Details of Sculptor

Surname

Banks

Alternative Surname

First Name

Thomas RA

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

1735

Flourished

Year of Death

1805

Biographical Details

Best remembered for his poetic subjects and influential monuments, Banks was hailed by his contemporaries as Britain’s first truly neoclassical sculptor. He was born in a house on Kennington Common, South London on 22 December 1735, the son of William and Mary Banks. His brother Charles Banks was also a sculptor. Their father was a gardener to the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton, Glos (Farington, 2, 402) and Banks apparently went to school at Ross-on-Wye. At the age of 15 he was sent to London, where he was apprenticed to William Barlow II, an ornamental carver, with whom he served his full 7 years. According to Farington and John Flaxman RA, who presumably had the information from the sculptor himself, Banks also had some training with Peter Scheemakers. Farington clearly states that this was after his time with Barlow, but Flaxman’s anecdotal account relates that the young sculptor drew and modelled in Scheemakers’s studio late in the evenings during his apprenticeship years.
Banks showed early promise by winning five premiums from the Society of Arts between 1763 and 1769. One, reflecting his training, was for ornamental carving (118) and the others were for classical subjects and heralded his future sphere of interest (40, 41, 103-5). Around this time he was studying at the St Martin’s Lane Academy and may also have been living or studying with Richard Hayward, for Joseph Nollekens RA addressed a letter to ‘Mr. Thomas Banks, Sculptor, at Mr. Hayward’s, Piccadilly, London’ c1763-6 (Whitley 1930, 40). On 31 August 1766 Banks married Elizabeth Hooton, whose recent inheritance of a small property in Mayfair gave the couple some financial security. In 1767 the newlyweds moved to a house in New Bird Street, Oxford Road, from which address he first exhibited at the Free Society of Artists. Over the next few years he coped with the rising rateable value of the property, which changed from £10 in 1769 to £34 in 1772.
On 24 June 1769 Banks joined the Royal Academy Schools and the following year he won the gold medal for a relief, The rape of Proserpine (106). He was evidently ambitious, for he applied (unsuccessfully) to become an ARA the same year. Banks showed at the first two RA exhibitions (1, 119). In 1772 he won the Academy’s scholarship to study in Rome.
Banks and his wife stayed in Rome for three years supported by the scholarship and another four at their own expense. His surviving letters, and references in Thomas Jones’s Memoirs, indicate that he was part of the vibrant community of artists and collectors in the city, who included the sculptors Michael Foy, Christopher Hewetson, Nathaniel Marchant, the Swede Johan Tobias Sergel, and the Italian G B Capizzoldi. From Capizzoldi Banks received training in the cutting of marble (‘in which the Italians beat us hollow’) (Smith 2, 1828, 194), but it was Henry Fuseli, the Swiss painter, who particularly impressed him. Several of Banks’s Rome reliefs were influenced by Fuseli’s dramatic subject matter and echo his lithe, mannered figures. The death of Germanicus (108) and Thetis and her nymphs rising from the sea to console Achilles for the death of Patroclus (110) also show a new compositional inventiveness and a unity of subject and treatment. The Germanicus consists of a series of interacting, jarring, semi-circular shapes created by limbs and drapery, which stand out in high relief against a simple ground. A similar compositional formula is used for the Thetis, except that here the swirl of limbs and drapery harmoniously rims the contours of the oval frame. A sense of depth is created by the use of gradated relief carving.
Banks’s daughter, Lavinia, was born in Rome, probably in 1775, and from 1777 to 1778 the family lived with the painter James Durno in the Stalla di Mignanelli, near the Piazza di Spagna. The Rome years ended unhappily, since Banks’s patrons failed to give him proper support. The Earl-Bishop, Frederick Hervey, commissioned a group of Cupid catching a butterfly on his wing (43), and then decided not to take it. George Grenville (later Marquess of Buckingham) ordered a relief of Caractacus before Claudius (109) for 200 guineas and then refused to pay more than 100. Banks challenged Grenville’s decision, which he said treated him ‘with too much contempt both as an Artist & a man’ (Bindman 2000, 772). By November 1778 Banks had become feverish and melancholic, a condition he blamed on his unreliable patrons. He submitted a late and unsuccessful design for Lord Chatham’s memorial at Guildhall in the City of London (2). Meanwhile his wife sought to borrow money from friends in England. On 18 May 1779 Banks and his family left home for England, perhaps financing the journey by the raffle of his oval relief of Alcyone (107), won by Henry Swinburne and given to his friend, Sir Thomas Gascoigne.
