Details of Sculptor

Surname

Nollekens

Alternative Surname

First Name

Joseph RA

Initial of Surname

N

Year of Birth/Baptism

1737

Flourished

Year of Death

1823

Biographical Details

Nollekens was Britain’s foremost portrait-sculptor in the years 1770-1815. His highly successful workshop also produced monuments and some ideal works. He was born on 11 August 1737 in Dean Street, Soho, and baptised at the Roman Catholic Chapel in Duke Street, Lincoln’s Inn, the second son of Joseph Francis Nollekens (1702-1748) and Mary Anne, neé Le Sacq. His father, ‘Old Nollekens,’ was a painter from Antwerp who settled in London in 1733 and specialised in fetes galantes and conversation pieces. His French mother remarried after her husband died in 1748 and went to live in Wales. Joseph remained in London and was apprenticed to Peter Scheemakers in 1750.
Nollekens remained in Scheemakers’s workshop in Vine Street as an apprentice and then a journeyman for 12 years. He also had drawing lessons from Michael Henry Spang and took full advantage of burgeoning art institutions in the capital. He attended William Shipley’s drawing school in the Strand, drew from casts in the Duke of Richmond’s Gallery and in 1757/8 submitted an entry for the modelling prize awarded by the Society of Arts. On 27 February 1759 the Society awarded him a premium in the category ‘Drawings and Figures from Models and Casts by Youths under the age of 22’. The subject was not specified. Two further premiums followed, for a Bacchus (143) and Abraham entertaining the angels (409), but on 24 March 1759, the committee withdrew the award for Bacchus after it was shown that Nollekens had been assisted by ‘Mr Wilton’ in ‘touching’ the clay model and was therefore in breach of the terms of the advertisement. The award for Abraham was also investigated and Nollekens protested that ‘the model was done from a thought of his own, that no person touched it afterwards’ and that his source was ‘from the print in Raphael’s bible and ... La Fage’s drawing (RSA, Minutes, 1758-60 seq 1 fols 79-80). Scheemaker's supplied a letter of verification, and on 29 March the second award was upheld, but the following month he was invited to ‘give proof of his abilities’ by seketching a composition and drawing a head from the subject Lot and his daughters, while locked in a room to ensure he received no assistance. This test was completed successfully (RSA Minutes,1758-60, seq 1 ff82, 95). Several premiums followed, for models of figures and reliefs. The subjects were all historical and won him high praise from the judges. In awarding the young sculptor 50 guineas for his relief of Timocles conducted before Alexander (412) they declared that Nollekens had ‘eminently distinguished himself’ (RSA Minutes, 1761-62 seq 3 fol 59). By May 1762 Nollekens was able to finance a visit to Rome himself.
He travelled through Paris, Lyons, Turin, Venice, Bologna and Florence. Richard Hayward recorded his arrival in Rome on 11 August 1762, accompanied by the son of the Swiss-born engraver, Johann Jacob Frey. Nollekens was to remain in Italy for eight years, where he successfully made a reputation and amassed a fortune. His sketchbooks, some of which survive, show that he was an assiduous student, who visited the great collections and steadily became familiar with antique and modern sculpture. By 1764 he had numerous patrons among the travelling British cognoscenti. His earliest known portraits, of David Garrick and the Duke of York, are assured in technique and already distinctive in style. The Garrick is shoulderless, bare-chested, and classical (185) and the York, bulky and baroque in feeling (186). In 1764 the sculptor carved copies of Boy on a dolphin for Viscount Palmerston, Lord Spencer and the Earl of Exeter (146). The original for this work, supposedly designed by Raphael, belonged to Bartolommeo Cavaceppi, the antiquarian and restorer, whose studio Nollekens entered before 1764. There he learnt many dubious restoration techniques of which he was to boast in later life.
