Details of Sculptor

Surname

Wyatt

Alternative Surname

First Name

Matthew Cotes

Initial of Surname

W

Year of Birth/Baptism

1778

Flourished

Year of Death

1862

Biographical Details

Matthew Cotes Wyatt, one of the most controversial sculptors of his age, came from a creative family, several of whom practised as sculptors, painters and architects. He was born in London on 30 April 1778, the son of the architect, James Wyatt, and had a happy youth receiving his schooling at Eton College and idling away the summers at Hanworth. In 1801 he married Maria McClellan, a wealthy widow, who bore him four talented sons, three architects and the sculptor, James Wyatt, who became his assistant and executed most of his father’s later designs.
Wyatt showed an early talent for miniature painting, which perhaps encouraged his father to enrol him at the Royal Academy Schools, where he studied drawing and painting. His first drawing, Study for Head of Cerberus, was exhibited at the Academy in 1800. His father’s contacts as surveyor general soon brought commissions for Wyatt and in 1805 he began work on a lengthy and prestigious contract for decorative ceiling paintings in the newly remodelled state apartments at Windsor Castle. These were destroyed during restoration work directed by his cousin, Jeffrey Wyatville. Wyatt was also invited to paint 28 life-sized portraits of founding members of the order of the Garter for a new chapter house in St George’s chapel. Plans to convert the adjacent Wolsey chapel for this purpose were not executed and none of the 21 portraits he completed have survived. He received £1,323 for these paintings.
In 1807, again supported by his father, who had influence with leaders of the Liverpool community, Wyatt submitted a design for the Nelson monument, to be sponsored by public subscription and sited in front of the new Exchange buildings (7). Several celebrated sculptors, including John Flaxman RA, JCF Rossi RA, Joseph Nollekens RA, John Bacon RA, (Sir) Richard Westmacott RA and a strong local contender, George Bullock, were invited to submit suggestions, but Wyatt’s design, his first known drawing for a work of sculpture, was chosen. His dramatic concept was for an apotheosis of Nelson, accompanied by Victory and Death, enveloped in swirling captured flags. This group was set on a drum decorated with four reliefs of Nelson’s greatest victories, interspersed with figures of shackled prisoners of war. Since the execution of the design was beyond Wyatt’s powers at this time, Westmacott cast the bronze statue. The monument was prepared in Westmacott’s studio and visitors commended him for successfully completing the largest and best executed work of its kind (Liverpool Mercury, 22 October 1813, cited by Yarrington 1988, 127). It was unveiled on the 21 October 1813, the eighth anniversary of Nelson’s death at Trafalgar.
After the death of Wyatt’s father in 1813, commissions for paintings from the Office of Works abruptly ceased. Wyatt decided to concentrate his energies on sculpture by teaching himself modelling and carving. Little is known about this period of his life except that he went to wrestling matches to make close studies of human anatomy.
In 1815 the Government invited leading artists to submit designs for a national tropheum to celebrate the nation’s victories during the Napoleonic Wars. Wyatt and his younger brother Philip presented a grandiose design for a pyramid 360ft high consisting of 22 terraces, each decorated with bronze reliefs commemorating a year of the conflict. This was to be surmounted by a statue of George III and placed in the King’s Mews next to St Martin-in-the-Fields (24). It was not executed.
On 6 November 1817, the Prince Regent’s only child, Princess Charlotte Augusta, died in childbirth. Such was the nation’s sorrow that a fund was opened for a memorial, to be raised by public subscription, limited to 1/- a head. The appeal brought in over £12,000. Wyatt provided the model for a proposed memorial and his personal connexions with the royal family gained him the commission (5). The group, which was originally intended to be placed in a temple, perhaps in a public park, was almost complete by April 1820, when it could be viewed in the sculptor’s studio in Henrietta Street. In February 1824 it was decided to house it in the Urswick chantry in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, despite objections that this was not a sufficiently public site. It was finally unveiled in 1826. Wyatt created a startling image, which had no real precursor in English funerary art, but may have been inspired by Arthur William Devis’s painting of the Apotheosis of Princess Charlotte in St George’s church, Esher, Surrey. The Princess lies covered by a shroud with the fingers of one limp hand protruding to macabre effect. She is attended by four, completely veiled, kneeling figures, thought at the time to represent the four quarters of the globe (GM, 1826, 350). Above the pitiful scene and in sharp contrast, the Princess bursts theatrically from an open tomb and soars upwards, accompanied by two angels, one of whom holds her child. Wyatt’s intention, to express the grimness of death and boldly assert Christian hopes of resurrection, met the public mood and made his reputation.