In London Banks took a house at 5 Newman Street, rated at £60, where his neighbours included John Bacon RA, the miniaturist Ozias Humphrey and Benjamin West, the subject of a bust shown at the RA in 1780 (58). Banks also exhibited the sculpture rejected by his patrons in Rome (47, 111), together with a design for a monument to Captain Cook, perhaps intended to advertise his ability as a monumental sculptor (4). His first executed monument is a finely-characterised bust of the academic and poet, Isaac Watts (3), above an animated relief of Watts at his desk, receiving dictation from ‘divine poetry’. Flaxman believed he could see the benefit of Banks’s training in ornamental carving in the floral grotesques around the oval relief. The commission did not lead to further work and, in June 1781, Banks left for St Petersburg. Little is known of his time in Russia, except that he arrived there in August and, through the influence of Lord Malmesbury and Prince Potemkin, was able to sell his Cupid (43) for 4,000 roubles to the Empress Catherine II. He won only two commissions in St Petersburg (44, 112), perhaps because Malmsbury’s influence at court was in decline, and in 1782 Banks returned to England.
He did not leave Britain again and lived in Newman Street until his death. Despite his earlier absences abroad, Banks had a reputation as a serious sculptor in England and he attracted the support of the writer George Cumberland, who recommended him to several potential patrons. In August 1783 Cumberland described Banks as a statuary who ‘to a very refined judgement adds great learning and perfect mechanical skill, the result of many years’ intense study and labour, the consequence is he has produced but few works but these of a quality to recommend and endear him to real judges’ (Bell 1938, 56). One such judge was the historian and MP, Thomas Johnes of Hafod, a patron over a period of 20 years. Johnes commissioned a marble version of the model for a statue of Achilles enraged, shown at the RA in 1784 (45). The model received enthusiastic notices in the press that year, particularly from the Morning Herald, which described it as ‘superior to most modern performances, and equal to many of the antique’ (Bell 1938, 61). Although the marble version was never completed, Banks did carve a chimneypiece for Johnes at Hafod (94), as well as several busts (71, 77), a commemorative garden urn (115), and the innovative statue of Mrs Johnes as Thetis dipping the infant Achilles in the river Styx (48). Around the oval base are waves and sea-monsters.
In November 1784 Banks was elected an ARA and won his first public commissions, the statue and monument to Sir Eyre Coote (46, 11), commander-in-chief of the forces in India. These were both financed by the East India Company. The 26 foot high monument in Westminster Abbey has a central figure of Victory placing a medallion of Coote over quasi-eastern martial trophies commemorating the territorial benefits of Coote’s military successes. It was the figure of a weeping Mahratta captive, exhibited at the RA, which excited particular admiration. Banks subsequently developed an iconography merging classical and Indian forms. He carved a chimneypiece for the former Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings, replacing the traditional caryatid figures of Dacian slaves with Indian women returning from the Ganges and adding a processional relief in the Roman manner, that bears debts to a painting of life in an Indian harem (92). Banks later executed several portrait busts of Hastings (67, 68).
Banks spent seven years from 1793 working on a statue of Marquess Cornwallis commissioned by the citizens of Madras to celebrate the end of the Mysore wars (50). The statue was the subject of a long and earnest debate amongst Academicians on the decorum of presenting Cornwallis in contemporary dress instead of the classical alternative. The work’s emotional force comes from the relief on the base, illustrating the poignant moment when Tipu Sultan had been forced to surrender two sons to British protection until conditions for restitution were met. This metonym for the nurturing of an undeveloped nation by the paternal British empire is typical of Banks’s major works of this period, for he focusses on moments of heightened emotion, often depicting the grief of a divided family.
His monuments of the 1780s and 1790s are amongst the most innovative and influential sculptural works of the eighteenth century. He executed considerably fewer monuments than either Bacon or Joseph Nollekens and never repeated designs, though he did develop certain themes, particularly the mourning widow grieving over a funerary urn (7, 10, 13, 15, 17, 25). The monument to Anne Martha Hand (6) focusses attention on the full-length figures of George Watson Hand and his dead wife, cradled in his arms, by reducing extraneous decoration to a minimum. Cornelia Milbanke’s dead children are resurrected to welcome their mother to Heaven as mannerist cherubs in a swirling figure-of-eight composition (26). Major Delap Halliday, in his shroud, reaches out to his grieving widow across the mortal divide, suggested by a central obelisk (30). Banks’s statue of Penelope Boothby of Ashbourne, a life-size child sleeping on a mattress (22), was said to have reduced Queen Charlotte and her daughters to tears when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. The work is justly remembered as an early masterpiece of British sentimental romanticism and its site in Ashbourne church, facing the wall at the end of the Boothby Chapel, stresses the tragic curtailment of the family line. The sculptor’s careful thoughts about the context of his monuments led Flaxman to proclaim that Banks could transform a church into ‘a museum of sacred sculpture’ (Flaxman 1838, 293).
