Details of Sculptor

Surname

Westmacott

Alternative Surname

First Name

Sir Richard RA

Initial of Surname

W

Year of Birth/Baptism

1775

Flourished

Year of Death

1856

Biographical Details

Sir Richard Westmacott was the most significant member of a family of successful sculptors and won the lion’s share of public commissions during the first three decades of the 19th century. He was born in London on 15 July 1775, the eldest son of Richard Westmacott I and Sarah, née Vardy. He probably received some training at his father’s workshop in Mount Street before being apprenticed at the age of 14 to his grandfather, the furniture carver Thomas Vardy. He also received teaching from the Italian sculptor Castoro Casoni before leaving England with Casoni in the winter of 1792. After a brief stay in Paris they travelled to Rome, arriving in January 1793.
Westmacott appears to have led a productive life during his three years in Italy. He lived in the Palazzo Zuccari on the Strada Gregoriana and spent his mornings and evenings modelling at the Accademia di San Luca. He sketched in the Vatican, the Capitoline Museum and the Museo Pio Clementino with Casoni and sometimes with the painter, Joseph Gandy. He appears to have met John Flaxman RA and his wife socially. Westmacott worked as an agent in Italy for the architect Henry Holland, buying and selling antique fragments. It was in the context of this trade and through an introduction by the Abbate Carlo Bonomi that he met Antonio Canova, with whom he struck up a friendship that persisted for 25 years.
Westmacott spent the summer months in Florence, where he sketched at the Uffizi and received the first prize from the Florentine Academy for a model in a life class (288). His earliest surviving work in marble was a copy of the Uffizi Apollino, bought by an English patron, J S B Morritt (287), but he was also working on original works. In May 1795 he won the Pope’s medal from the Florentine Academy for his classicizing relief, Joseph confiding Benjamin to Juda (358). Westmacott was helped by his friendship with the sculptor Vincenzo Pacetti, who not only corrected defects in the work but also sat on the committee awarding Westmacott the prize.
In the autumn of 1795 Westmacott went with Gandy to look at antiquities in Abruzzo and Calabria, moving on to Lake Fucino, Naples, Portici, Pompeii and Herculaneum. In April 1796 he was making preparations to leave Rome when was robbed of his possessions by armed assailants in the Via Flaminia. After recuperating the sculptor travelled north through Florence, Bologna, Venice, Trieste, Vienna, Dresden and Berlin, arriving in England late in 1796. He was elected a member of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno in absentia on 24 September 1797.
Westmacott set up his studio in London next to his father’s house and on 20 February 1798 he married ‘wisely and well’, choosing Dorothy Margaret Wilkinson, daughter of Dr William Wilkinson of Barbados (AJ 1856, 315). Their wedding was at St George’s, Hanover Square. Westmacott had good connections, including family ties with the influential architect, James Wyatt, who attempted to win public commissions for the sculptor, and he soon attracted distinguished patrons. Among his first exhibited works was a bust of Sir William Chambers and a statue for William Beckford (325, 289). In April 1803 Farington noted that Westmacott had work in hand worth £16,000, and by 1806 he employed an Italian assistant (Farington, vol 6, 2162; vol 7, 2715).
In 1803 Westmacott won the contract for Sir Ralph Abercromby’s monument in St Paul’s Cathedral, his first memorial financed by public subscription (83). It is a dramatic tableau illustrating the moment when the Lieutenant-General fell dying from his horse at the Battle of Alexandria. Seven other monuments by Westmacott followed, commissioned by the Committee of Taste which was set up to oversee the erection of public monuments in Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral (70, 86, 128, 131, 141, 149, 213). The Gentleman’s Magazine later described the cathedral as ‘a sort of gallery of the works of Sir Richard Westmacott’ (GM, vol 201, 1856, 510). His commissions from the committee would earn him £29,300 in the next 20 years, but his rise to prominence inevitably caused jealousy among rivals: in 1807 Nathaniel Marchant spoke of his work ‘with much disapprobation, saying the parts of his figures were without form,’ and he suggested that Joseph Nollekens and the collector Charles Townley had ‘puffed him into notice’ (Farington, vol 8, 3084).
