Details of Sculptor

Surname

Rysbrack

Alternative Surname

First Name

Michael

Initial of Surname

R

Year of Birth/Baptism

1694

Flourished

Year of Death

1770

Biographical Details

Michael Rysbrack was one of the leading sculptors working in England between 1720 and 1740 and was in steady demand throughout his long career. Although he never travelled to Italy he was the master of a restrained classical style that found favour with aristocrats and arbiters of taste of all political persuasions.
Rysbrack was a Fleming, baptised into the Catholic church at Sint Joriskerk, Antwerp, on 27 June 1694. He was the eighth or ninth child of Pieter Rysbrack, a landscape painter, who had visited England during the 1670s, but had been forced to return home because of the persecution facing Catholics after the Popish Plot of 1678.
In 1706 Rysbrack was apprenticed to Michael van der Voort, a successful Antwerp sculptor, known for his work in the classical idiom. He left the van der Voort workshop in 1712, became a master of the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1715 and took his first two apprentices in 1716. Rysbrack also worked in Brussels. No work from his Flemish years has been identified, but when he arrived in England in October 1720, he was already a confident master with an individual style. Rysbrack soon met the diarist and engraver George Vertue, who became an admirer and friend. Vertue’s extensive notes form the principal contemporary source for Rysbrack’s career. He was particularly impressed by Rysbrack’s clay models, which he considered ‘excellent & shows him to be a great Master tho’ young (about 26 years old). he was recommended to Mr Gibbs. Architect’ (Vertue 1, 76).
Rysbrack’s association with James Gibbs, a fellow Catholic, began shortly thereafter. Gibbs almost certainly introduced Rysbrack to Edward, Lord Harley, later 2nd Earl of Oxford, a member of the Tory Opposition and a noted connoisseur, who became Rysbrack’s patron (7, 138, 145, 199, 291, 296 and perhaps 4). Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, whose son’s bust, 1722, (135) was a very early commission, may well also have voiced her approval. Lord and Lady Harley were confident in recommending the sculptor to other Tory aristocrats, Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke (169), Thomas, Baron Foley (42), and the Bristol philanthropist, Sir Edward Colston (11, 149). Rysbrack’s early Whig patrons included the First Minister, Sir Robert Walpole (154, 215, 268, 274, 289, 290, 293, 297, 302), Lord Chief Justice King (30), a member of the Pelham family (161) and Sir Gilbert Heathcote (27), an influential supporter in the City of London. The sculptor’s comfortable relationship with clients throughout his career is particularly evident in his association with the banker, Henry Hoare (120, 122, 127, 252, 216, 217), which had begun by 1727 and ended only at Rysbrack’s death. In his will, dated 5 March 1768, the sculptor left Hoare ‘the model of the Hercules I made for him and the Drawing by me of Judas’s last Kiss to our Saviour’. Another client who felt easy in his company was Hoare’s cousin, Sir Edward Littleton of Teddesley Hall, near Penkridge, Staffs (240, 243-5, 286). 23 conversational letters from Rysbrack to Littleton, written during 1750s and 1760s, deal with the progress of work in hand for Littleton and other patrons, discuss technical procedures in the preparation of terracottas and tell of Rysbrack’s indifferent health with increasing age. The last, written in February 1766, ends ‘I think the Esteem which You and Mr. Hoare have for me, I shall never forget’ (Webb 1954, 209).
Gibbs raised Rysbrack’s professional standing by choosing him to execute his own designs for sculpture. The sculptor worked with Gibbs on at least eight monuments during the 1720s, most of them in London’s most prestigious place of burial and commemoration, Westminster Abbey (4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14, 16, 80). Rysbrack carved the surround and life-sized figures of Clio and Euterpe flanking a portrait bust of Matthew Prior by Antoine Coysevox, 1714, on the monument to the poet, 1723, in Poets’ Corner (7). James Ralph, a terse critic, felt that the bust was ‘hurt’ by the statues flanking it (Ralph 1734, 79). Vertue thought that Gibbs had treated Rysbrack shabbily by paying him only £35 for each figure (he would later command 35 guineas for a portrait bust in marble).
