Details of Sculptor

Surname

Wilton

Alternative Surname

First Name

Joseph RA

Initial of Surname

W

Year of Birth/Baptism

1722

Flourished

Year of Death

1803

Biographical Details

Innovative in his work, a gentleman in his lifestyle and the fortunate possessor of a Continental training, Wilton was, for a time, England’s foremost sculptor and a leading figure in the newly-formed Royal Academy. He was born in London on 10 July 1722, and christened at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 8 August, the eldest son of William Wilton, an entrepreneurial plasterer who owned an ornament manufactory, with premises near Cavendish Square and Charing Cross. Joseph appears to have received some instruction in the decorative arts in his father’s workshops, but William Wilton’s contacts and wealth enabled Joseph to have a privileged training as a sculptor. In 1739 he was sent at his father’s expense to Nivelles, Belgium, where he joined the workshop of Laurent Delvaux. Wilton is recorded in his master’s surviving account-books as working for 53 and a half days on Delvaux’s oak pulpit for the Carmelite church in Nivelles, completed in 1744. He left in December of that year.
Following a path taken by several of Delvaux’s pupils, Wilton then went to Paris, where he learned to carve marble in the studio of Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714-1785) and won a silver medal, presumably from the French Academy. According to the engraver Thomas Major, who shared Wilton’s lodgings in Paris in 1746, the sculptor passed himself off as a Fleming in order to avoid detainment as an English Protestant during the War of the Austrian Succession.
Wilton later told Joseph Farington that he first went to Italy in 1747 (Farington 2, 403), later recounting in his autobiography that he left Paris in October. One of the first records of his presence in Rome dates to January 1749, when he was recommended by the English politician, George Bubb Doddington, to Cardinal Albani. Wilton lived in the Palazzo Zuccari on the Strada Felice with Simon Vierpyl between 1749 and 1751 and acted as an intermediary for Vierpyl with an English client on at least one occasion. Wilton became involved in the making and supplying of plaster casts after the antique with Matthew Brettingham, who also lodged in the Palazzo Zuccari. In 1750 Wilton became the first Englishman to win a premium from the Academy of St Luke, the gold medal awarded by Pope Benedict XIV in his jubilee year (157). Wilton’s Rome sketchbook includes drawings of ornaments in churches and a study of Bernini’s monument to Pope Alexander VII in St Peter’s. He made his way however by copying excavated sculpture, and his early patrons were English and Irish tourists, including the avid collector, Lord Malton, later 2nd Marquess of Rockingham (47). According to J T Smith, Wilton also had a close friendship with William Locke of Norbury Park, one of the most noted English connoisseurs and theorists of the antique of his day.
Wilton lived in Florence from 1751 to 1755, paying frequent visits to Rome. On 9 January 1752 he was elected to the Florentine Accademia del Disegno. By June 1753 he was living in a house belonging to the British envoy, Sir Horace Mann, on the Via de’ Bardi, and that September Mann wrote proudly to Horace Walpole of this ‘ingenious modest sculptor’ whose work ‘is admired by all the professors as well as connoisseurs’ (Lewis 1937-1983, vol. 20, 391-2). Wilton became a familiar figure with British visitors in Florence and acted as a guide to the collections of the Palazzo Pitti and the Uffizi galleries, where he met many of his future patrons. Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait in 1752, and Robert Adam reported to his brother in 1755 that he had been skating on the Arno with Wilton, and found him ‘sensible, civil and good-hearted’ (Eustace 1997, 743). Wilton’s practice was still chiefly confined to copying antiquities for visitors like Lord Edgcumbe and Lord Tylney (75, 48), but he also gave his opinion on artistic matters, found an antique marble altar for Horace Walpole, and advised Robert Adam on the design and execution of a chimneypiece (carved by Michael Rysbrack) for Hopetoun House.
