Details of Sculptor

Surname

Carlini

Alternative Surname

First Name

Agostino RA

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

c1718

Flourished

Year of Death

1790

Biographical Details

Carlini was one of the leading sculptors in Britain in the 1770s, and his surviving works show considerable virtuosity and invention. Although details of his life and work are sparse, he was a founder member of the Royal Academy and was hailed by one later commentator as ‘the finest sculptor of the day’ (Passavant 1836, vol 2, 276).
18th-century sources give his place of birth as Genoa, and Farington recorded his death at the age of 72. Nothing is known of his training or career before 1748, when he received payments for himself and his workmen at Huis ten Bosch in the Hague from the architect Pieter de Swart. These payments, for decorative carving commissioned by the Dutch court, continued until 1751. Carlini made a model for the Dutch royal barge, which was rejected because the quotation of 5,000 guilders was considered excessive, and in 1751 he carried out ‘carved work’ for the ‘bed of parade’ in which William IV of Orange lay in state and was carried to his grave. Royal patronage in the Netherlands seems to have ended with the monarch’s death, and the only further reference to his work there is an advertisement inserted by the Hague sculptor, Anthoni Wapperom in the Gravenhaegse Courant (18 Dec 1754) for a sumptuous horse-sleigh in the shape of a gilded centaur ‘made by the famous sculptor A. Carlini’. The sledge was advertised again in 1756, and in 1765 it was auctioned; its subsequent fate is unknown. By this time however Carlini was established in London.
The date of Carlini’s arrival in England is uncertain; he is first recorded as an exhibitor at the Society of Artists in 1760, showing a design for General Wolfe’s monument intended for Westminster Abbey (1). His earliest surviving work for a British patron, a full-sized marble statue of the famous quack doctor Joshua Ward (11), indicates that Carlini had considerable experience of working in marble. Ward, the inventor of the medicinal ‘Pill and Drop’, which bore his name, made a fortune from his questionable concoctions, and had many celebrated patients, including George II. He was also a philanthropist who founded hospitals for the poor. Ward is said to have paid Carlini an annuity of 200 guineas until the doctor’s death in December 1761 in order to keep the sculptor in England. The statue, which may have been intended for a projected monument to Ward, shows him in all his bulk, his flabby face, bursting waistcoat and billowing coat giving ample scope for Carlini to demonstrate his broad and exuberant carving.
In 1768 Carlini was living in Dean Street, Soho, ‘next door to the tin-shop at the corner of Compton Street’ (Public Advertiser 13 and 14 April 1768), where his property was rated at £36. In 1768 he was one of the 22 artists who successfully petitioned George III to found the Royal Academy, and he served as one of the original nine ‘Visitors’ appointed as visiting instructors and superintendents. At the first Academy exhibition in 1769 he showed a plaster model for an equestrian portrait of George III (13), copies of which could be bought for 6 guineas each. This was acclaimed by the press as the finest image of the monarch carved to date. It must have brought the sculptor to royal attention, for in 1773 he produced a marble bust of the king (22), described at the time as ‘a strong expressive likeness’ (Trusted 1992, 783). Both the model and bust were acquired by the Royal Academy, and were subsequently displayed at Somerset House. The architect William Chambers commissioned Carlini to make some decorative sculpture for the Strand front of the building (25, 26) and the sculptor may have brought in Giuseppe Ceracchi, who lodged with Carlini in Soho in 1776, and worked on the ornaments before 1778.
In 1783 Carlini became Keeper of the Academy Schools, a post he kept until his death. J T Smith commented that he filled it with little distinction, since he failed to ‘control the students sufficiently, but allowed them to take liberties with their superiors which would later have met with expulsion’ (Smith 1828,1,159). Carlini appears as ‘Agostino Turnthekey’ in Pasquin’s The Royal Academicians. A Farce (London 1786). He was also a member of the National Academy of Design of America.
Smith described Carlini as ‘an Italian who associated mostly with foreigners’ (Smith 1828, 2, 202), and the sculptor certainly appears to have worked closely with other Italians in London. In January 1771 he submitted a model in competition for Alderman William Beckford’s monument (5), producing a design incorporating a seven foot high statue with bronze ornaments and gold lettering, estimated at £1500. Although unsuccessful, the model was drawn by Biagio Rebecca, engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi and issued as a print in 1772. Bartolozzi also engraved Carlini’s equestrian model for the statue of George III mentioned above (13), as well as his later design for a monument to the composer, Johann Christian Bach. In Carlini’s posthumous sale engraved plates of these works fetched £37 5s 6d, £47 5s, and £12 12s respectively, fetching notably higher prices than most of the sculpture in the auction.