Ralph was uncharacteristically generous in his response to two other Rysbrack monuments designed by Gibbs. The wall tablet for Ben Jonson, the playwright (4), has a relief portrait ‘executed with great happiness’ and a surround with the ‘few, proper and elegant’ ornaments that became characteristic of much of Rysbrack’s later output (Ralph 1734, 78). Ralph also singled out the memorial to John Smith (6) as ‘designed and executed with great judgment and spirit’ (Ralph 1734, 74). This has a portrait medallion held by a weeping female attendant, a composition adopted widely for monuments later in the century. The collaboration with Gibbs ceased in the early 1730s, but Gibbs’s Book of Architecture, published in 1728, to which Rysbrack subscribed, provided the inspiration for numbers of small monuments carved by Rysbrack (Eustace 1982, 78-80; eg 35). Gibbs and Rysbrack continued to meet socially and carried on their respective businesses from comfortable terraced houses on either side of the Oxford Chapel (St Peter, Vere Street) on Lord and Lady Oxford’s estate. Rysbrack began paying rates at Vere Street between 12 May and 26 August 1725 and he remained there throughout his life; the house was later numbered 3 Vere Street.
A second architect who collaborated with Rysbrack was William Kent. The sculptor probably met Kent through Lord Burlington, the champion of Palladian classicism, who commissioned statues of Andrea Palladio and Inigo Jones from Rysbrack for the principal front of his villa at Chiswick in 1723 (100). Kent was employed as decorator of the new state rooms at Kensington Palace and Rysbrack’s overmantel relief of A Roman Marriage for the cube room (now cupola room) was ordered by the board of works on 22 January 1724 (275). The subject, which may have been determined by Kent, came from an ancient Roman source, accessible to artists in England through an engraving. Kent and Rysbrack also worked together in the state rooms at Houghton Hall, Sir Robert Walpole’s country seat in Norfolk, where Rysbrack carved a series of classical reliefs from engraved sources (268, 274, 297). The two again worked in close association at Stowe: Kent designed a number of garden temples and Rysbrack provided busts of British Worthies (159) and statues of seven Anglo-Saxon deities, inventive figures that suggest a knowledge of medieval manuscripts (105). They also worked together on Queen Caroline’s new library at St James’s, London (210), the source of much confusion in the Rysbrack literature.
He executed designs by Kent for three of the most important funerary monuments in England in the first half of the 18th century. The memorial to Sir Isaac Newton, England’s greatest scientist and astronomer, was completed in 1731 (17) and sited in a focal position on the north side of the screen separating the nave and choir of Westminster Abbey. Kent provided the inventive design. The composition is triangular and has a reclining effigy on a sarcophagus with putti at his feet, holding a scroll inscribed with a mathematical formula. Above them is a figure of Astronomy seated on a globe. Rysbrack made minor modifications to Kent’s design, introducing a relief of boys with instruments on the sarcophagus. His finely detailed terracotta model for the Newton has survived and endorses Vertue’s opinion of the sculptor’s skill as a modeller in clay. A second ambitious monument commemorated John, Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim (25). It is an apotheosis of the great general in Roman military dress attended by his mourning family and by winged figures of Fame and Victory, either side of a sarcophagus. The lively relief on the pedestal records the moment of Marshall Tallard’s surrender at the battle of Blenheim. The model for this historic scene is also intact (SJSM) and is remarkable for the way it conveys the tension between rival commanders and particularly the nervous movements of their horses. The third inventive monument, to James, Earl of Stanhope, 1731-33 (24), is set on the south side of the screen in Westminster Abbey, across from the Newton. This pictorial composition depicts Stanhope, the soldier, reclining in Roman armour in his tent. Kent’s design was considered by Ralph to be ‘trifling and absurd’ (Ralph 1734, 72), though the execution is superb. Rysbrack’s enhanced status is reflected in the patron’s arrangements and in payments disbursed: Kent earned £50 for his design, but the contract between Rysbrack and Stanhope’s sister made it clear that the sculptor was in sole control, responsible for all aspects of the commission except the iron railings and that a sum of £670 would be paid for his work and the cost of materials.
