Details of Sculptor

Surname

Hewetson

Alternative Surname

First Name

Christopher

Initial of Surname

H

Year of Birth/Baptism

1737

Flourished

Year of Death

1799

Biographical Details

An Irish sculptor, who spent 33 years in Rome, he was considered the leading portrait sculptor in that city during the 1770s and early 1780s. He was the son of an officer, Lieutenant Christopher Hewetson, whose ancestry has been traced back to an Elizabethan clergyman, who moved to Ireland from Yorkshire. The family was well established among the Protestant gentry of County Kilkenny, where the sculptor was born, at Thomastown, in 1737. His father died in 1744 leaving a widow, Eleanor, with four young children. Hewetson received the best education that money could buy at Kilkenny College, where his uncle the Rev Dr Thomas Hewetson was the Master. Nothing more is known of him before the late 1750s, when he was working with or under the sculptor John Nost III, executing statues for the Rotunda Gardens, Dublin. With the possible exception of a bust, thought to be of Richard Rigby, who was Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland between 1758 and 1765 (6), no record survives of work by Hewetson undertaken before he left his native land.
Richard Hayward recorded Hewetson’s arrival in Rome in 1765 with Henry Benbridge, a young painter from Philadelphia. The sculptor took lodgings and a studio in the Strada Vittoria. In September 1779 he was living ‘opposite Margherita’s’(Pembroke Papers, 1734-1780, 273 quoted by Ingamells 1997, 494), and in 1790 in the Vicolo delle Orsoline. He appears to have left Rome only twice, to travel to Naples in 1766 and 1797. Hewetson forged valuable contacts with the principal English dealers and guides in Rome, among them James Byres and particularly Thomas Jenkins, who supported him throughout his Rome career and introduced him to several patrons. Another influential ally was Don José Nicola d’Azara, the Spanish Ambassador to Rome (19). Hewetson’s circle included some of the most talented artists of his day. He was on familiar terms with the neo-classical painters Anton Raffael Mengs, Gavin Hamilton, and the engraver, Johannes Pichler, and modelled or carved their portraits (20, 22, 26, 35). He is very likely also to have carved a head of Angelica Kauffman, now in Schwarzenberg church, Austria (32). His sculptor associates included Nathaniel Marchant, Thomas Banks, Johan Tobias Sergel from Sweden and the Italian, Giovanni Battista Capizzoldi. The Irish sculptor Michael Foy, another former associate of John Nost III, in due course followed Hewetson to Rome and was with him in 1776 when they met the English painter, Thomas Jones, at the Caffe degli Inglesi in the Piazza di Spagna (Jones Memoirs 1951, 53).
The sculptor’s first two securely dated busts, carved in 1769, were of the antiquary, Charles Townley (8) and the collector, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn (9). On 7 January 1769 Sir Watkin ‘Pd. Mr Hewson for a Bust in Clay of Sir Watkin and some casts from it’. The bust evidently pleased Wynn for five years later, in 1775, Joseph Nollekens would cast ‘three busts of Sir Watkin from Mr. Hewson’s mold’ at a cost of £7 17s 6d (Nat Lib of Wales, Wynnstay MSS, Box 115/1, 7 quoted by Potterton 1974, 142-5). Another early client of consequence was the Earl Bishop of Derry, whose bust was carved c1770 (10).
Hewetson’s great early coup, the work that spread his fame abroad, was a bust of Pope Clement XIV Gagnanelli, 1771 (12). This was perhaps initially a speculative exercise and it seems likely that Jenkins was involved, for the dealer was occupied in supplying antiquities at this time to the Pope for a planned extension to the Vatican galleries (now the Museo Pio-Clementino). The portrait is a confident, well-characterised representation and the sculptor rendered the rich embroidered fabric, buttoned shirt and twisted laces of the papal vestments with skill. Four signed versions in marble made their way into English collections, two of them as papal gifts. A fifth, dated 1773, was bought by Talbot, who himself sat that year to Hewetson (14). The collector was prepared to give £140 for his papal bust, £72 more than he paid for his own head.
