Details of Sculptor

Surname

Chantrey

Alternative Surname

First Name

Sir Francis Legatt RA

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

1781

Flourished

Year of Death

1841

Biographical Details

The outstanding portrait sculptor of his generation, he was particularly admired for his penetrating studies of character and the uncluttered contours of his busts and statues. He was born in humble circumstances at Jordanthorpe, near Sheffield, on 7 April 1781, the son of a carpenter and tenant farmer who died when Chantrey was a child. The boy was apprenticed to Robert Ramsay, a local carver, gilder and dealer in plaster models. In his spare time Chantrey practised drawing and modelling. John Raphael Smith, the mezzotinter and draughtsman, saw his work at Ramsay’s shop and encouraged him to develop his artistic skills. In 1802 Chantrey cancelled his indentures and set up in Sheffield as a portrait painter and miniaturist. He moved to London in May 1802, but then decided to tour the British Isles and in Dublin he fell seriously ill. By 1804 he had returned to England and he divided the next few years between London and Sheffield. In London he worked for a woodcarver, but studied informally in the Royal Academy Schools in the evenings. In 1804 he showed a competent canvas portrait of his uncle, Daniel Wale, at the Academy exhibition, giving his address as Chapel Street West, Mayfair. Chantrey made frequent visits to Sheffield, where he continued to paint portraits and modelled busts in plaster. In 1805 he won his first important commission, the monument to the Rev James Wilkinson, Rector of Sheffield (1). Wilkinson’s bust, framed by a pyramid and looped marble curtain, is conservative in style and owes debts to the generation of sculptors active in the mid-18th century, particularly Louis François Roubiliac, whose naturalism Chantrey particularly admired. The monument showed no awareness of the neo-classical style fashionable in the metropolis.
In 1808 Chantrey took rooms in Curzon Street, London, and showed his first major work of sculpture at the Academy, a colossal head of Satan (327) with a ‘gaze of dark malignant despair’ (Cunningham, 1820, 50). This was a rare instance of Chantrey modelling an ideal work. The following year he married Daniel Wale’s daughter, Mary Anne, who brought a handsome dowry, so enabling him to set up a house and studio in Eccleston Street, Pimlico and to embark on his professional career as a sculptor.
In 1809 he won the contract for 4 large busts of admirals in plaster and wood for the exterior of the Naval Asylum, Greenwich (328). These helped to establish his reputation, but it was the Royal Academy exhibition of 1811, when he was already 30, that finally brought him to a wider public. He showed plaster busts of well-known personalities from both sides of the political spectrum. The Establishment was represented by busts of Benjamin West, PRA, and a posthumous portrait of William Pitt (†1806), the Tory Prime Minister (332, 331). More controversial were his heads of three radical politicians, his friends and mentors, John Raphael Smith, Sir Francis Burdett and particularly John Horne Tooke, who had a formative role in his education (334-6). Tooke’s bust was a particular success, for it showed the sculptor’s extraordinary flair in realising skin textures and in capturing a sitter’s characteristic expression at a relaxed moment. Joseph Nollekens RA was so impressed with the bust that he conceded it a position at the exhibition intended for one of his own busts. Chantrey later estimated that the show brought in commissions for monuments and busts worth £20,000. Nollekens later allowed Chantrey to sculpt his portrait (386) and may have provided guidelines for workshop practice as Chantrey’s studio expanded. After the exhibition Horne Tooke, who took an interest in Chantrey’s progress, advised the sculptor that if he wished to succeed in London society, he must ‘model at least half-a-dozen of the other [Tory] party’ (Weekes, Lectures, 1880, 308, quoted by Potts 1981 (3), 73). In later years his clients came increasingly from the ruling classes.
Chantrey’s first opportunity to carve a statue in marble presented itself in 1811 when he won the contract for a figure of George III for the London Guildhall, in competition with 15 other submitted designs (291). He had already had sittings from the king for a portrait bust in the previous year (349). There were suspicions among members of the Court of Common Council that Chantrey was insufficiently experienced for the task and its hesitant leader, Sir William Curtis, asked the sculptor whether he described himself as a painter or a sculptor. Chantrey responded neatly: ‘I live by sculpture’ (Cunningham 1820, 6). The completed work showed beyond doubt that Chantrey was able to translate the qualities evident in his busts into a major statue, for the king’s fragile mental state was uncompromisingly captured in his portrait. It was completed in 1815, the year Antonio Canova visited London. Chantrey took the great Italian sculptor to see his work in Guildhall. The two sculptors became friends and Chantrey commissioned Canova’s portrait from Jackson.
Commissions for statues of other prominent personalities came in while the king’s image was in preparation and they allowed Chantrey to establish presentational formulae that he would use throughout his career. The image of a leading advocate, Robert Blair, 1812-17, for the Sessions House in Edinburgh, has a dignified and commanding head, but is seated with extreme informality and swathed in a voluminous cloak (292). The informally seated image was adopted for several later statues (308, 302, 303) and was particularly successful for the figure of Robert Dundas, 1820-24, also for the Sessions House (299). Whinney considered this the masterpiece of the series for its dignified and commanding head, relaxed pose and the simplified lines of the gown. A third statue for the Sessions House, the standing figure of Lord Melville, 1812-18 (294), provided a prototype for several statues of orators and statesmen, posed, speech in hand, with one foot determinedly forward (118, 310, 260). The statue of George Washington, sent overseas to Boston in 1826, is perhaps the most commanding of these standing men of action (301).