In 1732, Vertue listed 60 busts by Rysbrack, ‘modelld from the life’ or from painted portraits or engraved sources. These were of friends, artists, historic personalities, aristocrats and King George II, who twice sat to him. Heading Vertue’s list was the image of Daniel, 2nd Earl of Nottingham, a clay model which was translated to marble c1723 (137). This has recently been called ‘a landmark in English sculpture’ (Whinney 1988, 166), because it was one of the first attempts in this country at portraiture in the Roman manner. Rysbrack advertised his unequivocal mastery of both the classical and contemporary idiom in 1726 with two marble busts of Gibbs, one all’antica with a bald head (139) and the other a contemporary image, en negligé, with a curled wig and open shirt (140).
The 1730s were Rysbrack’s most secure years. His professional reputation was at its height and his company was sought by artists and collectors. In 1733 he became a member of the learned Spalding Gentleman’s Society, founded by Lord Oxford, and on 4 December 1734 he joined the Club of St Luke, an exclusive dining club of which Gibbs and Vertue were also members. Rysbrack hosted their dinner in 1735, the last before the club closed in 1743. In 1735 he was included in a conversation-piece by Gawen Hamilton with members of another club, the virtuosi who met at the King’s Arms in New Bond Street. Members of the latter included the Swedish portrait painters, Hans Hysing and Michael Dahl, the landcape architect Charles Bridgeman, John Wootton, the sporting and landscape painter, Matthew Robinson, a dilettante and amateur artist, William Thomas, steward of the Marylebone estate (on which several of them lived), Gibbs, Kent and Vertue. Rysbrack carved busts of seven of the 13 Virtuosi depicted in Hamilton’s painting. He also joined the larger and more loosely-knit Rose and Crown Club, which flourished for about 40 years until May 1745. Rysbrack was one of the first artists to rally around Captain Thomas Coram, founder of the Foundling Hospital, and he donated a work for permanent exhibition in the Court Room (280). He became a governor on 27 March 1745 and 15 other artists followed in December 1746.
Rysbrack’s outstanding public memorial of the 1730s was the commanding equestrian figure of King William III, a technical masterpiece in bronze for the new Queen Square in Bristol (108). The contract, from leaders of Bristol’s mercantile community, went to competition. Rysbrack and Peter Scheemakers submitted gilt models, to be ‘Viewd [in London] by judges of Art & horses’, whilst the Bristol community struggled to raise £1,500 to pay for the statue (Vertue III, 61). Bronze casting was costly and difficult, so the work in progress aroused considerable interest and Queen Caroline was among those who went to see it shortly before it was shipped to Bristol. Sir John Clerk of Penicuik on his 'Toure into England in the year 1733' recorded seeing in Rysbrack’s workshop the ‘furnaces &c. for melting the metal & the rest of the apparatus which is very great’ (National Archives of Scotland GD18/2110, f25 accessed through Art World in Britain 1660-1851). The loyal Vertue noted that experts in casting considered it ‘the best statue [in the medium] ever made in England’ (Vertue III, 66).
By the 1740s Rysbrack’s position as London’s leading sculptor was under threat. Scheemakers attracted a following after the unveiling of his monument to William Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey and Louis François Roubiliac challenged the supremacy of formal classical sculpture with a figure of the composer, Handel, in the guise of Apollo. Vertue noted a decrease in Rysbrack’s business, epitomised in 1745 by his failure to win the prestigious contract for the Duke of Argyll’s monument in Westminster Abbey, which went to Roubiliac (54).
