Details of Sculptor

Surname

Nost

Alternative Surname

Van Nost

First Name

John III

Initial of Surname

N

Year of Birth/Baptism

Flourished

Year of Death

1780

Biographical Details

Nost was born and trained in London, but made his name in Dublin, where he was the pre-eminent sculptor of the 1750s and 1760s, known particularly for his public statues of Hanoverian monarchs. He appears to have been the son of John Nost II and Catherine Nost, born on 22 June 1713 and christened at St Martin-in-the-Fields two days later. An entry in the Apprenticeship Books for 17 October 1726 records that ‘Jn Son of Jn Nost of St. Geo: Hanov: Square’ was bound to Henry Scheemakers for seven years, at a cost of £40.
Nothing is known of his career before 1749 when he presented a terracotta bust to the Dublin Society (24). His move to Dublin appears to have been dictated by a lack of competition in that city, where there was a considerable demand for sculpture and relatively few Irish practitioners to take advantage of it. He soon established an extensive practice in busts, monuments and royal statues.
Nost played an active role in the Dublin Society, an institution founded to promote ‘Husbandry and Other Useful Arts’, and the forerunner of the Society of Arts in London. In 1751 he carved a marble bust of its founder, Dr Samuel Madden, and in 1760, another senior member, Thomas Prior (25, 36). These and a bust in the Society’s rooms of the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (44), demonstrate that Nost was a highly accomplished portrait sculptor. Although Prior is portrayed all’antica, his sagging flesh and wrinkled brow are naturalistic, and Chesterfield has a bulbous nose and open mouth. Nost’s growing reputation for verisimilitude is confirmed by a letter from Mary Delaney to her sister, Mrs Dewes of 14 March 1752: ‘We called on a famous statuary, who has been here about two years – Vanhost. He served his time with Scheemaker and seems an ingenious man, and a great artist in his way: he takes as strong a likeness as ever I saw taken in marble – his price is forty guineas for the model and bust’ (Llanover 1861, III, 95-6). Delaney also noted that the sculptor was selling highly varnished plaster library busts, and making others to order. In this capacity he aided the Society by supplying plaster busts for students to work from, and he taught in the Society’s Figure Drawing School, providing tuition for numerous pupils including Patrick Cunningham, John Crawley, William Graham, Michael Foy and Christopher Hewetson.
Nost was fortunate to arrive in Dublin at a time of civic expansion. In 1752 he answered an advertisement issued by the Corporation by providing two proposals for an equestrian statue of George II. These were estimated at £1,200 and £1,730, the latter to include a stone plinth decorated with trophies. The Corporation chose Nost’s more costly design (12), noting that the sculptor was ‘the most knowing and skilful statuary in this kingdom’ and also that it would benefit ‘the honour and reputation of the city’ to have the work made in Dublin, rather than imported. A model was prepared by 1754 and the work was cast in 1756. It was placed in a focal position in the centre of St Stephen’s Green, and according to the Corporation was ‘allowed by persons of skill and judgement to be a complete and curious piece of workmanship’ (Hill 1998, 50).
During the 1750s Nost also continued the family tradition of lead ornament manufacture, though with less success. The philanthropist Dr Bartholomew Mosse, who founded Dublin’s first lying-in hospital, commissioned six classical figures (11) for the hospital’s new gardens. Nost had difficulties in obtaining payments from the governors of the Hospital and wrote to them on 24 October 1757: ‘My present distress compels me immediately to dispose of them, and am very willing to sell them many pounds cheaper at this juncture than at any other time I could afford them, being just now in misfortune, and must, this instant, raise a large sum to extricate me’. He later removed the works altogether and failed to deliver further gilt lead statues of George II and Frederick, Prince of Wales, which Mosse had ordered. (Strickland 1913, vol. 2, 483).
