Details of Sculptor

Surname

Campbell

Alternative Surname

First Name

Thomas

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

1790

Flourished

Year of Death

1858

Biographical Details

An Edinburgh-born sculptor who practised in London and Rome, Campbell is chiefly known for portrait sculpture in the neo-classical style. He was the son of Douglas Campbell, decribed as a gentleman’s servant and his wife, Helen, née Thorburn. A younger brother James (1810-1833) eventually became his pupil and studio assistant in Rome and latterly in London.
Campbell was born on 1 May 1791 and was apprenticed at an early age to a marble-cutter, John Marshall, who died during his apprenticeship. He completed his training with John Dalzell, who took over Marshall’s business. Campbell received his first recorded independent commission as a figure sculptor c1813 when he executed two freestone heads for the portico of St Mary’s Chapel (112). In 1816, after modelling a bust of Professor Robert Blair (31), probably carved subsequently in Rome, he attracted patronage from Gilbert Innes of Stow, the Depute Governor of the Bank of Scotland (32), who was impressed by the intellect of the young man when Campbell installed a chimneypiece in his home. Innes provided Campbell with the financial means to study at the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1818 and from 1819 in Rome.
During the winter of 1818, Campbell studied in Paris where the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire supplied him with a letter of introduction to Antonio Canova in Rome. The following year he met both Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, with whom he was to maintain amicable relations. Like many contemporaries he aspired towards the ‘ideal’, but was obliged to earn his living as a portrait and monumental sculptor. He maintained a good network of Scottish connections, acting as the accredited agent for the Board of the Trustees’ Academy of Edinburgh, for whom he managed to secure first casts of works by Canova and Thorvaldsen, and probably also casts after the antique for the use of students. He attracted some prestigious Scottish patrons and in 1820 was in a position to open a studio at 12 Piazza Mignanelli. Among his clients was Baron Kinnaird, who commissioned his own bare-chested, staunchly classical bust (40) and also a statue of his son, depicted as a curly-haired Ascanius, distracted from the act of tying his sandal (11). In 1824 Campbell was selected in competition with Samuel Joseph to provide an equestrian statue for the Earl of Hopetoun in Edinburgh (15). Executed in Rome and shipped back in 1829, the monument suggests Hopetoun’s patriotic virtue by showing him as a Roman citizen in a toga. The Earl is presented in a novel manner, leaning on the neck of his horse.
By 1823 Campbell had secured the patronage of the 6th Duke of Devonshire, who ordered a colossal portrait bust of himself (38). Devonshire went on to commission another of Princess Pauline Borghese (48), Napoleon’s sister, whose legendary beauty and links to recent history captivated the attention of the Duke and many others in Rome. This was followed by an order for a seated statue of the Princess (22) to accompany Antonio Canova’s statue of Napoleon’s mother, Madame Mère, in the sculpture gallery at Chatsworth. The Princess sat several times for Campbell, who also took casts of her famously elegant hands and feet. He kept the exasperated Duke waiting for 16 years before finally delivering the statue, which depicts the Princess doting on a medallion of her brother. The base was inlaid with numerous iron medallions, left by Pauline to the Duke on her death in 1825. By 1826, when he executed marble busts for King George IV of Pope Pius VII and Cardinal Consalvi, both after originals by Thorvaldsen, Campbell was the doyen of Scottish expatriate sculptors in Rome (47, 46).
Campbell had returned permanently to London by February 1830 with commissions in hand said to be worth £30,000. He took a studio at 28 Leicester Square and then, in 1834, at 16 Great Marlborough Street, retaining a studio in Rome, where both marble and labour were cheaper. Henceforth the preliminary carving of his major works took place in Italy, after which they were shipped to England, where Campbell provided the finishing touches. In his close personal control over both conception and final appearance, his modus shares something with Canova, whose work Campbell sought to emulate.
One of Campbell's aristocratic patrons was the 5th Duke of Buccleuch, who commissioned the monument to Elizabeth Buccleuch at Warkton (4), which the Art Journal later described as Campbell’s most important work. The effigy is seated stiff-backed on a classical throne rising nearly 10 feet in height and is attended, in Campbell’s own words, by figures, one ‘representing the Angel of Death the other a female figure recording the memory of her Grace’s virtues’ (Dalkeith Muniments, in GPC). Buccleuch also commissioned a statue of the Duke of Wellington (of whom Campbell produced numerous busts) in the pose of Donatello’s St George at Orsan Michele, Florence (10). Another notable Buccleuch commission was the monument to the Countess of Courtown in Ireland, which has a recumbent effigy (3). In December 1836 Campbell submitted an estimate of £6,490 to Buccleuch for works in hand, and by the time these were completed in 1847 Campbell had been paid nearly £8,000.
In 1837 George Cleghorn, in his Remarks on Ancient and Modern Art, cited the work of Campbell with that of Lawrence Macdonald and others, as evidence of the rebirth of the sculptural arts in Scotland. Campbell was not however to become the favourite sculptor in his homeland. He had offended members of the Edinburgh establishment, especially Sir Thomas Gibson-Craig, by his late delivery of the Hopetoun monument, and so failed to be selected for such prestigious public commissions as the monument to Sir Walter Scott. He executed a number of other less glamorous works for Scottish patrons, including a contrapposto statue of the Duke of York (21) and a figure for Aberdeen of the Duke of Gordon, robed as a Roman General with his foot on a cannon (25).
Campbell produced only a few funerary monuments. They included a standing figure of Sir William Hoste (2), and the memorial to Lady Whichcote, a severely classical stele relief of a woman reading (9). His busts were almost exclusively classical in style. They included several versions of the head of Earl Grey (51, 52, 60, 61), a portrait of the Duchess of Bedford in ringlets (87) and another of the rustic-featured surgeon, Robert Liston (79). The Art Journal described his works in this genre as ‘masterpieces of conception and invention’ which forcefully embodied the character of the sitter (AJ 1858, 107).
He died of bronchitis and emphysema on 4 February 1858 at 1 Great Castle-street, Regent Street and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. He was accorded no monument. Despite the large sums earned at his zenith from members of the aristocracy, he left effects worth less than £600. His remaining stock-in-trade, including an alto-relievo of Sarah Siddons, intended for her monument (5) was said to have been dispersed at an unrecorded posthumous studio sale. His estate was administered by the artist John Grey.
Campbell's obituary states that he was ‘of middle stature, and of a robust frame; lively in temperament, although occasionally subject to depression of spirits’ (AJ, 1858, 107). As a sculptor he was obsessively painstaking, building up his ideas in close detail and refusing to deliver commissions until he was convinced of their perfection. He does not appear not to have won wide fame, but was clearly appreciated by a small circle of wealthy patrons and friends.
MGS
Literary References: Haydon Autobiography 1853, vol 1, 343; AJ 1858, 107-8; Graves I, 1905-6, 386; Macready Diaries, II, 1912, 117; DNB; JKB 1971, 208-212; JKB 1972 (3), 322-331; Penny 1977 (1), 10; Smailes 1987, 709-14; Pearson 1991, 64-69; Dawson 1999, 210-1; Curl 2001, 242; Bilbey 2002, 231; ODNB (Smailes); Smailes 2009, 217-324
Additional MSS References: Correspondence 1826-1851, Beinecke Library, Yale GEN MSS/226; Letter-book, National Library of Scotland, MS146; Campbell/Buccleuch Letters
Will: PPR 7 July 1851
Portraits of the Sculptor: Christian Albrecht Jensen, oil on canvas, 1838, untraced (ODNB)