At this difficult period Rysbrack turned to a potential new market: he prepared models for statuettes of three famous artists, to be marketed as plaster multiples and advertised at seven and a half guineas a set (114-16). In 1744 he sought to attract public attention with another model, a statuette of Hercules (117), the acknowledged classical ideal of virility, and he combined a variety of sources in his new interpretation. The proportions of the figure were taken from the ancient Farnese Hercules, the pose from an engraving after an Italian baroque painter, Pietro da Cortona, and the musculature from a number of the best-proportioned boxers and bruisers in contemporary London. The figure was a success: Rysbrack’s loyal patron, Henry Hoare, ordered a colossal marble version for his pantheon at Stourhead in 1747 and was so pleased with the work that he gave the sculptor a bonus of £50. In March 1759 he commissioned a marble statue of Flora, also adapted from the Antique, to stand beside it (127). Horace Walpole considered the Hercules to be Rysbrack’s masterpiece, ‘the principal ornament of Stourhead’ (Anecdotes 1786, IV, 211). Hoare later bought five drawings and three basso relievos at Rysbrack’s 1765 sale. The workshop continued to turn out considerable numbers of monuments and to provide a steady flow of portrait busts throughout the 1740s and 1750s. Rysbrack’s preparatory model of the head of the 4th Duke of Beaufort for his effigy on the monument at Badminton, 1756, survives and shows that Rysbrack had lost none of his skill in conveying a sitter’s personality (78).
If there was a diminution in Rysbrack’s reputation in the 1740s, it was restored during the following decade, when he collaborated several times with the architect, Robert Adam, adapting successfully to the new neoclassical style. In 1755 Adam wrote to Lord Hopetoun from Rome sending a design for a grand chimneypiece (285) and recommending that it should be carved in London by Rysbrack or Roubiliac, both of whom could be relied on ‘to follow the Antique Taste’ and not fall into ‘French littleness’ (Linlithgow, NRA (S) 888 fol 621). Rysbrack won the contract. Two monuments to Adam’s designs followed as late as 1763 (95, 97) and showed no diminution in quality. By this date Rysbrack had to contend with financial problems and also declining health: a letter sent on 11 July 1763 to the dilatory James West (the 2nd Earl of Oxford’s executor), who had ordered a bust of Shakespeare in 1759 (249), but had still not given instructions for the inscription on the pedestal, ends ‘I have nothing to live on but my Business I want Money and am at too great Expenses to continue where I am without business’ (West Papers, Alscot, box 42). He wrote to Littleton on 30 November 1765 that he had entirely left off business. He died at home, on 8 January 1770, and was buried in the graveyard of the parish church of St Marylebone.
Rysbrack had a considerable reputation, not only as a sculptor but as a draughtsman, and was the author of a number of highly finished drawings of historical subjects that were not intended for translation to marble, but were regarded as independent works of art and were framed by patrons. In his practice as a sculptor he seems always to have prepared preliminary drawings for monuments himself, as well as models in clay, wood and plaster, or wax. The carving of marble components by his assistants was closely supervised by Rysbrack, who was an early riser, attending to his team and working with them from five or six in the morning until late at night. Most of his known assistants, cast-makers and suppliers seem to have been of Netherlandish origin. His foremen were Peter Classius or Claessens (†1749) and Gaspar Vanderhagen ‘who did live with me’ and was left £50 in his will. Samuel Chaplin, carver, of Oxford Chapel Court (whose son, John, was Rysbrack’s godson), and Anna Maria, the wife of his cast-maker, Peter Vanina, were also beneficiaries. It is clear that Rysbrack also maintained links with his early master, for a godson, Peter Vandervoort, a carpenter, was left a small bequest. The executors were both connected with the sculpture trade: John Arnold Wallinger owned the marble importing firm who supplied his materials, and James Devaux was either a sculptor or a practioner in an allied trade and was related to the sculptor John De Veaux.
Rysbrack’s work had an impact on that of his contemporaries, particularly on the more florid style of Sir Henry Cheere, and on Thomas Carter II and William Tyler. Provincial masons were quick to imitate his architectural wall tablets, particularly those which had their origins in Gibbs’s Book of Architecture. He was admired above all for his portrait busts, which were faithful to the spirit of his sitters, but by the time of his death, his reputation was already in eclipse and he had no obituary. In 1805 Flaxman dismissed him as ‘a mere workman, too insipid to give pleasure, and too dull to offend greatly’, because he considered Rysbrack’s work to be insufficiently grounded in the Antique (Address to the President and Members of the Royal Academy on the Death of Thomas Banks, R.A., Sculptor). His reputation was restored in 1954 with Webb’s biography and reinforced by an exhibition with a major catalogue held in Bristol in 1982 and arranged by Katharine Eustace.
