Details of Sculptor

Surname

Bally

Alternative Surname

First Name

William

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

1796

Flourished

Year of Death

1858

Biographical Details

William Bally was a phrenologist and sculptor. He was born in Locarno, Switzerland but by the 1830s he was working in Birmingham, where he employed George Jacob Holyoake, who later came to prominence as a leading secularist and pioneer of the co-operative movement. He accompanied the influential phrenologist Johann Gaspar Spurzheim on lecture tours all over the British Isles between 1829 and 1831, and under his direction produced sets of small plaster phrenological busts which seem to have been widely marketed with an explanatory text by Spurzheim (1). In 1833, when living in Liverpool, he published Mons. Bally’s Lectures on Casting, Modelling, &c (Nottingham), which gave accounts of life-casting, as well as anatomical preparation and natural history casting. The publication accompanied his lectures, which were aimed at a large audience. He ran the phrenological gallery on King Street, Manchester, and from 1836 served as curator of the Manchester Phrenological Society. Over 100,000 visitors attended the special phrenological exhibition he set up at the Manchester Mechanics Institute over the Christmas holidays in 1844. The display included a complete set of busts displaying the individual sections of the brai,n and another set of the most notorious murderers. Bally also taught wax modelling and plaster casting at the Manchester Mechanics Institute and lectured on phrenology at the Manchester Athenaeum. He retired to Switzerland in 1848, donating his collection of over 1,000 casts to the Manchester Mechanics Institute, but was back in England by 1850, when the Manchester Guardian reported that he had suffered a third paralytic stroke. The Times reported in 1851 that toxins in coloured wax had paralysed his arms and hands and ulcerated his throat, causing immense suffering. He was well enough, however, to contribute to the Great Exhibition in 1851 (as Inventor and Manufacturor). In 1852, his health reportedly improved, he was giving phrenology lessons In Manchester, and the following year carved the bust of Salis Schwabe (7). By December 1855 he had begun to work from his home in Tamworth Street, Hulme, and was still working in 1856 as the base of a death mask of William Palmer, ‘the Rugeley poisoner’, in the Winchester Museums Service collection is inscribed ‘The first cast of William Palmer taken by William Bally, Phrenologist of Manchester, the 14th June 1856 Stafford’ (8).His wife, Anna Bally, died in 1856. Bally died on 8 November 1858, and was buried with a death mask of his wife, at St Wilfrid’s Roman Catholic Chapel, Hulme. A number of his busts were left to a fellow Swiss modeller, Benedetti Lanarto, and a collection of his busts were deposited by 1860 at Queen’s Park Art Museum, Manchester, although these subsequently left the collections.
(Revised MGS 2017)

Literary References: Gunnis 1968, 36; Pyke, 1973, 29; Cooter 1984, 150, 274, 350 n57; Cooter 1989, 18, 107, 171-2, 189, 313, 330; Cliff 2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.15180/140102