In 1786 Banks became a full Academician. His diploma work, The falling Titan, crashes to earth amid falling rocks, as a tiny satyr and goats run for cover. This bravura performance was considered by J T Smith to be the finest work of sculpture ever produced by an Englishman (47). Banks played a major role at the Academy until his death, appeared regularly at general meetings and dinners, served on numerous committees (such as that to investigate G B Locatelli’s pay dispute with Lord Orford in July 1788) and featured frequently in Farington’s diaries. But the sculptor was also prepared to sacrifice his chance of official honours by his commitment to radical politics. Banks was regarded as a blunt and serious man, whose uncompromising stance, (according to Flaxman), had hurt his interest ‘both in Italy and in England’ (Farington, 2, 636). In the 1790s Banks joined the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI), becoming a central figure in the group around the radical reformer, John Horne Tooke, and in January 1794 Farington described the sculptor as a ‘violent democrat’ (Farington vol 1, 144). That year Tooke and several other leading radicals were charged with treason, and in June 1794 Banks himself was arrested and questioned by the Privy Council. Although he was released almost immediately and Tooke was later acquitted, the event prejudiced the Council against him.
His political enthusiasm remained undiminished. In 1795 he cropped his hair (a signifier of political opposition) and his letters indicate an increasing association with Tooke and his circle in his later years. He modelled portraits of Tooke (80) and other active members of the SCI, Felix Vaughan, Dr John Warner and Lord Daer, sat for him (78, 79, 113). Among Banks’s effects, and possibly by him, were busts of Tooke’s co-defendant at his trial, Thomas Holcroft, the radical writer Mary Wollstonecroft (whose husband William Godwin recorded meeting Banks at a Wimbledon dinner in his diary), and Napoleon Bonaparte (86), for whom Banks expressed some support, before it became clear that the Emperor was no democrat (‘he is chang’d & I have done with him’) (Bell 1938, 148).
Given Banks’s opposition to England’s participation in the Napoleonic Wars, it is a tribute to the sculptor’s reputation and ability that he was chosen to execute two of the monuments to war heroes in St Paul’s Cathedral (34, 36). Banks felt the contradiction, describing the memorials phlegmatically as works to the memory of ‘naval heroes who have been kill’d in attempting to kill others’, but he also recognised that the business ‘may be of some consequence to me’ (Bell 1938, 118). It was: the contract for the Captain Westcott’s monument earned him 4,000 guineas (Farington, vol 5, 1781).
Avarice was certainly not Banks’s driving force. He was a gifted portraitist (Speaker Addington described the unidealised portrait of his father (69) as the only bust he ‘could ever talk to’, (Farington, vol 3, 962), but did not exploit this lucrative genre, carving heads only for a limited circle of friends and patrons. He was suspicious of manufacturers like Matthew Boulton and, although courted by the Derby porcelain works (in 1787), he remained aloof from commercial modelling. He also disapproved of the practice among artists of acting as dealers (‘a sign that the love of gain prevails more than the love of art’). His daughter later claimed that her father lived frugally, was ‘very strict in his religious tenets’, and expended ‘considerable sums’ on alleviating distress (Bell 1938, 6, 137).
In May 1803 Banks had a paralytic stroke, which impaired the use of his hands. After this date his work at St Paul’s must largely have been the work of assistants. The names of his apprentices and workmen are largely unrecorded, although Joseph Panzetta later claimed to have worked on the relief of Shakespeare (99), and his bust of John Boydell was completed by F W Smith (16). The sculptor is known to have given tuition in drawing to the painter William Mulready.
In November 1803 Banks applied unsuccessfully for the post of Keeper of the Royal Academy, a post traditionally reserved for impecunious or inactive artists. His political history may have militated against him. Banks’s last days do not, however, seem to have been inactive or penurious, for he continued to oversee his grandiose monument to Westcott, and to make visits to Wimbledon, Bath and Wells. By January 1805, however, he was very ill, and on 2 February he died.
