Details of Sculptor

Surname

Bell

Alternative Surname

First Name

John

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

1811

Flourished

Year of Death

1895

Biographical Details

A prolific sculptor, particularly of romantic and literary subjects, many of them reproduced in bronze and iron and in ceramic materials, which brought them to a wider market. His technological and commercial versatility contrasts with his stylistic conservatism.
Bell came from a family of substance. He was born on 19 August 1811, the eldest son of Samuel Bell of Hopton Hall, Suffolk, a landowner, solicitor and the Collector of Customs in Great Yarmouth. He received a traditional classical education with a local vicar at Catfield Rectory, Norfolk and may have taken his first drawing lessons in Norwich. In 1827 Bell moved to London to study at Henry Sass’s School of Drawing in Soho, living nearby at 3 Frith Street. In 1829 he was admitted to the Royal Academy Sculpture School, where (Sir) Richard Westmacott RA had recently become a professor. After completing his training Bell, whose parents actively supported their son’s choice of career, was able to set up his own workshop, exhibiting his first work, a religious group, at the RA in 1832 (106). He showed regularly over the next forty-seven years, at the RA and British Institution and with the Society of British Artists in Suffolk Street. His secure financial position enabled him to concentrate largely on ideal works, rather than busts and funerary monuments. In 1834 he moved to 43 Cambridge Street, Belgravia. He became a founder member of the Etching Club in 1838 and later produced etchings for editions of Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Shakespeare’s Songs and Ballads.
Bell made his name as a sculptor with two imaginative works, The Eagleslayer (19) and Dorothea (16). The Eagleslayer was first shown at the RA in 1837 and then in 1844 at the exhibition held in Westminster Hall to select artists for the new Houses of Parliament. It was hailed as ‘a performance so striking and masterly that it at once fixes the attention, not only by the novelty of the subject, but by the ability of the treatment’ (Lit Gaz, 1435, 20 July 1844, 466). Large-scale versions were produced in marble, bronze and iron and the Art Union issued it as a small bronze statuette. Its success in the Westminster Hall exhibition eventually led to commissions for statues of two historic heroes for the Palace of Westminster, Viscount Falkland (32), and Sir Robert Walpole (43). Dorothea, a subject from Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, was exhibited at the RA in 1839 and proved to be Bell’s most popular work. The sculptor carved two marble versions, it was copied as a statuette in bronze and it was reproduced commercially in Parian ware.
He also worked as an industrial designer, collaborating with a number of metal-working and ceramics firms. He was closely associated with Felix Summerly’s Art Manufactures, founded by Henry Cole in 1847 to promote higher standards in the decorative arts. Manufacturers, including Coalbrookdale, Minton and Doulton, executed works designed by Bell and examples were displayed at national and international exhibitions. Bell’s novel designs for the Great Exhibition of 1851 included an ‘Hours’ clock, cast by Elkington; a matchbox in the form of a crusader’s altar tomb reproduced in Parian by Minton and in ormolu by Dee and Fargues; a chess set for Minton; the ‘Victoria Regia Cot’ executed in papier-maché by Jennens and Bettridge; and a Cerberus doorstopper, manufactured by Stuart and Smith of Sheffield. His Deerhound hall table (118), cast in iron by the Coalbrookdale Company and exhibited at the Paris Exhibition of 1855, was an arresting and inventive composition featuring four large seated hounds supporting the table top. This was dismissed by Gunnis as a canine monstrosity when High Victorian ingenuity was at the nadir of its artistic reputation.
In 1842 Bell moved to Kensington, living first at 1 Marlborough Place and then in Douro Place, where he bought land in 1846 and built a house and studios. That year he married Eugenie, the only daughter of a wealthy artist, Robert Sullivan. They had one daughter. In 1846 Bell took on an apprentice, Charles Stoatt, who remained with him until the sculptor’s death. In 1847 he was elected a member of the Society of Arts: he remained a member for 30 years and served on the Council on three separate occasions.
Bell’s statues of enslaved female nudes enjoyed considerable success and can be linked to Hiram Powers’s more famous works in this genre. The Octoroon (39), a mildly erotic standing figure, appropriate for private consumption, was purchased for Blackburn Town Hall and was also reproduced in bronze, iron and Parian. Another chained beauty, Andromeda (31), exhibited by Coalbrookdale at the Great Exhibition as an example of the firm’s skill in bronze casting, was purchased by Queen Victoria for Prince Albert and mounted above a fountain at Osborne House.
Examples of many of Bell’s most popular works were displayed at the Crystal Palace when it was re-erected at Sydenham in 1854. Bell also modelled four large statues for the building, Australia, Birmingham, California and Sheffield (35), cast in terracotta by J M Blashfield. Australia is said to have been the largest piece of sculpture fired in one piece at that time. Bell also designed several figures (36, 37, 41) and a fountain (97) for Blashfield.
