Details of Sculptor

Surname

Ceracchi

Alternative Surname

First Name

Giuseppe

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

1751

Flourished

Year of Death

1801

Biographical Details

Ceracchi had one of the most peripatetic, turbulent and romantic careers of any 18th-century artist. He worked in Italy, Germany, Holland, Austria, France and the USA and produced images of several of the most powerful personalities of his day. His formative years, 1773-80, were spent in England, where he carved portraits in the neoclassical style, which he was to use throughout his career.
He was born in Rome on 4 July 1751, the son of Domenico Ceracchi, a goldsmith, and Lucia, née Balbi. He studied under Tommaso Righi and Andrea Bergondi and at the Accademia di San Luca and then worked in Milan and Florence between 1771 and 1773. In October 1773 Richard Hayward recorded in his list of British visitors to Rome that ‘Giuseppe Carachi Italian sculptor’ had come to England.
Ceracchi’s reasons for embarking on a career in London are not recorded, but he had already cultivated connections with the British community in Italy. He was recommended to English patrons by Horace Mann, the British envoy to Florence, and arrived in England with letters of recommendation from Matthew Nulty (†1778), the British painter and antiquarian, who was a member for many years of the expatriate community in Rome. The first record of Ceracchi’s activities in England is in 1776, when he exhibited a bas-relief at the Royal Academy of a subject from The Iliad (22). This was reportedly made for the Earl of Shelburne, for whom Ceracchi provided another work around this time (33).
It seems likely that the connection with Shelburne was made through Ceracchi’s fellow-countryman Agostino Carlini, who had recently executed the monument to Lady Shelburne in High Wycombe. In 1777 Ceracchi was living at King’s Square Court, Dean Street, Soho, where Carlini had his home and workshop. It is possible that Ceracchi began work as an assistant to Carlini soon after his arrival in England and it may well have been by Carlini’s recommendation to Sir William Chambers, the architect of Somerset House, that Ceracchi won the commission for two of four statues for its façade, inspired by the antique Dacian slaves (PRO AO 1/2495). The others were Carlini’s work. Ceracchi was paid £203 3s for his figures (4).
Perhaps encouraged by his early success, Ceracchi left Carlini’s workshop in 1778 and moved to extensive premises in Margaret Street, Westminster, rented from a Mr George Watkins. J T Smith, who remembered Ceracchi visiting Joseph Nollekens's studio, was taken to the Italian’s premises, and described him as ‘a short, thin man, with a piercing black eye, and a very blue beard’ (Smith 1828, 2, 120).
Ceracchi carried out work for the architect Robert Adam. Among Adam’s effects was ‘a piece of foliage’ executed by Ceracchi (20), as well as a relief modelled by Ceracchi after a design by the Venetian painter Antonio Zucchi (26). Ceracchi’s only known use of artificial stone was for Adam (21). He also modelled at least one medallion for Wedgwood, the portrait of Joseph Priestley, which was reproduced in the series of Illustrious Moderns in 1779 (28).
Horace Walpole described Ceracchi as ‘particularly successful in likenesses in busts... all which were to be known at the first glance’ (Anecdotes 1937, 141-2), and his lively portraits are the most notable feature of his surviving English work. His head of Sir Joshua Reynolds (which was modelled in England but carved in Rome) is thought to be the only bust ad vivum of the Royal Academy's President (11). Ceracchi used as his source the antique bust of the Emperor Caracalla, presenting Reynolds in classical draperies, turning sharply to his left, his brow furrowed. J T Smith noted that this work was widely reproduced by plaster figure-makers. Ceracchi’s masterful bust of the naval commander and Whig politician, Viscount Keppel, is reminiscent of the Reynolds, but the turn of the head is less extreme and the draperies more vital (12).
Walpole may have been responsible for introducing Ceracchi to his protégé, Anne Seymour Damer. Apparently smitten by her ‘graceful nymph-like person’ the Italian ‘begged her to sit to him, and he made a most charming statue of her, whole length as large as life, in terracotta’ (Anecdotes 1937, 142). This was later translated to marble and is one of Ceracchi’s most inventive compositions. Damer is depicted as a personification of sculpture, standing with her tools at her feet and a statuette of a sea god in her hands (2). Damer, who had previously only sculpted portrait profiles in wax, subsequently received ‘two or three lessons’ in modelling from Ceracchi, after which she began to work in terracotta (Anecdotes 1937, 142).