In 1756 the Friendly Brothers of St Patrick, a masonic group, commissioned a gilt bronze statue of General William Blakeney (13), an octogenarian hero of the Seven Years War, who had been made an Irish peer for his defence of Minorca against the French. The statue was unveiled on St Patrick’s Day, 1759, after being carried from the sculptor’s house in Aungier Street to the affluent residential square at the end of the mall where it was erected. In 1760 a commission followed from the fiercely loyal Corporation of Cork, who chose to commemorate the end of George II’s reign with an equestrian statue erected to his memory (15). A temporary foundry was set up in a lane off South Main Street, and the statue was cast under Nost’s supervision.
The new reign was soon to be commemorated in Dublin by a statue of George III (17), commissioned and paid for, at a cost of 700 guineas, by another Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Northumberland. In May 1765 the English press reported that ‘Mr Van Nost, Statuary from Dublin’ had modelled ‘an elegant design for a statue in brass,’ a ‘striking testimony’ to the Lord Lieutenant’s ‘loyalty and munificence’. Further notices in June reported ‘His majesty has most graciously condescended to sit three times to Mr Van Nost who came from Ireland on purpose’ (Press Cuttings 1723-1800, fols 54, 61).
Although it is less well-documented, Nost appears to have had a career in London as well as Dublin. In 1763 he was listed in Mortimer’s Universal Director ‘at Mr Clarke’s, St Martin’s-lane, opposite May’s-buildings’ (p 28; Rate-Books 1763, Cleansing Street Rates, F6007). J T Smith later recollected that Nost had lived at 104 St Martin’s Lane, in a large house once inhabited and decorated by King George I’s sergeant painter, Sir James Thornhill. Smith considered Nost’s most noteworthy work to be ‘the famous mask of Garrick from his face’ (55), which had been in Nathaniel Smith’s collection, but had finished up in a ‘gallery of theatrical pictures, busts &c’ owned by a Mr Mathews of Highgate Hill. According to the actor, Macklin, Nost’s bust of Garrick was ‘in every barber’s shop-window, as a block for wigs’ (Smith 1828, v.2, 228, 275) (44). Nost appears to have had other connections with Garrick. The great actor owned a marble bust of George III executed in 1764 (41?), and on 17 June 1778 an advertisement was placed in The Morning Post for a statuette of ‘GARRICK represented in the Figure of ROSCIUS, By JOHN VAN NOST’ (19). The prolix text described Roscius ‘studying the Character of Phaedria in the Eunuch of Terence,’ and the statuette could be had on subscription for two guineas. Sir Watkin Williams Wynn was one of those who took advantage of the offer. The advertisement called Nost ‘Statuary to their Majesties’, and now gave his address as Chelsea-Road, Pimlico.
Nost had a steady flow of patrons for monuments throughout his Irish career and new stylistic trends from London manifested themselves in these works. His memorial to Judge George Gore (3) is close in concept and composition to Louis François Roubiliac’s near-contemporaneous Last Judgement monuments to Mary Myddelton and General Hargrave. Nost borrowed the image of the deceased casting off a winding sheet at the Last Trump and included a medallion portrait of Gore’s predeceased wife among the heavenly clouds. Roubiliac’s theatricality is also evident in Nost’s monument to Nicholas and John Fitzgerald in Waterford Cathedral (8), erected through a bequest of £600 by Richard Fitzgerald of London (†1763), an Anglo-Irish landowner with large estates, who wished to honour his father and uncle (PROB 11/893 f505). A winged figure of Time with a broken hourglass approaches a weeping woman, leaning on a portrait medallion of the deceased men. Nost’s figures are carved with anatomical intensity, and Time’s muscles and veins and the small rolls of flesh above the navel are precisely rendered. The profile portraits have flabby chins and mis-shapen noses. Damage to the monument has upset the composition, but its original appearance is known from a description and an engraving for Smith’s Waterford, 1774.
