman and Stevens 1972, 67). The epidemic had a terrible effect on his family, causing the death of two of his daughters and inevitably affecting his own work. The shock apparently made his wife lose her memory.
The sculptor visited England again in 1839, 1841, 1845 and 1847 and it was soon after this last-known visit that he took on his most ambitious achievement in funerary art, the monument to Colonel Edward Cheney of the Scots Greys (19). Cheney had died heroically at the battle of Waterloo after four horses had been killed under him. Gott chose to portray the moment when the Colonel’s fifth horse sank beneath him with a bullet-wound in its throat.
His work was now less distinguished and he began to receive hostile criticism. A dancing nymph, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1845 (91), was badly received and a letter to his daughter Ann, sent from Leeds on 24 August 1845, refers to bills and lawsuits. His last Academy submission, a Mary Magdalene, 1848, again drew unfavourable reports (94). He nonetheless showed a figure of Ceres at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (96) and Ruth Gleaning at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1855 (56).
He died in Rome on 8 January 1860 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery ‘followed to his last home…by most of the English, and several of the foreign artists resident in Rome’ (Leeds Intelligencer). Gott’s obituary in the Athenaeum said, ‘Every visitor to Rome, this half century past, has looked in at the studios of Mr Gott - no sculptor of genius, but one of grace, whose figures of rustics oftentimes combined with animals, pleased us better than furniture art, though not high sculpture’. Today he is particularly appreciated for his highly finished terra cotta figures and groups. They were made as studies for larger works in marble, often in the hope of obtaining commissions, but were also regarded as finished works of art in their own right.
Interest in Gott was revived in the 1970s as a result of a well-researched exhibition held in Leeds and Liverpool (Friedman and Stevens 1972). The catalogue, which includes much Gott correspondence from the years 1822 to 1849, is the most comprehensive source for the sculptor’s work.
IR
Literary References: RSA, Transactions, vol 26, 1808, 18; Graves II, 1905-6, 279-80; Gunnis 1968, 176-8; Friedman and Stevens 1972; JKB 1972 (3), 327-9, 331; Lovell 1986, 177-221; Grove 13, 213 (Friedman); Sicca and Yarrington 2000, 16; ODNB (Friedman); IGI
Archival Material: HMI Archive (album of photographs of the Banks family, patrons of Gott, and their home, St Catherine’s House, near Doncaster)