In 1755 Wilton returned to London in the company of G B Capezzuoli, the painter G B Cipriani and the architect Sir William Chambers, with whom he would collaborate extensively in later years. Wilton had attracted the notice of numerous aristocratic patrons in Italy, and much was expected of him in London. His copies of ancient sculpture had been ‘mentioned with encomiums’ in The London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette (Lewis 1937-1983, vol 20, 391-2), and as early as 1753 Reynolds had urged him to return home and ‘begin a reputation in London’ (Postle 1995, 17). In addition to his excellent training and connections, Wilton was also a skilful and inventive sculptor. His bust of Dr Antonio Cocchi, 1755-56, a portrait without wig or draperies, combines the severity of an antique bust with features and skin texture treated with an unflinching naturalism (78). A puff in the Critical Review of 1756 (vol 1, 387) announced that the bust was ‘almost finished’ and that Wilton combined ‘the strength and accuracy of a Bona Rota with all taste and delicacy of a Bernini’.
In London, Wilton worked from his father’s premises in Charing Cross, where he remained until 1761. He married Frances Lucas of Bishopsgate on 9 June 1757 in St Martin-in-the-Fields and their first child, Frances, was born nine months later. Wilton continued to churn out copies from the antique (81-83), but he also carved innovative portrait busts, notably Lord Chesterfield’s head, 1757 (80), which again combined classical and naturalistic elements. He also maintained a public profile through the press and was singled out for his ‘perfect power of Dorick elegance and simplicity’ in a pamphlet of 1761 entitled A Call to the Connoisseurs.
Wilton took an active role in several nascent artistic institutions. In the years 1756-59, with Brettingham, he supplied the plaster casts for the 3rd Duke of Richmond’s Gallery in London, having, it seems, selected suitable subjects for the Duke whilst in Italy (51, 52, 79, 85). His bills of 1758 included itemised casts of Trajan’s column, Giambologna’s Samson and the Philistine, and the feet of Michelangelo’s David (159). He also carved a marble copy of the Apollo Belvedere for the entrance (54), and authored the prospectus. When the gallery was opened to boys over the age of 12 as a drawing school in February 1758, Wilton and Cipriani were appointed directors. Wilton also became one of the first artist members of the Society of Arts, Commerce and Manufactures in February 1757, and he was on the committee of the Society of Artists, who met in 1759 to organise London’s first art exhibition. In 1760 he was among the group of artists who gave work for display in the Foundling Hospital.
Wilton’s connections brought a prestigious reward in 1760, when he won the commission for General James Wolfe’s monument in Westminster Abbey (24), in competition with such formidable rivals as Louis François Roubiliac, Rysbrack and Sir Henry Cheere. Wilton had already been commissioned to produce an image of Wolfe for the Duke of Richmond in 1759 (52), after studying the corpse’s physiognomy on its arrival in Portsmouth (Anecdotes 1937, 156), and he may already have carved a bust of Wolfe in Roman military armour (87). Funds for this first publicly-financed monument were voted in September 1759 by the House of Commons, led by William Pitt the Elder, one of Wilton’s patrons (86). Wilton’s innovative design for the monument presents the General as a near-naked Pietà figure, expiring in the arms of a uniformed grenadier, who receives a laurel wreath from an angel, symbolising the victory at Quebec where Wolfe lost his life. Although not finally erected until 1772 the design prefigured Benjamin West’s supposedly revolutionary depiction of the same scene in contemporary dress. The monument reflects Wilton’s ambitious approach, demonstrates the assimilation of French influences, and shows his ability to innovate within the traditions of Baroque monumental theatricality. Cappezuoli, who was living with Wilton in April 1774, executed the fine relief on the pedestal.