He kept his own workshop off the Via del Babuino, 1765-70, where he lived with the landscape painter James Forrester. Working, sometimes in partnership, with the dealer Thomas Jenkins, Nollekens made ‘considerable sums of money’ buying, restoring and selling antiques (Euro Mag 1788, 387), many of which were exported to clients in England such as William Weddell of Newby Hall, who paid £1,000 for a headless statue of Minerva fitted with an alien head. Nollekens’s copies after the antique also found British buyers. Lord Exeter purchased a copy of the Rondanini Medusa (184), and Thomas Anson of Shugborough Hall a fine copy of Castor and Pollux (147). Anson’s patronage was secured through James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, who appears to have acted as an agent for Nollekens in England. Stuart was also entrusted with installing Nollekens’s work at exhibitions organised by the Society of Arts, including a bust of the author Laurence Sterne (190), which the sculptor sent to him from Rome in 1767.
Nollekens appears to have been acquainted with members of elevated intellectual circles. His bust of the architect and neoclassical theoretician, G B Piranesi, is one of his most dynamic portraits (192). He also received some official recognition. He apparently had the patronage of Cardinal Albani, who saved Nollekens from censure when he neglected his religious duties. In 1768 he won a gold medal at the Concorso Balestra (148) and in June 1770 became a member of the Academy of St Luke in Florence. Nonetheless, in September 1770, Nollekens chose to return home, taking back antiquities, books, prints, paintings and cinquecento terracottas. He later boasted that he also smuggled lace ruffles through customs, concealed in his plaster casts. His sketchbooks show that he returned home via Genoa, Vienne and Paris. He must have become relatively affluent, for in Paris he settled a £40 annual allowance on a penniless uncle (Euro Mag 1788, 13, 387). He arrived in England on 24 December 1770.
During the 1770s Nollekens established himself in London in business and social circles. Within a few months he took a property at 9, Mortimer Street, Marylebone, rated annually at £33. The house doubled in rateable value before 1782. His early assistants included Giuseppe Angelini, whom he knew in Rome, and Nathaniel Smith. On 25 October 1771 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, and on 9 February 1772 a full Academician. On 5 February 1774, dressed in ostentatious Italian finery, he married Mary, the younger daughter of Saunders Welch JP, of Westminster. His wife was tall, graceful and well-connected. A family friend of Samuel Johnson, she liked to move in the best intellectual and artistic circles (Angelica Kaufmann painted her as Innocence), and despite the Nollekens’s preference for simple food, the couple played host to many guests from high society in the property in Mortimer Street.
Nollekens could boast numerous members of the Society of Dilettanti among his acquaintances and patrons. The collector Charles Townley bought antiques from Nollekens and always spoke of him as ‘the first sculptor of his day’ (Smith 1828, 1, 263). Nollekens secured the enlightened patronage of Lord Rockingham and Lord Yarborough who commissioned busts (220, 200) and poetic works. Rockingham ordered three statues to be juxtaposed with a restored antique figure to form The judgment of Paris (157-9), one of the most ambitious compositional groups ever created by a British sculptor. Yarborough ordered a Venus chiding Cupid and a Mercury (160, 163).
Nollekens’s first monuments combined styles and motifs from various sources. Those to Lady Henrietta Williams Wynn (3) and to Bishop Trevor (11) make use of full-size statues, the former a female figure of Hope, the latter the seated Bishop. Nollekens’s monument to Sir Thomas and Lady Salusbury (23) depicts the couple together clasping a myrtle wreath in front of a finely carved oak tree, reminiscent of Flemish baroque pulpit sculpture.