Distinguished patrons from all quarters of Europe sat for the sculptor. His British clients included George III’s brother, the Duke of Gloucester (13), whose head, modelled in clay, was mentioned in the London Chronicle for 30 April-2 May 1772. He is credited also with the Duchess of Gloucester's bust, now in the royal collection (RCIN 35403; de Breffny 1986, 53, repr). Hewetson was introduced to Baron Cawdor through Jenkins and carved his bust in marble (27). Models of a trio of visitors, Sir Thomas Gascoigne and Henry and Mary Swinburne were almost certainly prepared by Hewetson in 1778-9, and were cast in bronze by the Rome goldsmith, Luigi Valadier (LMG 7.123/68; Friedman 1976 (1), 16-23, repr; Bowron and Rishel 2000, 254). While they were in Rome, the Swinburnes’ young daughter, Martha, died: Hewetson was brought in to carve her monument, a delicate profile relief in a frame of oak leaves, erected in the English College (1).
The Spanish ambassador, d’Azara, sat for Hewetson in 1779, when his bust was modelled ‘under the direction’ of Anton Rafael Mengs (19). Mengs’s reputation as an arbiter of aesthetic standards resulted from his close association with Johann Joachim Winckelmann (†1768), the great advocate of classical Greek sculpture and a central figure in the Greek Revival. Hewetson arrived in Rome three years before Winckelmann’s death. Mengs died in 1779 and Azaro placed his bronze bust by Hewetson, cast from a model again executed under Mengs’s supervision, in the Pantheon, beside the tomb of Raphael. It was replaced in 1783 with a marble bust, also by Hewetson (20, 22).
The sculptor was responsible for two major church monuments. In 1771 he received a commission from Dublin for a memorial to a former Provost of Trinity College, Richard Baldwin, to be erected in the ‘theatre’ of his university college (3). This was Hewetson’s most ambitious work and the first neoclassical ensemble ever seen in Ireland, a graceful tableau of three figures supported by a sarcophagus and set against a pyramidal background. According to the sculptor, the group represented ‘Dr Baldwin ... near his end ... his will dropping from his hand [attended by] an angel [and] a muse, the simbol of science’ (Hodgkinson 1952-4, 56). The pyramid of red granite was a source of pride to the sculptor, who claimed that he was the first to use the material in that context. The monument took 12 years to complete: in February 1781 James Irvine, a Scottish painter and dealer in Rome, wrote that the work was in progress and ‘very clever’ (BM Add MS. 36493). It was exhibited in Rome in July 1783 and in the following month an application was made to export the work. It was finally erected in Trinity College in 1784. Hewetson was apparently paid £1,000.
Following the death of Cardinal Giambattista Rezzonico (a nephew of Clement XIII), his brothers commissioned a monument from Hewetson (2). This has a portrait bust flanked by seated boys, one rejoicing and the other grieving, raised on an austere table-like sarcophagus. The monument had a mixed reception. A contemporary account dwelt on the verisimilitude and nobility of the bust and the lifelike character of the children (Memorie per le Belle Arti : Hodgkinson 1952-4, 47). An English visitor, Henry Quin, dismissed it as ‘not a great work, but two Cupids and a Bust’ (Quin Journal, MS 2226/1,Trinity College, Dublin, 14 January 1786; Ingamells 1997, 494). A similar composition, but minus the boys, was used for another monument in preparation at this time, commemorating Duke Frederick August von Oldenburg (4).
Quin noted that Hewetson was still the best sculptor in Rome in 1784. Important commissions continued to come to the studio, including a portrait of the Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, future Tsarina of Russia (24) and a severe herm bust of Gavin Hamilton (26). But his supremacy was under challenge from Antonio Canova, who had arrived in Rome in 1779 and at once became a serious rival. Canova noted his appreciation of Hewetson’s ‘multi buoni ritratti’ in his diary on 12 June 1780 (Canova’s Diary, fol 71v, transcribed in Honour ed, 1994, 141). Both sculptors competed in 1787 and again in 1790, for contracts to carve monuments for Pope Clement XIV and Clement XIII, and each time Canova won. Accounts of Hewetson’s magnanimity in defeat reveals a remarkably generous spirit. While other sculptors, particularly the Romans, were jealous of Canova’s success, Hewetson not only praised his work, which he saw in the studio, but also gave a dinner in Canova’s honour in May 1787, attended by many fellow artists.