After the death of George III in 1820 a committee was formed to erect a memorial to his memory, by public subscription (15). Wyatt was invited to submitted a design because of ‘the long connection of his family with the late King’ (GM, 1822, pt 1, 268-9). His sketch of the king standing in a quadriga attended by two angels was rejected as too costly and a simpler design, an equestrian portrait of the King on his favourite charger, Adonis, was instead chosen. Waterloo Place was selected as the appropriate site for the statue until the committee realised that a statue of the Duke of York on a column nearby would overshadow his father’s memorial, whilst also turning his back upon it. When Cockspur Street was chosen as an alternative location, a banker in Pall Mall took out an injunction against the erection of the statue opposite his premises. Much time and expense was wasted before the Lord Chancellor gave his verdict that the Cockspur Street plan should be implemented. There were further problems when a section of the mould for the horse was sabotaged and part of the statue had to be recast. On 3 August 1836, 14 years after its inception, the statue was eventually unveiled by the unpopular Duke of Cumberland and the ceremony was disrupted by an unruly mob. It was described as a ‘burlesque effigy’ (The Times, 4 August 1836), and the king’s image, in a pigtailed riding wig, earned Cockspur Street the nickname Pigtail Place.
The Duke and Duchess of Rutland were loyal patrons of the Wyatt family and they employed Matthew Cotes and his brothers Benjamin and Philip in the restoration of Belvoir Castle after a fire. M C Wyatt, assisted by his son James, designed the new Elizabeth saloon, providing painted ceilings and a marble statue of the duchess (9). He supplied a trompe-l’oeil table for an immense silver wine cooler for the dining room (29) and a marble fireplace for the regent gallery (22). The duchess died unexpectedly in 1825 and the Wyatt brothers were commissioned to build a grand mausoleum at the Castle. M C Wyatt’s memorial to the Duchess was completed by 1829 and depicts her rising from the tomb with arms extended to greet her four dead children (4). It is lit through richly coloured stained glass, which gives drama to the darkened interior of the mausoleum. The monument has been described as Wyatt’s masterpiece, but better seen from a distance since the modelling does not stand up to close scrutiny (Robinson 1979 (2), 188).
In 1831 Wyatt was approached by Lord Dudley to have his favourite Newfoundland dog, Bashaw, immortalised in marble (11). Wyatt was asked to produce not only a good likeness but also his best work, regardless of cost. There was a promise of extensive further patronage at his lordship’s estate at Himley. Bashaw himself sat for the sculptor on numerous occasions in London and the statue was nearly complete when Lord Dudley died in 1833. His trustees and executors refused to honour the agreement to pay Wyatt the expected 5,000 guineas. The extraordinary statue caused a stir when it became the centrepiece of an exhibition in Wyatt’s studio, for it was unprecedented in intricacy. The life-sized dog had a coat carved from black, grey and white marble, eyes composed of gems and, beneath its foot, a bronze boa-constrictor with a forked tongue and protruding ruby eyes. Wyatt felt that the matter of payment should be referred to the courts, but nothing was done. The dog was exhibited at Wyatt’s show of his own work held in the great room, 21 Old Bond Street, London in 1834, where he also showed a ‘lay figure’ of a horse with metallic pivots on which the joints turned, so that a number of attitudes could be contrived. The dog was then forgotten until it was exhibited at the Great Exhibition in 1851 with the title The Faithful Friend of Man Trampling underfoot his most Insidious Enemy. Wyatt remained bitter about his treatment by Lord Dudley's executors and added a clause to his will stipulating that if any descendant of Lord Dudley should wish to buy the figure they should be obliged to pay the full 5,000 guineas.