The mainstay of Nollekens’s business and the source of his reputation was his portrait busts of public figures. He was on close terms with Henry Fox, Lord Holland, then under scrutiny for his alleged embezzlement as paymaster-general. Nollekens went ‘every Sunday morning to Holland-House’ (Farington, 6, 2244, 14 Feb, 1804) and his first entry at a Royal Academy exhibition was a bust of the statesman, the last work Nollekens had carved in Rome (189). Horace Walpole admired the likeness achieved with Holland's bust, and later expressed appreciation for the heads of Lord Chancellor Bathurst and the Marquess of Rockingham (206, 220). A skill in accurate and lively portrayal was the reason for Nollekens’s success. His busts are typically bare-chested or have only simple draperies, and poses are rarely complex. Little attempt is made to dignify features into an ideal form. Attention, as Smith later noted, was focussed on the eyes (which were usually incised), nose and mouth. Nollekens became to contemporary sculpture what Reynolds was to painting. He attracted royal patronage, although George III was apparently uncomfortable with the stern image chosen for his bust (198).
In 1782 Nollekens received his only public commission, the monument in Westminster Abbey to three naval captains, who had died that year in the Battle of the Saints (75). He submitted a design for a spiralling, free-standing monument, evocative of the sculpture of Bernini and Giambologna, which would have been one of the most remarkable English monuments of the 18th century. His estimates were however considered too high and this design was abandoned for a flatter, less energetic composition, created in collaboration with a Royal Academy committee. Flaxman called it ‘a very moderate performance’ (Farington, 2, 638). The unveiling of the monument and payments to the sculptor were delayed for several years, while the Treasury failed to provide a text for the inscription.
Nollekens’s experience with the vagaries of state sponsorship no doubt inhibited him from competing for future public works and he later told Farington that he had refused subsequent government commissions (Farington 8, 2853, 19 Sept 1806). In fact Nollekens had little need of the public exposure attendant on such commissions, for he already had a considerable reputation. Sophie von la Roche visited the studio of this ‘clever, modest man’ in September 1786 and declared his talent ‘equal to that of the ancients,’ (la Roche 1933, 233-4). An extensive notice in the European Magazine for 1788 said of Nollekens’s works that they were ‘sufficiently known’ to ‘transmit his name to posterity as an artist equal to any of the present times’ (Euro Mag 13, 387).
In 1791 Nollekens carved his first bust of Charles James Fox, the leader of the Whig party (227). This was executed for Lord Fitzwilliam and passed on to Catherine the Great to mark the start of diplomatic relations between the Russian government and the Foxite opposition, and it was a notable coup for Nollekens. It was copied for a number of Fox’s Whig colleagues. In 1802 the 5th Duke of Bedford ordered a second version, this time portraying Fox with the close-cropped hair then fashionable among radical Whigs, to be placed in the Temple of Liberty at Woburn Abbey (244). In 1807 Nollekens told Farington that he had executed twenty-one marble copies and had orders for 8 more, for which he was charging 100 guineas apiece (Farington 8, 3059-60).
Nollekens was quick to capitalise on the death of Fox’s great rival, the prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, who died in 1806 (271). He was asked to take a death mask (a regular practice for Nollekens) from Pitt’s face and within a year boasted that he had orders for 52 marble busts (Farington, 8, 3059-60). The astute Nollekens well understood the adverse effect that the market for plaster multiples would have on his sales of marble copies and he refused to sell casts of his bust until he had exhausted interest in marble versions (Farington 8, 2853, 19 Sept 1806). According to his biographer, J T Smith, the sculptor sold 74 replicas in marbles of the Pitt, and then 600 casts at 6 guineas each (Smith 1828, 2, 48). The busts of Fox and Pitt became stock pieces and brought his work before an even wider public. When the senate of the University of Cambridge voted to erect a statue to the deceased prime minister, Nollekens was chosen as sculptor, although it was widely thought that the commission was intended for Antonio Canova. The Gentleman’s Magazine reported that the statue was ‘esteemed a good likeness and the figure a fine piece of statuary’ (GM, 82, June 1812, 659).