In 1787 Hewetson agreed to carve a colossal marble bust of the philosopher Leibniz for the Leibniz Temple in Waterlooplatz, Hanover, financed by public subscription (33). News of its completion was reported in a letter to the Dublin Chronicle, dated 7 July 1788 and published 21-23 April 1789. The correspondent claimed that the newly completed bust surpassed any comparable work executed over the last few years. The reflective, wrinkled face and severe herm-like truncation of the upper torso apparently suggested ‘the bust of a philosopher immersed in the subtility of metaphysics’. Hewetson’s reputation was however waning. In 1789 the Earl Bishop of Derry, whose portrait head had been an early commission (10), wrote to his daughter in Rome asking whether Hewetson was currently employed and on what. Soon after, he commissioned a statue of ‘Mr Pitt’; it is unclear whether this was Lord Chatham, Pitt the Younger or even George Pitt of Stratfield Saye, Hants, who had been in Italy in 1771 together with Edward Salter, whose bust is also credited to Hewetson (Balderston 2000, 193, repr). It was probably not completed, perhaps because of the imminence of a French invasion.
In May 1791 Hewetson wrote to George Cumberland that patrons had recently neglected him. But though commissions were drying up he clearly had an active social life and was enchanted that year by Emma Hart (the future Lady Hamilton) performing her ‘attitudes’. He was still able to excite envy amongst rival sculptors. In 1794 John Deare was referring to Hewetson and Jenkins when he maintained that antiquaries were in league with artists in the city to the exclusion of outsiders.
By 1796 the invasion of Rome by Napoleon’s armies was becoming inevitable and tourists and settlers were leaving the city. Hewetson did not leave Italy, but in June 1797, Robert Fagan, the Irish painter-dealer, reported that he had gone to Naples to carve busts of Sir William and Lady Hamilton, which were perhaps not completed, since there is no further record of them (38, 39). He was expected back in Rome by the end of 1797.
French troops finally arrived in 1798 and Jenkins fled to England, but died just after arriving at Great Yarmouth. He left Hewetson a ring in memory of their friendship. Deare died in Rome in August and ‘Mr Christopher. Sculptor’ was one of the few friends invited to his funeral ( Smith II, 1828, 327). Hewetson himself died soon after, whether of age or anxiety in difficult times is not clear, and he was buried near a famous classical landmark, the tomb of Caius Sestius. His will is in the Archivo Capitoline in the Vallineliana at Rome.
The list of Hewetson’s commissions is no doubt incomplete since his busts were dispatched all over Europe. Malcolm Baker has noted the variety of conventions and formats which he employed in response to the character, professional and social position of his subjects and the changing fashions of the time (Bowron and Rishel 2000, 254-5). The papal portraits are in the baroque tradition, whereas that of Gavin Hamilton, the protagonist of neo-classicism, conforms strictly to Antique precedent, and the heads of Lord Cawdor, the marble version of Mengs and the Pichler are archaeological in character. The bronze heads of Mengs and Azara, which have short, but not cropped hair and bare necklines, read as romantic images and constitute a relatively new type of portrait. Common to all is a marked care in the realisation of the hair and features and these qualities no doubt brought him many patrons, directed the the studio by an influential group of supporters.
IR
Literary References: Jones Memoirs 1951, 53; Hodgkinson XXXIV, 1952-1954, 42-54; Neoclassicism 1972, 244-5; Ramallo 1973, 181-7; Potterton 1974, 242-5; Friedman 1976 (1), 17-23; Stainton 1983, 13; de Breffny 1986, 52-75, Deuter 1989, 161-93; Ingamells 1997, 494-5, 543-4; Bowron and Rishel 2000, 254-5; Bilbey 2002, 90-92; ODNB (Myrone); Coltman 2009, 230; Yarrington 2012, 106-114; AAI 2014 [Sullivan]
Portraits of the Sculptor: Henry Bunbury [or Henry Benbridge?], pencil drawing, inscribed ‘Christopher Hewetson, Sculptor /HB Rome del. 1769’, formerly private coll, Bury St Edmunds’; Stefano Tofanelli, Christopher Hewetson, Sculptor, with his bust of Gawen Hamilton, nd, oil on canvas, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne (de Breffny 1986, 52)