In 1803 Westmacott began work on his statue of the essayist, Joseph Addison, for Westminster Abbey (82), a monument noteworthy for the severe classical relief of the muses on the cylindrical pedestal. Several other early works, particularly the monuments to the Earl of Ilchester and Philip Yorke, have figures with heavy-hooded eyes, broadly carved draperies and an aura of classical purity almost unique in British sculpture of the day (32, 54).
Westmacott’s first public statue in bronze was of the 5th Duke of Bedford for Russell Square (291). The Times called it ‘the most magnificent work … ever cast in England’ and Westmacott soon gained a reputation as Britain’s foremost sculptor in bronze. The commemorative urge which swept through Britain’s institutions during and after the Napoleonic Wars proved immensely beneficial to Westmacott’s business. He designed, modelled and cast two statues of Nelson for Birmingham and Bridgetown (290, 292) and modelled and cast M C Wyatt’s complex baroque allegory commemorating Nelson for Liverpool (293). He is best known, however, for the statue of Achilles, 18 feet high, in Hyde Park. This was raised to celebrate the Duke of Wellington’s victories and was financed by subscription from patriotic British women, led by Lavinia, Countess Spencer (298). The Achilles is a modified version of one of the antique horse-tamers on the Quirinale in Rome, a scholarly quotation lost on the British press, who found hilarious the concept of high-born patriotic women erecting a colossal bronze statue of a naked man.
Westmacott hoped that the Achilles would foster a more widespread knowledge of classical sculpture and thus improve British taste. He was an acknowledged expert on the antique, who collected Roman works, such as the Westmacott athlete (BM) and dealt in antiquities with other connoisseurs, like the 4th Earl of Egremont, who nicknamed him ‘Westmacotteles.’ The sculptor was a member of the Society of Dilettanti and the Society of Antiquaries, and his views were sought by the Elgin Marbles committee. He, John Flaxman and William Pistell also helped to construct a temporary display for the Elgin and Phigaleian marbles at Burlington House. In 1815 Westmacott visited Paris to view the works of art looted by Napoleon and there met up again with Canova, who subsequently visited England and was received as an honoured guest in numerous country houses in Westmacott’s company. From 1816 he also acted as an unofficial advisor on antiquities and purchases to the Trustees of the British Museum. Westmacott also involved himself in depictions of British history, carving an unusual sequence of full-length statues for Ashridge Park, of historic personalities associated with the house (349, 351).
He became an ARA in 1805 and a full academician in February 1811. In 1818 his premises were no longer large enough to house the business and he moved to 14 South Audley Street, where he remained for the rest of his life. The property was soon extended and by 1820 he had set up his own bronze foundry in Pimlico. He employed several assistants, including M L Watson and John Carew. Carew was a valued employee, who was given piece-work between 1809 and 1827, which Westmacott estimated to be worth £800 to £1,200 per annum (Carew v Burrell 1840, 42). In 1838-39 Carew helped Westmacott sell 20 cases of antique statues, busts and fragments to the 4th Earl of Egremont, at an asking price of £1,137 (Orchard Wyndham MSS, 15 Nov 1838, 25 Jan and 25 Feb 1839). Other assistants included James Toole, T Clark of Bristol, James Trubshaw, William Griggs, William Scoular and Vincent Gahagan.
In December 1822 Westmacott was the subject of a five-page memoir in the European Magazine. That year he worked on a bronze statue of George III in the pose of Marcus Aurelius (311) and his monument to Charles James Fox was erected in Westminster Abbey (122). It depicted the Whig leader cradled by a severely classical Liberty and mourned by a kneeling African. By the early 1820s, Westmacott was acknowledged as leader in the field for public statues and major church monuments and he had the financial security and enlightened patronage to turn to ideal works, considered an artist’s highest achievement. His Psyche, shown opening a real ivory casket, appears to owe something to Canova and his asking price of 1,000 guineas was close to the Italian’s exorbitant charges (301). The Dream of Horace, a relief inspired by one of the poet’s odes, was exhibited with a long Latin quotation at the Royal Academy. It illustrates an episode from the poet’s infancy, when Horace was protected from wild animals by supernatural grace (363).
