Details of Sculptor

Surname

Bubb

Alternative Surname

First Name

James George

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

?1781

Flourished

Year of Death

1853

Biographical Details

A sculptor in marble and artificial stone, Bubb was responsible for some notable architectural ornaments. It seems likely that he is the James George Bubb who was christened on 23 September 1781 at Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, London, the son of James and Fanny Bubb. James Bubb senior was a tobacconist with a shop in the Strand, and the sculptor exhibited from an address in that same thoroughfare as a young man. In 1806 Lawrence Gahagan referred pejoratively to the sculptor as ‘Tobacconist Bubb’, which appears to confirm the connection (CLRO Misc MSS 207-8). Bubb married Margaret Alice, second daughter of Henry Blakey of Scots Yard, Bush Lane, on 9 May 1812 (The News, 31 May, 1812).
Bubb entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1801 and won a silver medal in 1805. He also worked before 1806 for J C F Rossi RA and John Bingley, who were then in partnership. According to Bingley, Bubb ‘did studiously attend to the duties of his profession and was employed in the several works carried on in that period, particularly in marble, viz. Captain Faulkener's monument in St Paul’s’ (CLRO Misc MSS 207-8).
Although young and relatively unknown, in 1806 Bubb was able to secure the commission for the monument to William Pitt, to be erected in the Guildhall (1). Bubb, whose estimate of £3,500 was the lowest tender, won the contract in competition with Samuel Percy, William Fisher, Lawrence Gahagan and Rossi, his former employer. Rossi was infuriated by the decision, which he felt to be a result of miserliness by the Corporation of London, and he queried whether Bubb was qualified to carry out the work. When asked to supply a reference, Rossi commented sourly that as Bubb had not ‘been employed during his continuance with me upon anything by which he could acquire any practical skill in the execution of such works as the one proposed’ he could not ‘give any opinion as to the executive ability of Mr Bubb’ (CLRO Misc MSS 207-8). Farington intimated that Bubb had been guilty of sharp practice, having ‘canvassed the Members of the Common Council and gave cards on the back of which he put the mark which he put on his model that it might be known’ (Farington vol 8, 2919).
Bubb intended the work as a pendant to John Bacon RA’s monument to the Earl of Chatham in Guildhall, but the statue has less variety and dynamism than Bacon’s composition. Pitt stands in an oratorical pose, whilst before him Britannia on horse-back emerges from the waves brandishing a fish (originally she carried a thunderbolt). Whinney called Bubb’s work ‘a tedious echo of the St Paul’s style of Rossi’ (Whinney 1988, 374).
Between 1809 and 1814 Bubb was recorded at three different addresses, Grafton Street East, ‘Mr Brooks’ in the New Road, Paddington, and 22 Tenby Street, Fitzroy Square. He is known to have taken Allan Cunningham as an assistant around this time, and in November 1811 he applied to become an associate Royal Academician, in competition with the sculptors Christopher Prospera, William Theed I, Sir Francis Chantrey RA, Peter Turnerelli and John Bacon II. The antipathy of his colleagues does not appear to have abated in the wake of the 1806 Guildhall competition for Bubb polled no votes.
Bubb produced a few busts, one of which is known to have survived, namely the impressive portrait of Admiral Lord Nelson, 1810 (15). His most notable works were decorative ornaments for buildings: an early commission for statues and a delightful bas-relief for Bristol’s Commercial Rooms, c1811, demonstrates real ability (19). In 1818 he and J C F Rossi went into partnership, despite their earlier dispute, to carry out extensive sculptural work for David Laing’s London Customs House (20). Bubb and Rossi used their own composition material, a type of terracotta, for the work, but within six years the badly-constructed building had been pulled down. The New Monthly Magazine, commenting in 1818, said of the sculpture that its material was ‘of a brick-like ferruginous colour and the general effect is very unpleasing’ whilst the figures were feeble, vulgar and ‘entirely devoid of all that is requisite in art; they possess no sentiment, they express nothing, they are seen and forgotten’. Lamenting Bubb’s failure to learn from the Elgin marbles, the article continued ‘It is a thousand pities that the performance of so great a national work should have been withheld from such men as Flaxman, Chantrey, and others, and its execution intrusted to a burner of artificial stone, whose style of design is as inferior to theirs, as is the tasteless material in which he deals to the purest marble of Italy’ (New Monthly Mag, 1818, vol 10, 154).