Funerary sculpture had remained a major workshop activity. During the course of his career Nollekens produced about 140 monuments. The early ones were innovative but he turned increasingly to the production of formulaic and repetitive designs, often incorporating a mourning woman in high relief, putti extinguishing torches or grieving over urns, portrait busts or medallions of the deceased. He nonetheless took considerable care with these minor works, monitoring, for instance, work in progress and the installation of the modest slab to Lord Southampton (132, Farington, 12, 4157). His monument to Mrs Coke, is atypical, for it has an angel hovering over a tide of ice-cream clouds, extending a hand to escort the deceased up to heaven (122). The memorial to Mrs Howard, who died during childbirth, is his monumental masterpiece (113). Described by Robert Smirke as ‘excellent – sensible and beautiful,’ (Farington, 3, 961) it represents Religion comforting Mrs Howard, dying with her lifeless infant on her lap. After its erection Benjamin West declared that he had recently seen works by Canova, ‘which could not be compared with Nollekens’s monument to Mrs Howard’ (Farington, 8, 2796, 25 June 1806).
Nollekens was still recognised as Britain’s premier portraitist in 1815. When the banker Thomas Coutts asked Fuseli to whom he should go for a bust, he was told that ‘although Nollekens is superannuated in many particulars, yet in a bust he is unrivalled… [for] a group of figures, I should have recommended Flaxman; but for a bust, give me Nollekens (Smith 1828, 2, 50). Nollekens’s price had now risen to 150 guineas for a marble bust with shoulders and 100 guineas without, and he could command 75 guineas for a plaster (Farington, 13, 4555). His prices did not deter customers, who continued to sit for the 16 or so hours which Nollekens needed to model their features. Among the notable later busts were those of Arthur, Duke of Wellington, Spencer Perceval and the Reverend Charles Burney (320, 327, 337). Nollekens commented that people seemed most pleased with his busts of Benjamin West and Lady Charlemont (307, 290). The bust of Thomas Coutts (343) is believed to be the last which Nollekens modelled, and is not his finest. Cunningham felt it deficient in likeness and deplored its air of poverty and sickness, neither of which seemed appropriate in the sitter (Cunningham 1829-33, 3, 171).
After a long period of infirmity Mrs Nollekens died in August 1817 (GM, 87, 190), and it was commonly expected that her husband would soon follow. The sculptor had collapsed in St Albans Street in July 1813 and had since become deaf and gout-ridden. Although no longer capable of modelling from life, he ‘amused himself by working on smaller matters’ (Farington, 14, 5022), presumably the small models in clay (pensieri) which he had been producing and exhibiting since about 1800. Cunningham noted that some felt these little works to be superior to Nollekens’s marbles, and in 1839 one commentator maintained that his tiny sketch of The Graces (170) was superior Canova's interpretation of the subject (Thomas Medwin, quoted in JKB 1998, 75).
Cunningham remembered seeing Nollekens, infirm and carried in a sedan chair, at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1819, and in September that year Farington saw the sculptor bed-bound, swathed in bandages and ‘in a state of great debility. His look was ghastly’ (Farington 15, 5404). Despite the predictions of his surgeon, Dr Carlisle, Nollekens lived on until 1823, cared for by his lifelong servants and his assistant L A Goblet. He died at Mortimer Street on 23 April and was buried at St Mary’s, Paddington, where a monument by William Behnes was erected to his memory. It incorporates a relief image of Nollekens’s monument to Mrs Howard.