In 1760 Wilton made the model and began carving a new royal coach (160) and in 1761, the year in which a flattering poem appeared in the London Magazine calling Roubiliac and Wilton ‘names as high as Phidias of antiquity’ he was appointed statuary to the King. A series of commissions for royal statues followed. In November the Corporation of London resolved to erect a marble figure of the new King on the Royal Exchange and Wilton wrote an obsequious letter to the committee offering his services as sculptor (Wilton/City Corp). The commission appears to have been awarded to him without competition (57). The statue was the subject of a spirited tirade in the Royal Magazine in April 1764, when the stiff pose and Roman habit were interpreted as dangerously expressive of the ‘haughty air of a tyrant’. Wilton was encouraged to reply to the criticisms in print, but answered that ‘an altercation with thousands of people who understand nothing of the matter’ would endanger his reputation and leave him open to prejudicial equivocation. Instead he answered each criticism levelled at his work in a letter (Wilton/City Corp), in which he suggested that the connoisseurs should be referred to antique precedents in the Capitoline Museum.
Wilton’s other royal monuments elicited varied responses Horace Walpole described the statue of George II at Cambridge (59) as ‘most vile’ (Anecdotes 1937, 156), but William Mason called the lead equestrian statue of George III in Berkeley Square ‘Phidian’ (60) (Lewis 1937-1983, vol 28, 472). It collapsed under its own weight in the early 19th century like other of Wilton’s publicly displayed portraits. The statue of George III erected in New York (65) became an inevitable early victim of the American War of Independence, and a bust of the King, commissioned by the philanthropist, Jonas Hanway, for the main square in Montreal was also destroyed (100). The Royal Exchange statue was taken down in a state of dilapidation in 1827, and was last seen in the studio of J G Bubb.
By the latter part of 1761 Wilton had erected extensive workshops in Queen Anne Street East, opposite Marylebone Fields, and occupied a large adjoining house on Portland Street. From here he ran a multi-faceted workshop, dealing in imported marble, urns and vases (142-6), supplying numerous chimneypieces, carrying out restoration work on antique sculpture (72), and turning out monuments of high quality. He employed many assistants including Nathaniel Smith, John Atkins and A Beaupré, a French sculptor recommended to him by Pigalle. Many of his works were produced in collaboration with Sir William Chambers, who had worked with Wilton’s father. Wilton’s eclectic training, his use of many assistants and his collaborative approach allowed him to move effortlessly between different styles. The influence of Delvaux has been detected in the arboreal frames to the Hales and Wolfe monuments (7, 24), the influence of Roman sculpture in the Berniniesque excess of the Bedford monument (22), whilst the memorials to Sir Hans Sloane, Christopher Griffith and Sir Robert Long are early examples of a cool, restrained neoclassicism (11, 16, 18).
The collaboration of Chambers and Wilton appears to have been the guiding force behind the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1768. The two resigned as directors of the Society of Artists that year and it was at a meeting at Wilton’s house that it was decided to offer the presidency of a new institution under the monarch’s protection to Sir Joshua Reynolds (Farington vol 6, 2469). These three leading figures in the artistic world were later depicted together in a painting by J F Rigaud celebrating the union of architecture, sculpture and painting. When Somerset House was built to Chambers’s design between 1776 and 1790 to house the Royal Academy and other bodies, Wilton’s workshop undertook a large share of the sculptural decoration (115, 137, 138, 148-153).
In 1768 Wilton’s father died, leaving his estate to his eldest son, Joseph. In addition, three properties in Mortimer Street, Cavendish Square, were left in trust to be administered by Wilton and Chambers in the interests of Joseph’s children. Wilton had acquired the trappings of a gentleman, including houses in town, on the Mall at Hammersmith, and at Snaresbrook, near Wanstead. His two sons, John and Joseph, were educated at Westminster School and young Joseph went on to University College, Oxford. His daughter, Frances, married Sir Robert Chambers, who had recently been appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature in Bengal. J T Smith, whose father had worked for Wilton, doubted that any man ‘supported a more liberal table’ (Smith 1828, 2, 177), and his guests included Lord Charlemont, one of his patrons (161), Joseph Baretti, who published puffs of Wilton’s work, and Dr Johnson, who refers to Wilton’s family in his correspondence, and who wrote the epitaph on the monument to Hester Salisbury (26). Many years later, when Wilton read Boswell’s biography of Johnson, he bemoaned the fact that he, Wilton, hadn’t kept a diary of things ‘worth recording of himself and those he knew’ (Farington 2, 415).