IR
Literary References: Vertue I, III, V passim; Mortimer 1763, 24; Pub Ad, April 18, 1767, 3; Anecdotes 1786, IV, 209; Webb 1954; Webb 1958 (1), 329; Gunnis 1968, 333-8; Physick 1969, 77-109; Eustace 1982; JKB 1983, 216-9; Friedman 1984, passim; Wilson 1984, passim; Whinney 1988, passim; Lord 1990 (2), 866-70; Craske 1992, passim; Grove 27, 466-9 (Eustace); Colvin 1995, 399-407, 580-6; Eustace 1997, 743-52; Eustace 1998, 31-40; Baker 2000, 95-118; Balderston 2000, 175-205; Balderston 2001, 1-28, esp. n 19; Ency of Sc III, 1489-90 (Giometti); ODNB (Eustace); Keynes 2005, passim; Eustace 2006 (1), 11; Eustace 2006 (2), 34-49; Craske 2007, passim
Archival References: PR, St Marylebone, 12 May and 26 August 1725, WCA 332 and 346; Hoare Private Accts, 1750-66, 16 July 1757, 19 Feb 1765; GPC
Wills: FRC PROB 11/954 , quire 28, 223 verso-quire 29, 225 verso, 5 March 1768
Miscellaneous drawings: Design for the Mansion House pediment ‘together with an explanation of the figures’ (CLRO Mansion House Committee Minutes, 14 March 1744 ) untraced; eight designs for monuments, Chicago AI R306/1140, 1149, 1159, 1164 , 1171, 1174, 1183-4; Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, Chicago AI, RX16751/10; Rest on the flight into Egypt, Ashm (Eustace 1982, 185, repr); four, for a monument, perhaps to the 2nd Duke of Beaufort, Beaufort Papers (Eustace 1982,151-3, repr); The triumph of Alexander, Bristol MAG K 4017 (Eustace 1982, 190-1, repr); St Joseph holding the bridle of the ass, BM Fawkener 44.5211; 15 classical and biblical subjects exhib Free Soc, 1765-9; Maiden with a Pitcher, Tobias and the Angel, Joseph and his Brethren, ink and wash, Harris P516, 517, 518; Briseis restored to Achilles and an unidentified monument, HMI 19/1988, 17/1991 (Friedman 1993, cat 1,18, repr); Two nymphs, huntresses, Louvre, Paris, Département des Arts graphiques 20434; several, unidentified monuments and biblical scenes, ex coll Charles Rogers, Cottonian Coll, CMAG, Plymouth (Eustace 1982, 115-6, 126-7, 133, 179-80, 184-5, 186-7); misc designs, principally for monuments, Soane, vol 37; The baptism of St John; Saul and the witch of Endor; A sacrifice; The punishment of a banditto; The contest between Aeneas and Diomedes, The entombing of our Saviour with Joseph of Arimathea, exhib Soc of A, 1763, 1765; ten classical and biblical subjects including Menelaus wounded, The surgeon extracting the dart from the wound of Menelaus, Judas’s last kiss to our Saviour (left to Henry Hoare in Rysbrack’s will), The Entombing of our Saviour, Saul and the Witch of Endor, The Witch of Endor raising the ghost of Samuel, NT, Stourhead (Webb 1954, 185; Eustace 1982, 188-91, repr); misc designs, principally for monuments, VAM 93E, 27 A-D (principally vol A); misc design, VAM 4248; design, perhaps for a monument to Arthur Onslow, VAM 4910.58; design for a monument to Dr Arthur Johnston, VAM 8933.37 (Physick 1989, 60, 62, repr); design for an unidentified monument showing the influence of James Gibbs’s design for the Craggs monument, exec Guelfi, inscr ‘£625’, VAM E.434-1946; study of a horse’s head, Nat Gall of Victoria, Melbourne (Eustace 1982, 97-8, repr); Henry Herbert, Earl of Carnarvon and his younger brother, William, portrait heads, chalk on buff paper, Wilton Archives (Webb 1954, 185, untraced 2002); 14 drawings of classical and biblical subjects sold Langford 14 Feb 1767, lots 22-28, 65-71; four designs for chimneypieces, 1759, VAM E.459-61, 463-1946 (Physick 1969, 101-3); two designs for chimneypieces, 1761, VAM E.464-1946 (Physick 1969, 101-3)
Auction Catalogues: Rysbrack 1764; Rysbrack 1765; Rysbrack 1766; Rysbrack 1767 (1); Rysbrack 1767 (2); Rysbrack 1772; Rysbrack 1774
Portraits of the sculptor: John Vanderbank attrib, c1728, oil on canvas, NPG 1802 ( Eustace 1982, 64 repr), engraving by W Finden, Anecdotes 1876, III 33; John Faber after John Vanderbank, 1734, mezzotint (Eustace 1982, 64-5 (repr); Gawen Hamilton, A Society of Artists, c1730, oil on canvas, Ashm; Gawen Hamilton, A Conversation of Virtuosis...at the Kings Armes, oil on canvas, raffled on 15 April 1735, NPG 1384 (Eustace 1982, 62-3 repr); Andrea Soldi, 1753, oil on canvas, YCBA, Paul Mellon Coll, B1976.7.75 (Eustace 1982, 43, 192 repr); Jonathan Richardson, profile sketch, pencil, nd, VAM E1-1942 (Eustace 1982, 66-7 repr)

The following list of works was prepared by Gordon Balderston