He was buried in Paddington churchyard and a small tablet was erected in his memory in Westminster Abbey, with the lines ‘Whose superior abilities in his profession added a lustre to the arts of his country, and whose character as a man reflected honour on human nature’. His wife and his daughter, Lavinia Forster, were his sole beneficiaries. There is no indication of the size of his estate, though Mrs Forster later claimed that he left ‘a handsome provision’ for them. On 22 May 1805 there was an auction of the contents of Banks’s studio, which included many of the original terracottas for Banks’s most famous works, sculpture by Joseph Wilton and Foy, as well as oddities such as ‘four highly curious Gothic figures’ rescued from the façade of the old Guildhall (101), and an antique fragment dredged from the Thames. It is impossible to be certain which of the plaster casts and busts listed are by Banks. Numerous other models were kept in the family (which moved to Paris ten years later), and then fell into the hands of J C F Rossi and ultimately Sir Francis Chantrey, who is said to have destroyed many of them (Builder, 3 Jan 1863, xxi, 5). Achilles arming (42) is a rare and celebrated survival.
Many notices in the press and comments in unpublished memoirs attest to Banks’s status as one of England’s greatest sculptors. Farington recalled Flaxman telling William Hamilton RA that Banks was the equal of Antonio Canova (Farington 2, 302). Banks was the subject of an extended biographical notice in the European Magazine in 1790, and in February 1805 Flaxman composed an address to the Royal Academy’s Council On The Death of Thomas Banks, in which Banks was cast as Britain’s first truly neoclassical sculptor, the artist who saved Britain from a cocktail of Puritan iconoclasm and the pernicious influence of Bernini. Flaxman’s lecture was not delivered publicly, as many had hoped, since Farington and others fretted over whether their celebration of an artist who had been ‘proclaimed to be democratical’ might lead to the King’s displeasure. Instead the eulogy was appended to the second edition of Flaxman’s Lectures in 1838.
Banks’s reputation remained high in the nineteenth century, aided by numerous hagiographic notices by his daughter (in The Builder and elsewhere) and a ‘Life’ by Allan Cunningham (1830). J T Smith felt that ‘England had no sculptor of mind until the appearance of Thomas Banks’ (Smith 1828, II, 185). His sculpture was shown at the International Exhibition in 1862, and seen by Palgrave as being the originator of the British school. But Banks’s only modern full-length biographer has been an unsympathetic descendant. C.F. Bell’s Annals of Thomas Banks (1938), a thorough piece of scholarship, posits the subject’s works as quaint and outmoded and suggests that the character of the man is indelibly tainted by his ‘heady democratic idealism’ (Bell 1938, 170). Yet the influence of Banks’s neoclassicism, combined with dramatic and sentimental subject-matter and innovatory composition and treatment, can be felt throughout the 19th century and deserves greater attention. The serious and high-principled nature of his approach to art and life marks him out as one of the more engaging characters in the history of British sculpture.
MGS
Literary References: Farington, passim; Smith II, 1828, 185-201; Flaxman 1838, 271-294; Whitley 1930, 40-1; Anecdotes 1937, 140, 146; Bell 1938; Jones, Memoirs 1951, 53, 73, 75, 89; Hutchison 1960-62, 134; Stainton 1974, 327-331; Read 1982, 19; Bryant 1983, 742-5; Bryant 1985, 49-64; Whinney 1988, 322-336; Bryant 1991, 409-11; Bricknell 1995, 16; Groseclose 1995, 57-8, 64; Grove 1996, 3, 183-5 (Bryant); Ingamells 1997, 48; Bewley 1998, 120, 153, 185; Bindman 2000, 769-772; Bilbey 2002, 46-53; Bryant 2005 (1), 51-8; Bryant 2005 (2)
Archival References: Poor Rate Books, St Marylebone, reel 19, 1780; RA Council Minutes, vol 1, 28 June 1770, fol 82; Banks/Upscott, Banks/Cumberland, Banks/Hastings; Banks/Humphry (most of Banks’s surviving correspondence is published in Bell 1938 or Bindman 2000, 769-772)
Additional MS Sources: RA/GA, travelling scholarship, minutes of council, I, 137, 171, 191; minutes of general assembly I, 64
Will: Thomas Banks, 1 March 1805, PROB 11/1421, fol 324
Miscellaneous Drawings: double page from a sketchbook, unknown subject, s&d 1803, HMI, 9/1990, Leeds 1999, 8; study of a male nude, signed in monogram ‘TB’, University of Glasgow; portrait of John Malin, ‘a late model to the RA’, exhib RA 1771, 6, RA (Whitley 1928, 2, 374)
Auction Catalogues: Banks 1805
Portraits of the Sculptor: Richard Cosway, graphite, before 1794, (BM, P&D 1965, 1211.34); James Northcote, canvas, 1792, RA; George Dance, chalk, 1793, chalk, RA; George Dance, 1794, graphite BM, P&D, 1898, 0712.12; anon, plaster mask cast from life, before 1791, RA; Henry Singleton, The Royal Academicians under the Presidentship of Benjamin West, c1793-5, RA; John Flaxman, graphite profile drawing, 1804, BM, P&D 1965, 1211.33; John Flaxman, pencil, 1804, pencil, Fitzwilliam. All these, and others of Banks’s wife and child, are reproduced in Bell 1938, pls I, XXV, XXVI, XXVII, XLI