Details of Sculptor

Surname

Hollins

Alternative Surname

First Name

Peter

Initial of Surname

H

Year of Birth/Baptism

1800

Flourished

Year of Death

1886

Biographical Details

Peter Hollins was Birmingham’s leading mid-19th century sculptor. He spent part of his career in London but despite early critical success, he failed to gain a national reputation. He was born on 1 May 1800 in Great Hampton Street, Birmingham, the fourth surviving son of the sculptor and architect William Hollins. Several members of his family were involved in artistic pursuits, including a cousin, John Hollins, the son of a Birmingham glass painter, who became a successful painter of portraits and historical subjects. Peter began his own artistic training in his father’s studio. In an untraced manuscript memoir Hollins later recalled walking to Warwick Castle with his father at the age of 15 to model details of the Warwick vase and described assisting his father in his work at Alton Towers (Hill and Midgley 1929, 42). He also attended John Vincent Barber’s drawing school.
In 1822 William and Peter Hollins exhibited three busts at the RA as joint works (77, 78, 80). At about the same time Peter went to London to work under Sir Francis Chantrey. It is not clear how long Hollins stayed but in 1824 he was in Birmingham, helping to install Chantrey’s statue of James Watt in St Mary, Handsworth. Hollins praised the statue for its ‘qualities of conception, and beauty of effect in light and shade’, which he considered unequalled anywhere (Hill and Midgley 1929, 42). This opinion has tended to be confirmed by posterity for the Watt statue remains widely regarded as one of Chantrey’s masterpieces.
Hollins’s bust of Edward Grainger, the anatomist (79) was an early independent work. A correspondent in Aris’s Birmingham Gazette applauded its verisimilitude, its realistic rendering of skin textures and animation and considered it an extraordinary achievement for such a young sculptor.
Hollins returned to London around 1828 and he shared a studio with the portrait painter Henry Room, at 17 Old Bond Street. He held an exhibition in the studio in 1831, showing groups of The murder of the innocents (62), Conrad and Medora (59) and Aurora and Zephyr (61), as well as three plaster busts (87-89). He was awarded the Sir Robert Lawley prize by the Birmingham Society of Arts for Conrad and Medora. A critic in the Spectator described The murder of the innocents (later shown at the 1851 Great Exhibition) as ‘a noble composition and a work of art of the highest class, and of superior merit’ despite some faults and concluded that Hollins was a promising young sculptor who seemed likely to distinguish himself in the future (Spectator, 14 May 1831, vol 4, no 150, 478).
Hollins was in Italy in the years 1835-36. He returned to London, where he spent the next few years and produced two of his most important church monuments, to Sophia Thompson (28) and Georgina, Countess of Bradford (30). The Thompson effigy, reclining on a couch greeting a celestial apparition, owes debts to Chantrey’s monument to Elizabeth Digby, 1825, but Hollins’s turning figure has a sense of vitality and drama that is absent from the Chantrey image. The Bradford monument, which has a reclining effigy in front of a relief of angels about to bear her soul to heaven, is influenced by the work of Sir Richard Westmacott.
In 1839 Hollins unsuccessfully competed for the commission for the national monument to Admiral Lord Nelson, to be erected in Trafalgar Square, London. His design (146) featured a statue of Britannia 120 feet high and was probably influenced by John Flaxman’s proposal for a monumental Britannia with a lion, intended to commemorate British naval victories and to be placed in Greenwich Park.
Hollins appears to have maintained close links with the Midlands while he was in London, continuing for instance to exhibit with the Birmingham Society of Artists, and it is possible that he worked with his father on several occasions before William Hollins’s death in 1843. This collaboration provides problems in identifying authorship of works produced during the 1820s and 1830s: many are signed simply ‘Hollins’ and may be by the father or the son, or possibly both. After his father’s death in 1843 he returned to Birmingham to oversee the family business. There he produced numerous monuments, mostly for churches in the Midlands, and many busts of local dignitaries.
Hollins was also responsible for a number of portrait statues, including the figure of Dr Samuel Wilson Warneford, which has a prime position in the entrance of the Warneford Psychiatric Hospital, Oxford (68). He also submitted designs in competition for statues of Lord George Bentinck to be erected in Mansfield and of Sir Robert Peel, for Manchester, both of which Hollins mentioned in letters to the Warneford Hospital authorities. He did not win the contracts. Hollins provided two prestigious statues for Birmingham, of Peel and the City Recorder, Sir Rowland Hill (72, 75) but evidently felt that he should have been employed more extensively in works for his native city. He later darkly commented, ‘I wish to draw a veil over my labours for my native town as they were a grievous disappointment to me, and the more than Egyptian darkness and ignorance of that branch of art which I had chosen was simply appalling’ (Hill and Midgley 1929, 43). Among his few ideal works was a statue of Sabrina for the 2nd Earl of Bradford, which was later presented to the city of Shrewsbury (69).
Despite his complaints about the city’s philistinism Hollins was a leading figure in Birmingham’s artistic community. He was vice-president of Birmingham Society of Artists for 37 years and was instrumental in obtaining its royal charter. He was also an active supporter of numerous local educational and philanthropic institutions, including the School of Design and the Birmingham and Midland Institute. A tablet in St Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham, states that in 1859 he paid for restoration work on the west end of the cathedral in memory of his father. His contribution to the city was acknowledged in 1872 when a testimonial portrait by William T Roden was commissioned by subscription. It is now in the collection of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
Hollins died 16 August 1886, in the house of his birth. He had stopped working some years earlier, having suffered from rheumatism, perhaps caused by prolonged working with wet clay in a cold studio. He is commemorated by a monument in St Paul’s, Birmingham. He is not well known in comparison with near-contemporaries such as Edward Hodges Baily, Joseph Durham or William Theed II. The fact that he spent much of his career in an artistically unfashionable, if economically and technologically dynamic provincial centre helps explain his relative neglect. Yet his sculpture, which ranges from a baroque drama in the monumental effigies to more sober Victorian realism in his portraiture, has elicited retrospective admiration. Gunnis wrote of him, ‘Hollins at his best was a very great artist and his monuments to Lady Bradford and Sophia Thompson are as fine as anything by Chantrey (Gunnis 1968, 205).
EH
Literary References: Langford 1873, passim; Birmingham Daily Post, 18 August 1886, 4; DNB 27, 1891, 174; Hill and Midgley 1929, passim; Physick 1969, 40, 181; Penny 1977 (1), 89-92, 214 n48; Parry-Jones 1981, 24-32; Grove 14, 1996, 686 (Stocker); ODNB (Fisher)
Archival References: Hollins Notebook
Additional Manuscript Sources: Peel Papers, 1844, Add MS 40544 fol 144
Wills and Administrations: Birmingham district probate registry, will with two codicils, 22 November 1886, (personal estate £24,219 1s 6d), re-sworn February 1888, (£24,389 7s 5d), re-sworn May 1888, (£25,089 7s 5d)
Portraits of the Sculptor: William Thomas Roden, oil on canvas, BMAG