Details of Sculptor

Surname

Lough

Alternative Surname

First Name

John Graham

Initial of Surname

L

Year of Birth/Baptism

1798

Flourished

Year of Death

1876

Biographical Details

Lough came of rural stock, but established himself as a successful metropolitan sculptor and was hailed as a genius early in his career. His work is eclectic, drawing upon classical, Renaissance and Gothic sources.
He was born in the hamlet of Greenhead, Northumberland, on 8 January 1798, the third son of William Lough, a blacksmith, and his wife Barbara Clemitson. Accounts of his early life are inconsistent because Lough embellished his story on moving to London. He took several years from his age and described himself as a farmer’s son, an occupation his father only took up after March 1812. He also added Graham, his paternal grandmother’s maiden name, to his own name.
Lough’s talents for drawing and modelling were evident as a school boy and were encouraged by George Silvertop, the local squire, who allowed Lough access to his art collection. He was apprenticed for some years to a stonemason at Shotley Field and in the early 1820s worked on decorative sculpture for the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society building (170). He also executed a few minor monuments in the north-east (1-4).
In February 1825 he went to London on a coal ship and on his arrival visited the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum. The following year he exhibited his first work at the Royal Academy (173) and was accepted as a student at the RA Schools on the recommendation of JT Smith, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum and the biographer of Joseph Nollekens. He may have worked for William Behnes at this time, for Palgrave includes him in a list of Behnes’s pupils. Lough’s first major work was a colossal statue of Milo (36), inspired by the Parthenon sculpture, which he carved in his room above a greengrocer’s shop in an alley off Strand. A story, which may be apochryphal, tells that Lough made a hole in his ceiling to accommodate the statue, so causing his landlord to threaten legal proceedings. The publicity apparently made his name.
At this time Lough came to know the painter, Benjamin Haydon. Haydon was impressed by Lough, praised his work in a letter published in the Carlisle Journal on 9 February 1828, and was instrumental in organising two shows of his work. In June 1827 Milo and Samson slaying the Philistine (37) were put on display in the great rooms, Maddox Street. The exhibition was a considerable success, a number of celebrities including the Duke of Wellington and Sarah Siddons attended the private day and Lough received several commissions. Nine months later he showed these works again, with two new ones, Iris waking Somnus (38) and Musidora (39), from rooms in Regent Street.
In January 1832 Lough made an advantageous marriage to Mary North, a daughter of the Duke of Kent’s chaplain. They had two daughters, Mary Rebecca and Georgina. In 1834, shortly after Georgina’s birth, the whole family left for Rome, where they remained for three years. The Art Journal for 1876 noted that the Duke of Northumberland and Lady Guildford had subsidised the journey. Whilst in Rome Lough carved a statue of James Losh, the Recorder of Newcastle, for the Literary and Philosophical Society (49), depicting him in classical pose and dress. Early in 1837 Lough wrote to the Duke of Northumberland asking for financial help, explaining that the visit had not been entirely successful. An outbreak of cholera had kept potential patrons away from Rome and other sculptors without families were able to undercut his prices. Lough then travelled to Naples on his doctor’s instructions only to be trapped there by a further outbreak of the disease. In August 1837 the Loughs left Rome, travelling briefly on the Continent before returning to London.
By 1846 Lough was renting a house at 42 Harewood Square, in the area now occupied by Maylebone Station, where he remained for the rest of his life. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution until 1863 but never became an Academician. He also sent works to the Westminster Hall Exhibition in 1844 and to the Great Exhibition in 1851. One of his most celebrated compositions, The mourners (60) was shown at both. It depicts an incident during the English Civil War, where a wife has found her husband dead on the battle field, his horse standing over him. The Literary Gazette was of the opinion that ‘if visitors to the hall were asked to vote, nineteen out of twenty would prefer it to any other among its competitors’ (Lit Gaz, 27 July 1844, 482)
Lough maintained lifelong connections with the north-east, which he clearly exploited. Among his most important northern patrons were the Ridley family of Blagdon in Northumberland. In 1832 the 3rd baronet bought a cast of Duncan’s Horses (43) and commissioned an Orpheus (44). From 1836 onwards, his elder son, Matthew, began ordering works for his London house, 10 Carlton House Terrace. These included a series of statues of Shakespearean characters (56, 59, 62, 66-73), a group of St Michael triumphing over Satan (77) which cost £2,000, and a bronze version of Milo. Lough charged Ridley another £2,000 for a marble frieze of William Shakespeare surrounded by figures from Macbeth and The Tempest (171). He also executed busts of a number of Ridley family members (104, 111, 112, 117, 121, 164). A last commission from the family was a series of four statues for a bridge at Blagdon (85). Lough clearly depended on Ridley’s patronage at times of financial hardship. In 1843 Lady Ridley wrote to her father of a ‘melancholy letter’ received from the Loughs, relating that he was penniless and obliged to borrow to pay his men. ‘Literally now he lives on what he gets from Matt, who pays him every now and then as much as he can, and Lough hurries on his things much more than we wish really because he has no other hope’ (Ridley 1958, 144-5). Charles Hanbury-Tracy, later Baron Sudeley, was another supportive patron. He was building a Gothic mansion at Toddington, Glos, and obtained a statue of a monk for a staircase niche (46) and then four nymphs and hunters for garden terraces (89).