Westmacott’s monumental practice continued to be extensive, varied in style and occasionally innovative. The ponderous Greek revival mode of his early monuments gave way to a greater eclecticism: graceful mourning females appeared on several monuments (216, 226), he used deathbed scenes reminiscent of the work of Thomas Banks (99), and he echoed Flaxman with his angels escorting or exhorting the dead to heaven (135, 252). He also revived and adapted medieval conventions, representing the Dukes of Montpensier and Cleveland as recumbent effigies (241, 282).
One of Westmacott’s notable introductions to funerary sculpture was a sentimental rustic realism. The monument to Lord Penrhyn at Llandegai has a full-length figure of a slate-worker, complete with apron, crow-bar and hatchet, accompanied by a Welsh girl. Together they mourn over the sarcophagus of the rural reformer (165). During the 1820s Westmacott also produced a relief of ‘afflicted peasants’ in the style of Raphael for the 7th Earl of Bridgwater’s monument (192). His monument to Elizabeth Warren, 1824, features a statue of a rag-clad Irish migrant with her naked infant, grieving for the loss of her benefactress (198).This much appealed to contemporary taste. In 1832 he exhibited a figure of a gypsy with a child, apparently modelled from the life (312). The Gentleman’s Magazine later commented that Westmacott was essentially a naturalistic sculptor, and his achievement was to ‘represent thought and emotion … under their modern and national types’ (GM vol 201, 1856, 510).
Public works remained a part of Westmacott’s practice. In the 1820s he worked on the Waterloo Vase (352), carved from 20 tons of Carrara marble presented by the Grand Duke of Tuscany to George IV, who commissioned reliefs celebrating Napoleon’s defeat (GM vol 159, 1836, 186). Westmacott was still depicting British victories at Trafalgar and Waterloo in 1830, when he provided reliefs for the Marble Arch (354). His imposing bronze statue of the Duke of York, on a column 112 feet high, was an important precursor of Nelson’s Column (316).
In 1827 Westmacott was elected professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy, receiving £60 annually for delivering six lectures. These were said to be ‘treatises of considerable archaeological research, interspersed with practical remarks of great force and shrewdness and accompanied by admirable drawings’ (GM, vol 201, 1856, 510). Other public honours followed: in 1836 he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University and on 19 July 1837 he was knighted by Queen Victoria. In 1840 Westmacott estimated that he and Sir Francis Chantrey commanded the highest prices for sculpture in England (Burrell v Carew 1840, 48).
His notable later works included The sleeping infant, a sentimental monument to Lady Susan Murray (278) and a statue to the former Governor-General of India, Lord William Bentinck (319), his last work in bronze. Like the earlier monument to Warren Hastings in Calcutta (309), the Bentinck stresses the contribution of the British administration to the people of India. Hastings is depicted on a raised pedestal flanked by a Hindu brahmin and a muslim, whilst Bentinck’s monument includes a relief commemorating the outlawing of the practice of suttee.
Westmacott’s pediment group for the British Museum was clearly intended to be his crowning achievement, a testament to his scholarship and vision (356). It traces the progress of mankind from rude savagery to civilization and the accompanying creation of art. It makes reference to contemporary debates over the use of colour in Greek sculpture by its modest use of polychromy: the tympanum was tinted blue and some of the ornaments were gilded.
As a grandee of the British art establishment, Westmacott served on a number of public bodies. In 1843 he was one of the judges in the parliamentary fresco competition and in 1845 he reported on the condition of tombs in Canterbury Cathedral for the office of woods and forests. In 1849 the same department appointed him to supervise the erection of E H Baily’s Nelson monument in Trafalgar Square. In 1850 he was the leading candidate for the presidency of the Royal Academy but declined in favour of the painter, Sir Charles Eastlake. He acted as a commissioner for the Great Exhibition in 1851 and in 1853 testified as a witness for the select committee on the National Gallery. In 1855 he served on the Committee for English Sculpture at the International Exhibition in Paris, where he exhibited The houseless traveller, The nymph unclasping her zone and The sleeping infant (198, 308, 278).
