Details of Sculptor

Surname

Bonomi

Alternative Surname

First Name

Joseph

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

1796

Flourished

Year of Death

1878

Biographical Details

Bonomi began his career as a sculptor but later achieved prominence as an Egyptologist and draughtsman. He and his twin sister, Mary Ann, were born at 76 Great Titchfield Street, London, on 9 October 1796, the fourth and fifth surviving children of Joseph Bonomi ARA (1739-1808), an Italian-born architect, and his wife Rosa née Florini. He was baptised 4 days later in the Venetian chapel in London, when his sponsors (by proxy) were Giovanni Carlo Bonomi, his uncle, and Angelica Kauffman, the painter, who was his mother’s cousin. Bonomi’s parents died while he was young but he was left well provided for. He went to school at Carshalton, Surrey.
Bonomi had become interested in sculpture by 1815, when he was awarded a silver medal by the Society of Arts for an original bas-relief in plaster (16). He gave his address at that time as Charlotte Street. He joined the Royal Academy Schools the following year and won their silver medals in 1817 and 1818. He also studied anatomy under the eminent surgeon and anatomist Sir Charles Bell. Joseph Nollekens was a family friend and c1818 Bonomi entered his studio as a pupil. Nollekens seems to have been fond of the young man, whom he took on excursions to see the Parthenon marbles and on his regular Sunday evening walks. J T Smith records that ‘it was generally supposed that he would have left a considerable part of his immense property’ to his pupil in his will ‘from his long continued attachment to him from his birth’ (Smith 1828, I, 39). In fact Nollekens bequeathed him only £100 but he also left the same sum to each of Bonomi’s five brothers and sisters. Joseph’s brother Ignatius Bonomi (1787-1870) trained under his father and set up his own architectural practice in County Durham. He went on to design a number of funerary monuments, including two carved by Charles Harriott Smith.
One of Joseph Bonomi’s earliest works is the monument to Captain Charles Showers, in Kolkata (Calcutta) Cathedral, which he signed ‘[Bonomi] / Nollekens / Discipulus / Fecit 1819’ (1). It has a relief of the battle at Malown, during which Showers and his lieutenants, Bagot and Broughton, were killed in 1815. Rupert Gunnis considered it ‘fine’. Bonomi exhibited Jacob wrestling with the angel at the British Institution in 1820 (19) and showed several portrait busts at the Royal Academy in 1820 and 1821 (7-9). The following year he travelled to Rome, intending to study under Antonio Canova, but the plan collapsed because Canova died before Bonomi arrived in the city. There he became acquainted with John Gibson RA and executed at least two works (6, 17). A critic who saw them wrote that ‘this accomplished and intelligent artist is particularly distinguished by animation, freedom and simplicity in his works, very different from the usual manner of his countrymen’ (Lit Gaz, 1824, 668).
In spite of this encouraging review, sculpture soon became a secondary occupation. In Rome he met Robert Hay, a naval officer who was to lead an expedition to Egypt, and was persuaded to join the explorers to help record their discoveries. This occupation must have been congenial, for between 1824 and 1834 Bonomi travelled extensively in Egypt and the Near East, with a number of leading Egyptologists, making drawings of hieroglyphics, monuments and ancient sites. He also took casts of antiquities, including one of the head of the colossal statue of Rameses II at Memphis, which was later displayed at the British Museum. After his return to England in 1834 he illustrated books on ancient Egypt and coloured plaster-casts of Egyptian sculpture for the British Museum. He even became involved in two architectural commissions, designing an Egyptian façade for John Marshall’s Temple Mills in Leeds and an unrealised ‘carved and painted tympanum’ for James Wild’s masterpiece, Christ Church, Streatham, in South London. In 1842 Bonomi and Wild joined a Prussian research team, led by Professor Karl Richard Lepsius, in Egypt. Between expeditions Bonomi continued to work as a sculptor and exhibited several works at the Royal Academy in 1837 and 1838 (3, 4, 10, 13).