In 1837 the City of London resolved to erect a statue of the Duke of Wellington, in recognition of his assistance with the London Bridge Approaches Act of 1827. Wyatt was proposed as executant, but the contract went to Sir Francis Chantrey RA. Later in the same year it was decided to erect a memorial commemorating the Duke of Wellington’s military achievements and a Wellington military memorial committee was duly set up, chaired by the the Duke of Rutland. By 1838, £14,000 had been raised by subscription and it was resolved that the memorial should take the form of a bronze equestrian statue, to be placed above the triumphal arch at Hyde Park Corner (17). Wyatt was selected as sculptor but angry letters appeared in the papers condemning the selection of artist without competition and the use of a great triumphal arch as a mere pedestal. Wyatt nonetheless started work on a design, choosing to depict the Duke seated on his favourite horse, Copenhagen, at the close of the battle of Waterloo. The committee approved the design and Wyatt signed a contract which accorded him £30,000.
Before work could start, a special studio with a roof 30 feet high had to be constructed next to his studio in Harrow Road, Paddington. Wyatt and his son James spent the next two years working on a huge model in plaster of paris. It took three years to cast the statue, in eight pieces, using bronze from French cannon captured at Waterloo. When completed the statue weighed over 40 tons and was large enough for a party of eight people to dine comfortably within the body of the horse. In September 1846 the roof and one wall of the foundry were removed and the statue was manoeuvred onto a special carriage designed by Wyatt, weighing nearly twenty tons. On 28 September the statue made its one and a half hour journey to Hyde Park Corner hauled by 29 dray horses and accompanied by military detachments and their bands.
It was greeted with derision. Every newspaper was hostile, questions were asked in Parliament and the RIBA condemned both the equestrian figure and its position on the arch, calling for its removal, a view endorsed by the Queen and Prince Albert. At this stage the duke himself made it known that he would consider the removal of the statue a personal insult and he threatened to resign as commander-in-chief. Faced with this prospect, the controversy collapsed and the statue remained on the Arch. Over the next 37 years Londoners became accustomed to seeing it and even came to regard it with some affection. In 1883, when Parliament resolved to make improvements to Hyde Park Corner, the statue was finally removed from the arch. It remained at ground level for a year before being offered to the army who re-sited it at Aldershot.
Wyatt did not live to see the banishment of the most controversial of all his works. He died at his home at Dudley Grove House, Harrow Road, Paddington, on 3 January 1862 and was buried at Highgate Cemetery. He had amassed a fortune of just under £80,000, thanks in part to family connections and a judicious marriage, but principally to a successful career. It is now generally recognised that his principal talent was as an imaginative designer, but that the finished works, which were executed largely by assistants, were at times disappointing.
Sylvia Allen
Literary References: GM 1862, 241 (brief notice of death); Tallis 1951, III,11; Gunnis 1968, 446-8; Physick 1969, 42; Linstrum 1974, 17; Penny 1975 (1), 314-32; Penny 1977 (1), 11, 12, 13, 56-9, 214 n48; Robinson 1979 (2), 173-88; Yarrington 1983, 315-29; Yarrington 1988, 124-8, 267; Whinney 1988, 422; Colvin 1995, 730, 1105, 1110; Grove 33, 1996, 447-8 (Robinson); Cavanagh 1997, 51-5; Phillimore, 2002, XIV; Bilbey 2002, 437-8; ODNB (O’Donoghue, rev. JM Robinson); Sinnema 2004, 173-92 (repr)
Archival References: Agreement between Westmacott and the committee for Nelson’s monument, Liverpool, 25 April 1818, Liverpool PRO 73 /Geo 2/11, cited by Yarrington 1988, 124; Wyatt family papers, RIBA drawings coll WY 3/1/28; family corr, NAL MSL/1948/3143-3144, (including letters from Wyatt to John, Duke of Rutland and to Charles, Marquis of Londonderry; payments for paintings for the Wolsey Chapel, St George’s Chapel, Windsor, TNA WORK 5/103; decorative work for the Royal Mint, PRO Works 5/112; sketch for an heraldic crest in the shape of a quatrefoil, 26 July 1862, RIBA drawings, J13/68; sketch for a jewelled coronet, RIBA drawings, J13/69; James Wyatt the Younger, album of drawings of and for sculpture including several relating to the Wellington statue, one of Queen Victoria exhib 1851, one of St George and the dragon
Additional MS Sources: Two letters from Soane to Wyatt, NAL, cited in the catalogue of non-illuminated MSS, National Art Lib, 1975, 89
Will: Draft, 10 November 1858, RIBA Wy Fam/1/10; FRC, Eyre and Spottiswood, Microfiche 6/98
Miscellaneous Drawings: Design for a low relief in St George’s Hall, Windsor, Royal Coll RL 17613; design for a monument to George III in the form of a quadriga , RIBAD
Handbill for Wyatt’s exhibition at the great room, 21 Old Bond St in 1834, coll Derek Linstrum (xerox HMI)
Auction Catalogues: M C Wyatt (1), 16 June 1860 (untraced); M C Wyatt (2), 20 June 1862 (untraced); M C Wyatt (3), 2-3 July 1862; M C Wyatt (4) 25 February 1881