The tasteless material, referred to as ‘lithargolite’, was used for another of Bubb’s architectural works, the frieze for the Italian Opera House in the Haymarket (21). The work, according to Thomas Allen’s near-contemporary description, had Apollo and the Muses at its centre, and a carved allegory of the Progress of Music. The fragments that survive suggest a diverse iconography, from ancient Egyptian dancers to figures in contemporary dress.
Around this time Bubb experienced financial difficulties and he borrowed heavily in order to be able to complete his commissions (Farington, vol 16, 5652). In August 1820 he became bankrupt and his premises and kiln were taken over by Joseph Browne, who employed Bubb as a modeller and designer. Despite this setback, Bubb continued to attract large-scale commissions for architectural decoration. When the architect Francis Goodwin proposed to employ Bubb for the statuary on Manchester Town Hall (27), he described the sculptor as ‘pre-eminent in this country ... in this particular branch of the Arts’ (PMSA National Recording Project MR/MCR54). Bubb certainly attracted attention for the scope of his work if not for its quality: the Literary Gazette commented of his pediment with 40 figures for Cumberland Terrace (28) that it was ‘on so large a scale that it is only exceeded in size by that on St Paul’s Cathedral’ (Lit Gaz 1827, 65).
Bubb provided much ornament for the front of the Royal Exchange (24). In 1827, when Joseph Wilton’s statue of George III was taken down from the quadrangle because of its ill state of repair, the work disappeared into Bubb’s studio, from which it appears never to have re-emerged. Within a few months Bubb had applied to create a replacement and he was given the task without competition by the Gresham Committee. Bubb refused to copy Chantrey’s statue in the Guildhall as suggested and instead made a sketch ‘grateful to his own feelings for taste’ which depicted the King in robes of state rather than ‘any foreign costume’ (10, Letter MC, GR, 1824-29, 29 October 1828, transcribed in Roscoe 1997, 182). The committee was more stringent in awarding the commission for a statue of George IV, and after a competition that work was awarded to Sebastian Gahagan.
Bubb exhibited ideal works at the Royal Academy in 1830 and 1831 (11, 12), but his business appears to have declined gradually over the following years. In 1833 he held a sale at his premises in Grafton Street of his ‘architectural sculpture, casts &c’. He must have been something of a collector, because among the lots was Johann Zoffany’s Life class at the Royal Academy, which was sold to Joseph Browne for £37 16s (GM, 1833, pt 1, 252). In 1835 he applied to the AGBI for support, having had scarcely any employment over the previous two years. Bubb stated that he was living in impoverished circumstances, his landlord had taken and sold his stock in lieu of rent, and he had a wife and two children to support. A later note said that his wife had eloped with a young man who had been living with him as a pupil.
In 1839 Bubb was employed by J M Blashfield on experimental terracotta work at Canford, Dorset, where Sir John Guest was seeking to build inexpensive model cottages for agricultural workers. A small quantity of moulded bricks, tiles and ornaments were made from sketches by Sir Charles Barry. The same year he produced a statue of Pomona for Sir William Middleton (13), but these are his last known works. Bubb left a son, Francis, who was employed by John Seeley of New Road. A James George Bubb was given a gift of £12 by the Royal Academy in 1860. If Bubb died in 1853, as stated by Gunnis, this must have been a family member.
Bubb has not been remembered favourably, if at all. Most of his major works have been lost, destroyed or dismembered, and the low opinion of him expressed by his contemporaries and embittered rivals has given the impression that he was a sculptor of meagre talent with a reputation for opportunism. Mrs Esdaile was, however, so impressed by the remains of the Italian Opera House frieze, that in 1929 she described Bubb as an example of the ‘Illustrious Obscure’, with a ‘genius for relief’ (Esdaile 1929 (1), 33-8).
MGS
Literary References: Farington passim; Euro Mag, 1820, vol 78, 87; Builder, 1868, July 25, 547; Graves, I, 1905-6, 324; Esdaile 1929 (1), 33-43; Gunnis 1968, 66-8; Whinney 1988, 374; Roscoe 1997, 182-6; Ward-Jackson 2003, 174-7
Archival References: RA premium list; TNA WORK 5/144 (Mason’s work at Customs House, executants unidentified); AGBI, vol 2, 181 (1835), vol 5, 189 (1853); IGI
Will: James Bubb, tobacconist of the Strand, proved 26 November 1808, PROB 11/1487, 395-6