In his will (which had 14 codicils) Nollekens left money and property worth about £200,000. He had no children and small bequests were made to dozens of friends and family members, as well as his assistants, including George Gahagan, his doctor and even his hairdresser. The principal beneficiaries were the three legatees, Rev Thomas Kerrich, librarian of Cambridge University, the antiquary Francis Douce, and Francis Russell Palmer, the natural son of the 5th Duke of Bedford, whose mother was one of Nollekens’s close friends.
Goblet, who was left an annuity of £30, was instructed to sell the sculptor’s remaining works, stock and antiques, and auctions duly took place in July and December 1823. Nollekens’s sale included several busts and statues, numerous pensieri, and a large collection of terracotta figures, said to be by such illustrious sculptors as Giambologna, Fiammingo and Michelangelo. Nollekens also owned sketches by Louis François Roubiliac, Michael Rysbrack and Agostino Carlini. The buyers included many of a new generation of sculptors, whose sculpture would reflect the influence of Nollekens, including E H Baily, William Behnes, Sir Richard Westmacott and Francis Chantrey. Nollekens had praised and promoted the young Chantrey, and in return the latter always mentioned Nollekens ‘with tenderness and respect’ (Cunningham 1829-33, 3, 190).
Nollekens was admired by many of his fellow academicians. Benjamin West called him ‘a very honest man’ and a firm supporter of the Royal Academy (Farington, 6, 2331). There are numerous recorded instances of Nollekens providing advice and financial support to fellow artists, either personally, as in the case of the architect George Richardson, or through beneficiary funds. His professionalism and his talent were universally recognised: Nathaniel Marchant considered him to be unrivalled by any contemporary in the practice and execution of sculpture. Nollekens’s concentration on portraiture however suggested to a younger generation of neo-classical sculptors a lack of poetic ambition. Flaxman said that Nollekens ‘wanted mind’ (Farington, 2, 2511). Allan Cunningham believed his genius to be limited to the close observation of ‘the visible and earthly’ rather than the higher reaches of art (Cunningham 1829-33, 3, 199).
He was also an eccentric character and his personal foibles received greater attention after his death than his sculptural achievements. Wordsworth had commented in 1800 that Nollekens ‘was a strange and grotesque figure’ (Selincourt and Darbyshire 1947, 4, 409) and Farington had noted a ‘narrow disposition’ in some of his dealings in property (Farington 2, 638). In 1828 these quirks were given a full public airing in Nollekens and his Times, a petty-minded, vindictive and entertaining biography by John Thomas Smith, the son of Nollekens’s assistant Nathaniel Smith. J T Smith was virtually brought up in Nollekens’s studio and had been assured by the sculptor that he would benefit substantially through Nollekens’s will. He received only £100 as an executor. His response was to give a pitiless insight into the ‘pecuniary and domestic habits’ of the sculptor and his wife (Smith 1828, 1, iii), who, despite their wealth and position, practised economies close to self-degradation. Despite its vengeful motives and numerous factual inaccuracies, the book is one of the first full-length biographies of a British sculptor, and the second volume contains numerous vignettes of other sculptors’ lives, making it one of the most important printed sources for the study of 18th-century sculpture.
Smith’s account of Nollekens did not go unchallenged. The Gentleman’s Magazine considered the book to be born of unworthy motives and gratifying only to ‘the most malevolent feelings.’ It predicted that ‘the fruits of [Nollekens’s] talents will survive the memory of his faults’ (GM, December 1828, 98, 536-40). In 1830 Allan Cunningham sought to rescue the character of ‘this remarkable man’ from his ‘ungentle executor’. Cunningham rebutted Smith’s suggestion that Nollekens underpaid his assistants, and he replaced Smith’s caricature of the sculptor, at ‘one remove from an idiot’, with the image of a blunt, but well-liked and sincere man (Cunningham 1829-33, 3, 122, 186; Smith 1828, 1, 118).