Bonomi settled permanently in Britain in 1844 and married Jessie, a daughter of the painter John Martin, the following year. The couple’s first four children all died of whooping cough in 1852. They went on to have four more, but Jessie died in 1859 and Joseph brought up his young family with the assistance of his sister-in-law, Isabella Mary Martin. He found that his combined expertise in art and Egyptology could be put to good use in a number of enterprises at home. In collaboration with two other artists, Henry Warren and Joseph Fahey, Bonomi produced and exhibited two moving panoramas depicting a trip along the Nile and a journey through the Holy Land. Highlights of the Nile panorama, which was put on display at the Egyptian Hall in London in July 1849, included a tableau of Abu Simbel seen by torchlight and a representation of a sandstorm overtaking a caravan in the Libyan desert. In 1852-53 Bonomi and Owen Jones designed the Egyptian Courts for the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. Bonomi oversaw the decorative sculpture and executed much of it himself (14). In 1857 he and James Wild jointly prepared a model for the national Wellington Memorial competition but were not successful (5) (Bonomi Papers Add 9389/2/W/60). In 1861 Bonomi was appointed Curator of the Sir John Soane Museum, in spite of objections from architects who pointed out that the post was officially reserved for a member of their profession. He also published a treatise, The Proportions of the Human Body, and invented a measuring device which he suggested might be used by artists and to identify individuals for legal purposes.
He died on 3 January 1878, after a short illness. His last known sculptural work was a pair of reliefs for the principal front of his family home, ‘The Camels’, in Prince’s Road, Wimbledon, which was built by Ignatius Bonomi between 1865 and 1866 (15). They depicted the riddle famously posed by the sphinx in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and the camels that gave the house its name were prominently featured. They were presumably demolished with the rest of the building. He bequeathed his portrait bust of the painter and dramatist, Prince Hoare the Younger (12) and a portrait of his father by John Francis Rigaud to the Royal Academy.
Bonomi is remembered chiefly for his contribution to the study of the ancient monuments of Egypt and the Near East. One of his most popular publications, Nineveh and its palaces. The discoveries of Botta and Layard, applied to the elucidation of Holy Writ, was reprinted several times between 1852 and 1894. One obituary recalled that ‘The kindness and urbanity of his disposition and his philanthropy endeared him to many friends, while his knowledge of the sites and monuments of ancient Egypt was freely imparted to all who sought his assistance or advice’ (Athenaeum, 1878, i, 316).
EH
Literary References: RSA, Transactions, vol 33, 1815, 22; Smith 1828, passim; Farington, 14, 5119; Builder, 1861, 165; The Times, 5 March 1878, 10; 17 May 1878, 11; DNB V, 1886, 364 (Lane-Poole); Simpson 1895, 548-9; Gunnis 1968, 58; Ormond 1973, 43, pl 67; Altick 1978, 182, 206, 460; Darby 1983, passim; Jenkins 1992, 116, 127-8; Colvin 1995, 142; Grove 4, 1996, 333 (Meadows); Curl 2001, 57; ODNB (Meadows)
Additional Manuscript Sources: Bonomi Autograph 1; Bonomi Autograph 2; Bonomi Miscellania; Bonomi Papers; Bonomi/Catherwood; Bonomi/Douce; Bonomi/Eastlake; Bonomi/Hay 1; Bonomi/Hay 2; Bonomi/Hérékyan Bey; Bonomi/Lee 1; Bonomi/Lee 2; Bonomi/Lee 3; Bonomi/Panizzi; Bonomi/Smythe; Bonomi/Trevelyan; Bonomi/Wornum; Collectanea Ægyptiaca; Eclipse Scrapbook
Wills and Administrations: PPR, will, 1 May 1878, effects under £8,000
Collections of Drawings: Drawings, watercolours and sketches made in Egypt, Nubia, Palestine and elsewhere, Griffith Institute, Oxford University
Portraits of the Sculptor: Matilda Sharpe, canvas, 1868, NPG 1477 (Ormond 1973, pl 67); C Martin, painting, exhib RA, London, 1867, 493; J Pastorini, miniature, exhib RA, 1816, 732; woodcut published ILN, LXXII (1878), 245