Carlini was also a close associate of his fellow academician, Giovanni Battista Cipriani, to whom, it was rumoured, he was often indebted for his designs (Smith 1828, 2, 203). At the 1787 Academy exhibition Carlini showed a model for Cipriani’s monument (9), drawing a hostile reaction from the press, who commented ‘the medallion of [Cipriani’s] head possesses neither the least likeness nor character of the worthy original; but this Mr Carlini will no doubt correct in the marble; - as well as give more forcible expression to the weeping genius’ (Press Cuttings 1686-1835, II, 337). Carlini, stout and elegant and holding his sculptor’s hammer, appears with Bartolozzi and Cipriani in a portrait by John Francis Rigaud, 1777 (NPG 3186).
The most notable of Carlini’s executed monuments, to Lord and Lady Milton at Milton Abbey, Dorset, was designed by Robert Adam. The composition is a revival of a seventeenth-century formula, featuring a grieving husband reclining by the recumbent figure of his deceased wife (8). Like his other known funerary monuments, the Milton memorial displays the grace and skilful handling of draperies which were highlighted in Carlini’s obituary. He died at 14 Carlisle Street, London on 16 August 1790 (GM 1790, 2,769) unmarried and intestate, and the administration of his will was granted to his sole heiress, ‘Elizabeth Watton, spinster’, who was apparently his housekeeper. In January 1791 she held a sale of Carlini’s prints, models, books, equipment and other possessions, including his Royal Academy diploma.
The scattered references to Carlini’s life in 18th- and 19th-century sources give little insight into his personality, although JT Smith penned a characteristically colourful impression of the sculptor; ‘When Carlini was Keeper of the Royal Academy, he used to walk from his house to Somerset-place, with a broken tobacco-pipe in his mouth, and dressed in a deplorable great coat; but when he has been going to the Academy-dinner, I have seen him getting into a chair, and full-dressed in a purple silk coat, scarlet gold-laced waistcoat, point-lace ruffles, and a sword and bag’ (Smith 1828, 205).
Contemporary sculptors clearly held his work in high regard, for Nathaniel Smith and Joseph Nollekens were amongst those who purchased work at his posthumous sale. Farington noted that Nollekens was collecting information on Carlini 15 years after the Italian’s death. Other commentators were less willing to accord undiluted respect to a foreign sculptor. A contemporary press report, for instance, commented that although ‘Carlini had great abilities’ and ‘He might have been stiled a genius … the superior minds of our English sculptures left him in this respect – far – far behind’ (Trusted 1993, 201). J T Smith was also prepared to grant that he was ‘a man of talent’, whilst criticising his work as displaying ‘foreign affectation’ (Smith 1828, 2, 203). Carlini was indeed one of the very few foreign sculptors working in England in the 1770s and 1780s, and arguably the most important. Following the acquisition in 1991 of the statue of Dr Ward by the Victoria and Albert Museum, scholarly interest has begun to revive in this important but still enigmatic artist.
MGS
Literary References: Press Cuttings 1686-1835, vol 2, 337; Pasquin 1786, dramatis personae; GM, 2, 1790, 769; Farington, 1794, 1, 132; 1805, VII. 2524; New Mont Mag, 1816, vol 418, 1 June, n29; Smith 1828, I, 159, 2, 202-5; Passavant 1836, 2, 276; Colvin V 1973-76, 372-3, 466; Penny 197 (1), 109, 128, 206, 210; DBI 1960-2000, vol 20; Hutchison 1986, 24-5, 27-8; Whinney 1988, passim; RSA J 1991, 433; Trusted 1992, 776-84; Trusted 1993, 190-201; Bindman and Baker 1995, 337; Baarsen 1998, 172-83
Archival References: WCA Poor Rate, St Anne, Soho 1770 (A239)
Will: PROB 6-166, fol 221
Miscellaneous Drawings: Design for an unidentified monument, signed, pen and ink, Witt coll, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1420; attributed drawings for unexecuted or untraced works, BM, Anderdon coll, 1869, fol 305); Soane (repr Trusted 1992, 777); VAM (repr Bindman and Baker 1995, 337); impressions of an engraving by Bartolozzi after a lost design for a monument to J C Bach, BM Add. MS 38072 f17, VAM 29 599B
Auction Catalogues: Carlini 1791
Portraits of the Sculptor: Charles Maucourt Agostino Carlini 1762, watercolour and bodycolour on ivory (NPG 5388); Johan Zoffany Life Class at the Royal Academy 1771-2, oil on canvas (Royal coll); Peter Rouw the Elder, Agostino Carlini RA, exhib RA 1788, no 639, wax (untraced)