Lough was also involved in a number of public commissions. In 1845 he was paid £1,050 for a statue of Queen Victoria for which she gave sittings, conceived as the marble centrepiece for the courtyard of the new Royal Exchange (63). The statue was not popular, Lough was criticised for his choice of a veined marble, and its exposed position led to degradation of the material. In 1896 it had to be replaced with a new statue by William Hamo Thornycroft. Lough’s second Exchange commission fared better; this was a statue for Lloyd’s Rooms of Prince Albert (65), ordered in 1845 to commemorate his laying of the foundation stone of the new building and it may be the earliest surviving representation of Prince Albert. A companion figure, Queen Victoria as the Island Queen (64) was not realised. Lough’s connections with the Ridley family perhaps led to the statue of Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood at Tynemouth (61). The sculptor was among the many unsuccessful entrants in the competition for a national monument to Horatio, Viscount Nelson and was at one time invited to sculpt the lions at the column’s base, but this plan was thwarted when the memorial committee was reconstituted. He had the wit to adapt his Nelson memorial design for the memorial to George Stephenson in Newcastle (81), an ambitious composition with four supporting figures of engineering workers represented in the classical style.
Although Lough preferred heroic subjects, patrons’ demands led to a large number of busts and funerary monuments. He executed busts of several famous men including the Duke of Northumberland (115), Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate (120), Professor Edward Forbes, the naturalist (135) and Richard Twining, the tea merchant, who was Lough’s brother-in-law (138). These were carved in a broad, smooth, generalised style. His monuments were more varied, ranging from neoclassical tablets, for instance to William Fermor (5), which has a relief of a mourning female figure leaning against an urn, to more elaborate Gothic tomb chests with effigies, particularly to Robert Southey (18) and Lord and Lady Sudeley (35). The monument to Emma Constance Methuen (32) takes the form of a young child sleeping on a marble bed, and owes debts to Thomas Banks’s admired monument to Penelope Boothby. The Thomas Middleton monument is a large, freestanding image of the bishop blessing two kneeling Indian converts (7).
Lough continued to work into old age, though he ceased to exhibit in 1863. Ideal works, such as The lost Pleiad (84) and Night’s swift dragon (177) were occasionally illustrated in the Art Journal. His daughter Georgina died in 1868 and he carved her monument for the mausoleum at Kensal Green Cemetery (34). This is a reclining effigy on a tomb chest decorated with medallion profile portraits of Lough, his wife and elder daughter and with mourning angels at either side. Mary Rebecca’s name was added when she died three years later. Lough survived both his daughters, dying of bronchitis at his home in Harewood Square on 8 April 1876, at the age of 78.
His life is better documented that almost all his contemporaries and provides a good insight into what it must have been like to struggle as a sculptor with ambitions of gentility in the mid-19th century. Martin Greenwood comments that Lough’s work ‘reflected an impulse towards novelty in form and subject matter, and an eclectic mixture of sources ... which mark him as a “transitional” sculptor, seeking to break the mould of neo-classicism’ (ODNB). During his lifetime his work elicited extreme responses from the press: the Literary Gazette hailed him as an ‘extraordinary genius’, whose works were of ‘perfectly miraculous power’ (Lit Gaz, 12 May 1827, 299) whilst in 1844 the Art Union condemned The mourners (60) as ‘maudlin sentimentality rarely outdone in the most drivelling essays’ (Art U, 1844, 215). Attitudes changed however and the Art Journal gave him a favourable obituary (AJ, 1876,202-3). In 1877 his studio models and several marble statues were given to Newcastle Corporation by his widow and displayed at Elswick Hall. This was closed in 1932 and later demolished. The hapless sculpture was dispersed and in due course largely destroyed and Lough was forgotten. The recent monograph by Lough and Merson has helped rehabilitate him.
EH
Literary References: Palgrave 1866, 41, 225; AJ 1869, 320; 1870, 192; 1876, 203; Hall II, 1883, 241-2; Allen 1958; Ridley 1958, 52, 144-6; Boase 1960, 277-90; Gunnis 1968, 242-4; Physick 1969, 42, 181; Penny 1977, passim; Read 1982, passim; Lough and Merson, 1987; Stocker 1989, 435-6; Ellison 1989, 240-241; Groseclose 1995, 95, 115-17; Grove 19, 1996, 720 (Greenwood); Leith 1997, 340-2, 345; Usherwood 2000, 328-9; ODNB (Greenwood)
Archival References: RA admissions
Additional MS Sources: Lough/Howard; Lough/Forster; Peel Papers, 1844, 1846, Add MSS 40548 fol 375, 40591 fol 266
Wills and Administrations: PPR, will, 20 May 1878, effects under £7,000
Portraits of the Sculptor: self-portrait, bust (119); self-portrait profile relief, part of monument to Georgina Bourchier, née Lough (34); Benjamin Haydon, sketch, Haydon Diary, Houghton Library, Harvard (repr Lough and Merson 1987, repr 3); anon canvas, coll B Etherington (repr Lough and Merson 1987, repr 4); photo (Lough and Merson 1987, repr 6); Ralph Hedley, canvas, Lough in his studio at work on Milo, 1881 (sold Christie 31 July 1987, cat repr)