Some associates regarded the ageing artist as pompous, but the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who was known for his waspish comments, found him mellow and generous. The diarist Caroline Fox, who visited Westmacott’s studio in June 1842, saw him as ‘a man of extreme energy and openness of countenance, real enthusiasm for his art, and earnest to direct its aim as high as heaven’ (Fox 1882, vol 2, 317, quoted in Busco 1994, 6). The most vivid illustration of his commitment to art came in 1834, when, at the age of 61, his physical exertions helped prevent the destruction of Westminster Hall during the fire at the Houses of Parliament.
Westmacott remained healthy until a few weeks before his death at South Audley Street on 2 September, 1856. He was buried at Chastleton, Glos, where he had the living and his son, Horatio, was the rector. Westmacott had already settled part of his fortune on his children on marriage, but in his will he left a settlement of £12,500 on his two daughters, Dorothy and Eliza, £1,100 to his son Spencer and £100 per annum to another son, Robert Marsh. He left numerous properties in London, his advowson at Chastleton and a large collection of works of art. These included a painting by Rembrandt, a portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo, a collection of papal medals and more than 4,000 prints and drawings by Stothard. The house in South Audley Street was made over to his son Richard Westmacott III RA, who appears to have taken an increasing role in the monumental business during the 1840s.
Westmacott was in virtual retirement for most of the last two decades of his life and his obituaries suggest that his work had already become old-fashioned. It was recognised nonetheless that for many years Westmacott and Chantrey had enjoyed the highest reputation accorded to any British sculptors at home or abroad. His output was considerable and since it spanned more than 55 years and several styles, writers of his obituaries and later scholars found it hard to categorise. Whinney was one who found his work puzzling and disappointing. In recent years, Penny and Busco have provided a more balanced appraisal of a man who was Britain’s principal official sculptor for thirty years.
MGS
Literary References: Farington, passim; Euro Mag 1822, vol 82, 493; GM 1836, vol 159, 186; Carew v Burrell 1840, 42-59; GM 1856, vol 201, 509-11; AJ 1856, 316; Honour 1963, 368-76; Gunnis 1968, 423-8; Colvin 1973-6, vol 6, 404-5; Penny 1974, 492-3; Penny 1975 (1), 314-32; Penny 1975 (2), 120-7; Penny 1977, passim; Read 1982, passim; Whinney 1988, passim; Busco 1988 (2); Busco 1989, 776; Penny 1991 (1), 255-264; Jenkins 1992, passim; Busco 1994; Ingamells 1997, 993; JKB 2006, 181-2; Baker 2008, 381, 384; Ward-Jackson 2012, 25-26
Archival References: Westmacott family archive (HMI 2000/80); Westmacott Corr, BL; Westmacott Corr, Yale; Westmacott Corr, VAM; Westmacott Corr, Met NY; Orchard Wyndham MSS; Westmacott/Elmes; Westmacott/Wellesley; Westmacott/Canova; Westmacott/Duke of Newcastle; Westmacott/Knighton; Westmacott/Nash; Westmacott/Adam; Westmacott/Lincoln; Westmacott/SDUK; Westmacott/RIEFAS; IGI;
Will: PROB 11/2245, 345v-238v
Collections of drawings: 96 studies of sculpture and architecture and English landscape watercolours, including views of Woburn Abbey, most inscribed and some dated circa 1848 (HMI A/S3 3); an album of 128 landscape sketches made on the Continent 1820-1824 and 1826 (HMI A/S1 4); 36 landscape views, studies of castles and churches in pencil, pen and ink and sepia wash, some landscape watercolours (HMI A/D1 7); Diary and sketchbook, c1835, detailing a journey in Scotland (HMI A/S2 19); 36 sketches of landscape views in Italy and Britain (HMI A/D1 32)
Miscellaneous drawings: Sketch after Raphael, ink, private coll, Busco 1994, 108 (repr); Sketch after a portrait of Edward VI, ink and pencil, private coll; sketch of a figure on Gloucester Cathedral, ink and watercolour, private coll; Two angels and a dying girl, watercolour, private coll, Busco 1994, 151 (repr); four designs (documented or attributed) including an equestrian statue of King George III for Windsor, Royal Coll, RL 24112, 24126, 17489, 23232; Plan for the arrangement of sculpture in the Sculpture Gallery, Chatsworth, c1830-4, Devonshire MSS, Wyatville correspondence B7: c. 1830-34 (Noble and Yarrington 2009, 49).
Auction Catalogues: Westmacott 1857 (1); Westmacott 1857 (2); Westmacott 1859
Portraits of the Sculptor: J Thomson, engraving in the Euro Mag, vol. 82, December 1822, Busco 1994, vi; Charles Benezech, 1792, chalk, NPG 731, Busco 1994, 7; George Scharf I, Westmacott’s lecture at the Royal Academy, 1836, pencil drawing, BM, P&D, 1862,0614.179; William Brockedon, chalk and pencil, 1844 NPG 2515 (95); Charles Hutton Lear, pencil, c1845, NPG 1456 (27); Eliza Westmacott, c1846-50, watercolour, private coll, Busco 1994, 20