Regardless of Nollekens’s perceived limitations as a poetic sculptor, or of his domestic eccentricities, it has long been recognised that he was the unchallenged master of British portrait sculpture for nearly 50 years. Despite the less-elevated position of this genre in the traditional hierarchies of academic art, it is nevertheless an achievement which distinguishes Nollekens as one of Britain’s foremost sculptors.
MGS
Literary References: Hayward’s List, 12; Euro Mag, 1788, 387; Farington, passim; GM, 1817, vol 87, 190; MS Inscriptions; Smith 1828, passim; GM, December 1828, vol 98, 536-40; Cunningham 1829-33, vol 3, 122-199; Selincourt and Darbyshire 1947, vol 4, 409; Howard 1964, 177-89; Wilton Ely 1976, 592-5; Penny 1977 (2), 1336-7; JKB 1977 (1), 180-2; JKB 1979, 1844-8, 1930-1; Lord 1988, 915-9; JKB 1989, 27-32; Penny 1991 (2), 5-34; Grove 1996, 196 (JKB); Mitchell 1992, 117-8; Ingamells 1997, 709-11; ODNB (JKB); JKB 1998, 72-84; Bilbey 2002, 95-107; Coltman 2004, 35-56; Wilson 2006 (3), 17-24; Sullivan 2006, 401-2; JKB 2010 (1); Wilson 2005 (2), 10; Wilson 2009 (1), 124
Archival References: St Marylebone Rate Books, Reel 14, 1771, p 60; reel 20, 1782, p 244; RA Council Minutes, vol 1, 25 Oct 1771, fol 111; Nollekens Family Papers; Nollekens/Polley; Nollekens Corr, BL; Nollekens Corr, Yale; letter to Thomas Banks, 1762-3, untraced, (transcribed in Whitley 1930, 40); RA/GA, I Nov 1779, report of JN’s election as Associate; Nollekens lecture ticket; Nollekens leasehold assignments; Nollekens’ note on Cowper bust; IGI
Will: Joseph Nollekens, 1823, FRC PROB 11/1673 p275-278v, proved 1 July 1723 (transcribed in Smith 1828, 2, 17-34)
Collections of Drawings: VAM, E.4343-4442-1920 (100 sheets of designs) ; E.547-663-1950 (117 sheets); two complete sketch books of sculpture in Rome, Genoa, Vienna, Paris, c1765, Ashm 1462 (Ingamells 1997, 710, and Scherf 2008, 362, 363, 365 (repr); designs for monuments and drawings, sketches of Roubiliac’s busts, Harris P437-442, P 504-510; 229 loose drawings, Sackler coll, USA; untraced, sold at Abbott and Holder, Feb-March 1989, lot 214, the folder entitled ‘Nollekens/Proportions of celebrated statues in Italy, measured by himself in 1770’, including two large drawings of Laöcoon and one of statues of women; Soane, vol 19
Miscellaneous Drawings: Design for a monument, 1799, sgd, BM 1901-4-17-11; design for a tablet monument, BM 1920-12-14-9; pencil drawing of the Laocoon, BM 1901-4-17-10; a faun with kid, 1759, Soc of Arts, London, Allan 1979, opp 161 (repr), and JKB 2009, 44 (repr); figure of Ocean and drawing(s) for monuments and/or chimneypieces, HMI, Henry Wood of Bristol Archive; drawings of antiquities, apparently for sale, RIBA, c1769, Soane (Ingamells 1997, 710)
Auction Catalogues: Nollekens 1823 (1); Nollekens 1823 (2); Nollekens 1823 (3)
Portraits of the sculptor: James Barry attrib, Rome c1769, oil on canvas, YCBA (JKB 1979, 1931 repr); Johann Zoffany Life Class at the Royal Academy 1771-2, oil on canvas, Royal coll; John Francis Rigaud, exhib RA 1772, oil on canvas, untraced (Christie, 23 March 1979, lot 113 repr); Charles Grignion, c1780, chalk and bodycolour, Huntington (59.55.624); Thomas Rowlandson Joseph Nollekens modelling a female nude, caricature, engraving, c1780 (Baker 2000, 36, repr); Lemuel Francis Abbott, c1791, oil, NPG, acc 30; Henry Singleton, The Royal Academicians under the Presidentship of Benjamin West, 1793-5, RA; H Edridge, January 1807, pencil and watercolour, BM; G H Harlow, c1810, oil on canvas, private coll; G Dance, 17 Feb 1810, black chalk, RA; Sir William Beechey, exhib RA 1812, oil on canvas, Tate acc N00120; James Lonsdale, c1816, oil on canvas, NPG, acc 360; Lewis Alexander Goblet, herm bust, exhib 1816, plaster, Ashm, 1821 and marble, VAM A.70-1965 (Bilbey 2002, 287 repr); J Jackson, pencil and watercolour, c1818, BM; Sir Francis Chantrey, 1818, marble, Woburn Abbey, Beds (another version : marble, 1819-20, BM. Original model Ashm, prelim drawing, pencil, Huntingdon); James Northcote, c1820, oil on canvas, Fitz; William Behnes, marble bas-relief on a monumental tablet, after 1823, St Mary, Paddington Green, London

The following list of works was prepared by John Kenworthy-Browne.