Wilton’s social standing no doubt helped him to secure regular commissions and throughout the 1770s and ‘80s he produced a steady flow of church monuments. Protean in style, these incorporate elements borrowed from the previous century of British sculpture, from the reclining figure awaiting the Last Judgement in the Mexborough monument (35) to the severe neo-lassical urns on the monument to the three wives of Lord Guildford (40). His finest achievement in the field was probably, however, the testament to Lady Anne Dawson, erected in a temple on her husband’s estate in County Monaghan (27). Its arrival in Ireland was announced in the Hibernian Journal in August 1774. Wilton and Chambers had used the theme of an angel escorting the deceased to heaven in their monument to the Countess of Mountrath (23), and then returned to it for the Dawson memorial, which has an angel appearing to Lady Dawson’s widower and son as they grieve over her urn. The angel appears in a swirl of draperies and clouds, causing the little boy to clasp his father in terror at the apparition. Despite the grandeur of the concept, the composition is relatively simple, tense and effective.
Wilton appears to have had financial difficulties in the late 1780s and J T Smith wrote that in June 1786 he sold his premises and studio contents. No sale catalogue has surfaced, so it is difficult to ascertain the reasons for the sale, or its size, although there were blocks of marble, models, casts, busts and several ‘elegantly ornamented chimney-pieces, which had been executed upon speculation’ (Smith 1828, vol. 2, 180). In 1790 he was appointed keeper of the Royal Academy in succession to Carlini and he moved into a suite of rooms at Somerset House. His financial decline continued and on 22 June 1793 the Universal Magazine carried news of Wilton’s bankruptcy (vol XCII, 472). He continued to work during these difficult years, was paid for more ornaments at Somerset House (largely the work of assistants, according to Smith), and in 1796 he dedicated his model for the bravura statue of Archbishop Tillotson (69) to George Stansfield, who supervised the monument’s erection in Yorkshire, signing himself ‘Joseph Wilton, RA, Statuary to the King and Keeper of His Majesty’s Royal Academy in London.’
Although now over 70, Wilton was in general good health, and appears to have carried out effectively such duties as vetting students for the plaster Academy at the RA. At this period he also began to write down particulars of his life, largely for Farington. He continued to be sociable, dining with guests in his rooms and receiving visits from his family, including his son who had become an Episcopalian vicar in Haddington, Scotland. Wilton’s wife died in September 1794 (GM, Sept 1794, 866) and he appears to have re-married for Farington recorded in January 1800 that Wilton’s ‘wife’s mother has £1,000 a year which must come to His family after Her decease. She is 70 years of age - He expects soon to have a good living’ (Farington, 4, 1357). Farington reported that Wilton’s health was failing in 1799, but he survived another four years dying on 25 November 1803. He was buried in the graveyard at St Mary, Wanstead: above the inscribed slab is a tall stone watch-house, locally known as the ‘watchers-box’, said to be a replica of the entrance to the holy sepulchre in Jerusalem. Wilton’s obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine described him as ‘an artist of very considerable merit. In his private life he was universally beloved, being of a placid temper, mild in his manners, benevolent, and hospitable; an indulgent and affectionate parent, and a kind master; all his habits were temperate, which contributed very much to his longevity’ (GM, Nov 1803, 1099).
J T Smith’s response to the sculptor was similar: he gave a vivid picture of the ‘portly and well-looking’ sculptor, ‘always dressed in the height of fashion’ and carrying a gold cane, whose perfectly gentlemanlike manners ‘rendered him an agreeable companion’ (Smith 1828, 2, 183). Horace Mann was less charitable about his former lodger. In 1760, after Wilton had failed to maintain correspondence with the consul, he described the sculptor as ‘a low-born fellow without education or gratitude’ (Lewis 1937-1983, vol. 22, 418-9). In 1796, the generous-spirited Wilton told Farington that ‘there was no just ground of reproach against the late Sir Horace Mann’ (Farington, vol. 2, 524).