Bell and the painter, Richard Redgrave, advised on the display of British sculpture at the Paris Exhibition of 1855. Several of Bell’s statues, including a new work, Omphale mocking Hercules (42) were on show. This was the sculptor’s first journey abroad and he visited the Louvre to see the classical sculpture.
He submitted two models for the Wellington Memorial competition in 1857 (5). Neither was chosen over the next two years and the sculptor wrote numerous articles on the subject of this notoriously badly managed commission. In 1859 he won his first public commission, the Crimean War Guards Memorial, Waterloo Place, London (6). It combines a group of three realistic guardsmen in bearskins and greatcoats and an allegorical figure of Honour, poised over them, clutching oak wreaths in her outstretched hands. The juxtaposition of ideal and naturalistic elements, which caused difficulties for many Victorian sculptors, was not successfully handled and the figure of Honour was ridiculed in the press as ‘the quoits player’.
Bell proposed that a monument should be raised to commemorate Prince Albert and his role in the Great Exhibition and in 1858 he submitted a model in the form of an obelisk with symbolic figures at the corners of the base (99). The idea was not implemented until after the Prince Consort’s death, when the Queen and her advisers chose a Gothic design by the architect George Gilbert Scott in preference to Bell’s suggestion. He responded with a model for the central figure of the Prince, represented kneeling in the armour of a medieval knight (58). This too was rejected. The sculptor was responsible, however, for the group representing America (64), which won acclaim. The Times preferred it to the other groups of Continents carved by John Henry Foley, William Theed II and Patrick MacDowell, judging it ‘the finest conception and composition of the four groups, and the boldest and most vigorous in every way’ (The Times, 2 July 1872).
The late 1870s saw the emergence of ‘The New Sculpture’, developed by a generation of sculptors who sought to combine greater naturalism with a wide imaginative range and the use of new materials. In one respect Bell can be seen as a forerunner of the movement for, like the New Sculptors, he executed small-scale works for domestic interiors. But his generalised forms and bland style must have appeared outdated in the new context.
Bell retired in 1879, at the age of 68. He lived an increasingly secluded life at Douro Place, where he wrote poetry and carved a few statues, including a version of Dorothea, given as a wedding gift to his daughter Marguerita in 1881. A collection of 14 works from his studio was presented to Kensington Town Hall. Bell wrote a catalogue to this collection and was a regular contributor to Building News and other journals, for which he wrote articles that combined erudition and eccentricity, on such diverse topics as The four primary sensations of the mind (JDM, 1849) and An Attempt towards the restoration of the Venus of Melos (Mag of Art, 1894, 16-7). He died in his sleep on 14 March 1895 and was buried at Kensington cemetery, Hanwell, on the outskirts of London.
Many of his works were removed from their original site or destroyed during the next fifty years. At the time of his death two were on display at the South Kensington Museum, but within a few years Babes in the wood (21), one of his most popular works, loaned to the museum by the sculptor, was returned to the family and the iron version of The Eagleslayer was relegated to Bethnal Green Museum. When the Crystal Palace at Sydenham burned down in 1936 plaster versions of many of Bell’s works were lost and during the Second World War the collection of sculpture at Kensington Town Hall and at Bell’s former home and studio were destroyed by bombs. Gunnis was critical of much of Bell’s work, writing of his groups exhibited at the Royal Academy ‘They were much admired at the time and are typical of the work which has brought the sculpture of the late Victorian era [sic] so deservedly into disrepute’ (Gunnis 1968, 49). As with his contemporaries, Joseph Durham, William Theed and Henry Weekes, Bell has not been rehabilitated as a sculptor, though he does enjoy some respect for his contribution to industrial design.
EH
Literary References: All, 1842, 128; AJ, 1861, 30, 158; Mag of Art, 1894, 16-7; The Times, 28 March 1895, 10; Athenaeum, April 6 1895, 449; DNB Suppl I, 1901, 165-6; Gunnis 1968, 48-9; Physick 1970, 46 n5, 156-7; Lawley 1980, 18-21; Bayley 1982, passim; Read 1982, passim; Avery and Marsh 1985, 238-37; Grove 3, 1996, 629 (Stocker); Barnes 1999 (with comprehensive list of Bell’s publications); ODNB (Dodgson rev. Edwards)
Additional MS Sources: Bell/Gosse; Bell/Holland; Bell/Lubbock; Bell/Soden-Smith; Biography Handbook Papers, 1860, Add MSS 28509 fol 131; Layard Papers, 1866-9, BM Add MSS 38992-7, 58166 fol 68, 58223 fols 8, 10; Sherborn Autographs, 1846, Add MSS 42575 fol 47
Will: PPR, probate, 26 April 1895, effects £220 14s 2d
Portraits of the Sculptor: Rachel Bird (née Glover), paper silhouette of John Bell and family on the beach, 1838 (Barnes 1999, repr1); photograph, 1867, family coll (Barnes 1999, repr 64); photograph, c1888, family coll (Barnes 1999, pl 91); engraving, from a photograph by W H Grove (Mag of Art, 1894, 16).