Towards the end of his life Nost began to lose his monopoly on on Irish public statues. In 1771 the commission for a figure of Dr Charles Lucas for the Dublin Exchange went instead to the young Edward Smyth. A 19th-century source tells that Nost challenged the decision that his model was too large, and begged to be allowed to resubmit: ‘In the interval he cut his model in two, and omitted part of the centre, and thus presented it a second time for judgement; but this alteration had so cheated every other part of the figure of its fair proportions, that Smyth’s model was immediately chosen’ (Wright 1821, 320-1).
In 1775 Nost suffered a serious accident during the erection of the monument to Archbishop Smyth, a grand architectural piece with a large urn in a niche (9). The work was completed by Henry Darley of Abbey Street (Hibernian Magazine, April 1775, 193). According to Nost the accident 'deprived him for near three years of the use of his right hand and arm.' Nost went to England to recover, and by 1778 was able to model the small figure of Garrick in theatrical character (19), which was reproduced and sold by subscription for two guineas apiece. He was recorded at Chelsea Road, Pimlico in the advertisement. Early in 1779 he returned to Ireland, and in an announcement in Saunders News-Letter (1-2 February 1779) he stated that he was now 'perfectly recovered' and hoped to meet 'the same encouragement as when he first introduced the art in this kingdom, where he has resided above twenty-six years, and from which he never wishes to depart' (inf Ruth Ord-Hume).
Nost's commissions thereafter were few, and the Gentleman’s Magazine recorded the death in Dublin, late in 1780, of ‘Mr John van Nost, statuary to his majesty’ (vol 50, 494). His will, dated 24 October 1779, from an address in Mecklenburgh Street suggests that the sculptor left considerable assets. His wife, Ann (‘otherwise Armstrong’) inherited ‘all and every of his houses, estate, leasehold, interests, lands, household furniture, goods, chattels and effects.’ His sister Catherine Legross, widow, and his nephew, Richard Lynd, each received the proverbial shilling.
Nost was a versatile sculptor. He appears to have designed commemorative medals during the 1760s, including one showing the bloated profile of the victor of Culloden, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (56). His public works had a turbulent later life. The statue of General Blakeney survived only six years before being pulled down and removed to a new location, after which it disappeared. The royal statues suffered, like so many other statues in Ireland proclaiming loyalty to the English government. The equestrian George II in Cork was assaulted in 1849 by two men with staves, and after numerous other attacks and repairs it was destroyed. On the 13 May 1937 the Dublin statue fell a victim to dynamite. The poet W. B. Yeats wrote the following day ‘I would go into mourning, but the suit I kept for funerals is worn out. Our tomfools have blown up the equestrian statue of George II in St Stephen’s Green, the only Dublin statue that has delighted me by beauty and elegance’ (Irish Times, 14 May 1937).
MGS
Literary References: Press Cuttings 1723-1800, fols 54, 61; Mortimer 1763, 28; Smith 1774, 177; Hibernian Mag, April 1775, 193; Morning Post, 17 June 1778; GM vol 50, 1780, 494; Wright 1825, 181-2; Smith II, 1828, 228, 275; Llanover 1861, III, 95-6; Strickland 1913, vol 2, 478-487; Childe-Pemberton 1925, vol 1, 181; Webb 1957 (3), 119; Potterton 1974 (1), 260; Potterton 1975, passim; Hill 1998, passim; Sullivan 2005, 8-9; AAI 2014 [Sullivan]
Archival References: Parish register, St Martin-in-the-Fields, vols 9-10, 1713; Cleansing street rates 1763, WCA, F6007
Wills: ‘A memorial of the last will and testament of John Van Nost’ registered 3 Feb 1781, Registry of Deeds, Dublin (338.145.226588); Richard Fitzgerald, PROB 11/893 fol 505
Auctions: Strickland, vol 2, 485 notes that when Nost moved from his home in Aungier Street to a residence on the property of the Right Hon Anthony Malone on the east side of St Stephen’s Green (1763), he held a sale of his moulds and models; no reference to a surviving catalogue or source is included.