A similar ambivalence is evident in evaluations of Wilton’s art. James Dallaway suggested that ‘the works of Bacon, Banks, Nollekins [sic], Wilton and Flaxman, will rescue the present age from being totally indebted to foreigners for perfection in statuary’ (Dallaway 1800, 402). Later critics have been less charitable: Baker notes that most commentators have treated Wilton’s variety of styles and genres as evidence of a lack of a strong sculptural personality (Baker 2000, 26). Allan Cunningham considered Wilton to be possessed of ‘little original merit as a sculptor’ and condemned him for his dependence on Chambers and his inability to produce poetic works when Wilton, unlike other sculptors, had the financial independence to do so (Cunningham 1829-33, vol 3, 81). More recently, Whinney has professed herself baffled and disappointed by Wilton’s inability to shake off the baroque style he had learnt under Delvaux and to embrace wholly the neo-classical ethos. His achievement is hard to summarise, but his career and output confirms that he was an innovative, skilled and eclectic sculptor, who played a pivotal role in British artistic communities from his days as a cicerone in Rome to his Keepership of the Royal Academy. As a sculptor, a friend of aristocrats and literati, and a crusader for institutions to support fellow artists, he occupies a unique role in the history of British 18th-century art.
MGS
Literary References: Critical Review, I, 1756, 387; GM, 1761, 431; Mortimer 1763, 29; GM, 1774, 141; Farington, passim; GM, 1790, 962; Univ Mag, XCII, 22nd June, 1793, 472; GM, 1803, 1099; Smith 1828, 2, 167-184; Cunningham 1829-33, III, 68-81; Builder 1859, 849; Graves 1907, 283; Walpole Soc 1917-18, 116; Whitley 1928, I, 96; Anecdotes 1937, 5; Lewis 1937-1983, vol 20, 391-2, vol 22, 418-9, vol 23, 567, vol 28, 472; Gunnis 1961, 13-15; Hodgkinson 1967, 73-80; Nat Sculpt Rev, 1974, 13; Allen 1983, 196; JKB 1983 (2), 41-44; Whinney 1988, passim; Sunderland 1988, 131 and repr 49; Coutu 1992, 59-67; Allan and Abbott 1992, 118; Coutu 1993, passim; Postle 1995, 11-18; Bindman and Baker 1995, passim; Grove 33, 1996, 227 (Murdoch); Coutu 1996, 175-185; Eustace 1997, 743; Jacobs 1997, 58-66; Ingamells 1997, 1009; Baker 1998 (3), 223-5; Leeds 1999, 62; Baker 2000, 26; Bilbey 2002, 161-64; ODNB (Coutu); Wilson 2005 (2), 4-26; Craske 2007, passim; JKB 2009, 40-49
Portraits of the Sculptor: Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1752, oil on canvas, NPG 4810; L F Roubiliac, bust of Wilton, c1761, RA; Johann Zoffany ‘The Academicians of the Royal Academy’ 1773, Royal coll); Charles Grignion, 1773, chalk, NPG 4314; John Francis Rigaud, Sir William Chambers, Joseph Wilton and Sir Joshua Reynolds, oil on canvas, 1782, NPG 987; John Hamilton Mortimer, Self-portrait with Joseph Wilton and a student, oil on canvas, c1765, RA; John Hamilton Mortimer Caricature Group, nd, YCBA
Archival References: Wilton Archive; Wilton/Bedford (see Harris 1970, 201, 247); letter to Lord Charlemont, 17 May 1773 with detailed bill, HMC 1891, vol 1, 314-5; Wilton/City Corp (transcribed in Roscoe 1997, 186-7); Chambers’s Letter-Books 41133, fol 1, 94 (letters to Wilton relating to the trust set up by Wilton’s father); Goodwood bills; IGI
Will: William Wilton, PROB 11/935, p316r
Miscellaneous Drawings: Continental sketchbook, ex coll Christopher Powney, 26 drawings chiefly of sculptural decoration, including MS notes and a sketch of a work by Pigalle (C Lib repr). Four studies from this notebook are of interior decoration in S Ignazio, Rome; a study of a papal monument; designs for or studies of a monument and a study of the nave decoration in S Maria in Vallicella, now HMI, 27.1 to 27.4/75 (Leeds 1999, 62); sketch of the tomb of Pope Alexander VII, St Peters, Rome, private coll (Grove 1996, 227, C Lib repr); design for a carved gilt mirror, three designs for garden urns, seven designs for unidentified monuments VAM E496-1964, E497-499-1964, E502, 505-7-1964, E1185-1187-1965; design for a vase, Stanford SC; chimneypiece design for Osterley House, signed by Wilton, Soane v22/201 (Harris 1970, 42, 240)
Auction Catalogues: Wilton 1786