Details of Sculptor

Surname

Willems

Alternative Surname

Williams

First Name

Joseph

Initial of Surname

W

Year of Birth/Baptism

c1715

Flourished

Year of Death

1766

Biographical Details

Willems was born in Brussels c1715 and married Marie Joseph Lahaize at Tournai in 1739. He came to England around the middle of the 18th century and worked as a modeller at the Chelsea porcelain factory, run by Nicholas Sprimont. It has been suggested that the emergence of an interest in figurative models at Chelsea after 1749 and the development of a house style of modelling from about 1753 onwards may be linked to Willems’s arrival at the factory. However, his presence in England cannot be confirmed until 1755-8 when ‘Mr Williams or Mr Sprimont’ are mentioned in the Chelsea rate books as tenants of a house there. A pair of terracotta dancing figures at the Ashmolean Museum are signed ‘WILLEMS 1749’ but it is not certain that they were made in Britain and the veracity of the inscription has been called into question (Penny III, 1992, 185) (1).
He exhibited models at the annual exhibitions of the Society of Artists between 1760 and 1766 and Mortimer’s Universal Director for 1763 carried the notice, ‘Williams, Joseph, Modeller, at the Brussels Coffee-house, Chelsea. This artist teaches drawing and modelling; and has modelled for the Chelsea china manufactory for many years’ (Mortimer 1763, 29). He left England soon after February 1766, invited to the Tournai porcelain factory by its director, and died in Tournai on 1 November. A posthumous inventory of his effects included ‘plusiers grouppes de ronde bosse de terre cuite et colorées en blanc de sa composition, et par lui modelées’ (Lane 1960, 247). Several of the models exhibited by Willems at the Society of Arts, or recorded as being in his possesion at his death, appear to correspond to surviving Chelsea porcelain figures.
The death of ‘Mrs Mary Williams, wife of Mr Williams, Modeller at the Chelsea Manufactury’ was reported in the London Chronicle for 24-27 July 1764 (Lane 1960, 247 n12). Willems apparently remarried soon after, for on 25 July 1769 the Chiswick Times announced the death of ‘Mrs Mary Williams, widow of Mr Williams, for a long time Modeller at the Chelsea Manufactory’. It is possible that his second wife was Mary Anne Nollekens, the mother of Joseph Nollekens, for one account states that her second husband was ‘a person of the name of Williams an inferior statuary, who modelled for the Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory, and who went to Flanders, where he died, his widow surviving him for four years’ (Annual Biography and Obituary, 1824 and Gould 1838, 368, in GPC).
Literary References: Tapp 1938, 176-82; Lane 1960, 245-51; Gunnis 1968, 432; Watney 1972, 818-28; Penny III, 1992, 185-6