The list of Ceracchi’s exhibits at the Royal Academy in 1779 suggests that in addition to his market for busts of notable sitters, he hoped to execute great public works. He showed busts of Count Belgioioso, the Lombard minister at the Court of St James (13), and Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican patriot (15), but also a sketch for a proposed memorial to William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1) to be erected in St Paul’s Cathedral. The envisaged site was a novelty, for there were no contemporary monuments in St Paul’s. Ceracchi made two allegorical designs in terracotta ‘in one of which the character of Disinterestedness rejecting presents was fine and striking’ (Anecdotes 1937, 142). If Ceracchi hoped his scheme would be realised he was to be disappointed: no monument was raised in St Paul’s, and the monuments to Chatham that were erected in Westminster Abbey and the Guildhall were secured by John Bacon RA.
Walpole considered Ceracchi ‘an excellent young Italian sculptor,’ (Anecdotes 1937, 141-2) and William Chambers is said to have given the Italian work at Somerset House to encourage him to remain in England. Despite such powerful support, Ceracchi failed to find patrons and he won only four votes when his name was put forward for election as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1779. It appears that his fortunes failed for he disposed of his premises in Margaret Street and left England in February 1780 to escape his creditors, whilst pretending that he had been summoned by the Emperor of Germany (ibid).
He left London for Vienna, where he carved a fine bust in the classical style of Prince von Kaunitz-Rietberg (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). The commission came through the recommendation of Count Belgioioso. He spent the 1780s working also in Berlin, Rome and Amsterdam, continuing chiefly to carve portraits, and among his sitters was Pope Pius VI (1790, Genoa, Galleria di Palazzo Bianco). His monument to Jan Van der Capellen de Pol (1785-89, Villa Borghese, Rome, gardens) was his most ambitious project, but had to be abandoned through political circumstances.
In 1791 Ceracchi left for the United States, where he hoped (in vain) to win the commission for George Washington’s monument, then under debate in Congress. He did however carve several stern neo-classical busts of Washington and other American leaders, including John Jay (Supreme Court, Washington), George Clinton, Vice-President of New York (NY Hist Soc, X.42) and over 30 others. In 1792 Ceracchi returned to Italy with his wife, Therese Schlishan, and their 4 children, but he was driven out by the Papal authorities who were suspicious of his connections with Protestant Holland and the Republican USA.
After another short spell in Philadelphia in 1794, Ceracchi arrived in Paris, where his passion for sculpture was gradually relegated in favour of politics. He supported the French invasion of Italy in 1798 in the hope of seeing political reforms in his homeland. Then he changed loyalties. After giving allegiance to Napoleon, whose bust he modelled during the Italian campaign, Ceracchi gradually became disillusioned with Bonaparte. On 11 October 1800 he participated in a plot to assassinate the First Consul at the Paris Opera, and after a much-publicised trial, he was guillotined at the Place de Grève on 31 January 1801.
Ceracchi continued to have a reputation as a sculptor in England after his departure in 1780. In 1801 his ‘celebrated’ bust of Napoleon was brought to England under the ownership of a commercially alert dealer, Henry Richter of 26 Newman Street, who had the work engraved and offered casts after the original. Publishing twenty-seven years after the sculptor’s death, J T Smith evaluated Ceracchi as ‘highly gifted’ but frustrated by the lack of encouragement he received in England, a judgment borne out by the high quality of his English work, and by its limited extent.
The legend of the sculptor’s dramatic demise steadily began to eclipse any serious evaluation of his work as a sculptor. Smith enjoyed relating a fantastic story that Ceracchi had gone to the guillotine dressed as a Roman emperor in a bespoke chariot. In 1839 the playwright Samuel Naylor dramatised the sculptor’s last days in Ceracchi: A Drama. Its vaunted purpose was to show ‘the misdirected energies of a noble nature, erring in its departure from habitual contemplation of the exalted ideal of Art, into the vain pursuit after its semblance in Man’ (Naylor 1839, vi-vii). In recent years Ceracchi’s international career has begun to receive scholarly attention, though much still remains to be discovered about his formative years in London.
MGS
Literary References: Robert Adam’s sale, 1818; Smith 1828, vol 2, 119-21; Naylor 1839; Graves 1905-6, vol 1, 19; Whitley 1928, vol 1, 338; Pesci 1934, 170-4; Anecdotes 1937, 141-2, 237; Honour 1963, 368-76; Desportes 1963, 140-79; Hubert 1964, 24-37; DBI; Stainton 1983, 15, 29-30; Whinney 1988, 319, 461 n.40; Campitelli 1993-1994, 121-41; Reilly 1995, 99; Grove 6, 323-4 (Bryant); Magnien 2002, 344

Archival References: WCA, St Anne Soho Poor Rate 1776 (A255); PRO AO 1/2495; St Marylebone Rate Books, 1778, reel 19, p25; RA/GA, 1 Nov 1779
Portraits of the Sculptor: John Trumbull, oil, Met NY (Ceracchi Exhib Cat 1989, 13, repr)