In several cases, the commission for a statue or monument followed a successful bust and led to Chantrey’s selection as sculptor for the full-sized figure (291, 52, 302, 311, 153, 306, 165). An early example is the statue of George III (291), but several of the finest were of friends, whose physiognomy and character were familiar to the sculptor. The bust of James Watt, the engineer and inventor (357), which pre-dates the monuments (52,130), cranes forward with down-set mouth and an expression of focussed concentration in his mesmeric eyes. Chantrey and Watt had shared interests and corresponded on the subject of new pointing machines for sculpture. The bust of Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society (368), was presented by Chantrey to the Society the year after his election as a Fellow in 1818. Ten years separate the bust and monument, but the heads are similar, and they suggest close familiarity with the determined old scientist.
Chantrey was a sociable man and as he gained a reputation he was increasingly able to select his sitters for busts from among his many friends in artistic and professional circles. John Rennie was the civil engineer responsible for Waterloo Bridge: Chantrey’s secretary, Allan Cunningham described his portrait (385), as a ‘head of evident extended capacity and thought’ (Cunningham 1820, 7-8). Dr James Scott’s bust was a gift from the sculptor to a kindred spirit of humble origins, who had also made his name by the skill of his hands (467). It was one of 17 busts, statues and monuments celebrating medical men. A rare bust of a woman, the scientist, Mary Somerville, is a reflective image of an intellectual who was another of Chantrey’s circle (508). The acclaimed portrait of Sir Walter Scott (416) was one of the few marbles produced entirely on Chantrey’s own initiative and he kept it in the studio until 1828 when he presented it to the writer on condition that Scott agreed to sit for a new, more formal image, intended to convey his public achievement. Cunningham noted that the first bust appealed to contemporaries because it was felt to capture Scott’s ‘conversational look…when about to break into some sly funny old story’ (Potts, 1981 (2), 53).
Chantrey was responsible for a large number of funerary monuments, many of them small and repetitive in composition. He paid lip-service to the classical taste with wall tablets of Greek stele shape, incorporating low-relief portrait medallions (30, 51, 64), or images of female mourners on sabre-leg stools (68, 106). More inventive were his kneeling women, carved both in relief and in the round (37, 88, 92, 132, 148, 174). The monuments which particularly appealed to contemporary sensibilities and brought him wide acclaim were large-scale deathbed dramas and disturbingly life-like images of dead children, carved in the second and third decades of the century. His first major achievement in funerary art was the monument to Mariamne Johnes, the daughter of Thomas Johnes of Hafod, a distinguished collector, remembered particularly as the patron of Thomas Banks RA. The commission followed a visit to Johnes in Cardiganshire, made with a friend, the painter and engraver, Thomas Stothard, who probably helped work out the composition (8). It is a striking tableau of triangular shape: the young woman lies on a couch while her father stands behind her, looking into her face, and her mother sits weeping at her feet. The model for the memorial was too large to exhibit at the Academy and so was shown at Spring Gardens, London, in 1812. Thomas Johnes was reportedly too overcome by emotion when he saw the finished work in the studio to take it back to Wales. It was destroyed by fire in 1932. Chantrey provided another magnificent death-bed scene in 1818, the monument to David Pike Watts at Ilam (32), the sculptor’s most ambitious and costly funerary work. The old man is depicted raising himself from his pillows to bless his daughter and three little grandchildren. Tenderness between children and parents was again the theme in the group of Dorothy Jordan, the actress mistress of William IV, and two of her young children, 1834, which was designed for a secular context, but would have been as well-suited to a church (313).
The most popular of all Chantrey's monuments was to the daughters of William Robinson, Prebend of Lichfield Cathedral. Stothard again had a hand in the composition. The monument was known as The sleeping children because of the lifelike character of the entwined effigies, and it received rapturous acclaim when it was exhibited at the Academy in 1817 (25). Its success prompted Chantrey to consider carving a series of idealised portraits of young children, only three of which materialised (295-7). The ‘sleeping’ figure of Harriet Acland, 1819 (297), is clearly indebted to the Robinson Children, and was carved for her father’s library. The standing figure of Louisa Russell, 1819, at Woburn Abbey (295) was commissioned as a pendant to her young sister Georgina’s statue by the Danish neoclassicist, Bertel Thorvaldsen. This was an uncharacteristic work for Chantrey, since it formed part of an iconographic programme. The statues of the two small girls, placed in niches outside the Temple of the Graces, acted as attendants to Canova’s Three graces, the focal point of the gallery.
The end of the long Napoleonic Wars gave Chantrey an opportunity to widen his horizons and cultivate his taste by foreign travel. In 1814 he visited Paris and admired the Italian treasures in the Louvre but apparently showed less enthusiasm for the French sculpture (Cunningham 1820, 6-7). The following year he returned to France with his wife and Stothard, and took the opportunity to sketch Gothic architecture in Rouen. Soon after his return to London, public honours began to come to him: in 1816 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, becoming a full Academician in 1818. That year he was elected to the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries.
In 1819 he visited Italy to examine the ancient masterpieces, with the idea of launching himself on his return as a sculptor of ‘ideal’ gallery pieces, a prestigious but financially hazardous departure, since the return on the sculptor’s time was often uncertain. Chantrey’s ledgers for 1820 record orders for ‘poetical’ subjects received on his return from Italy from five great patrons, the Dukes of Devonshire and Bedford, the Earls of Egremont and Dartmouth and Lord Yarborough. Only a pair of indifferent reliefs for the Duke of Bedford were executed (530, 531). Among the many visitors to Chantrey’s studio at this period was James Losh, who recorded on 13 June 1822 ‘Amongst other things I saw today Mr Chantry, his workshop and rooms, with all of which I was much delighted. He is evidently a man of genious, plain and simple in his manners, but clear and vigorous in his opinions and expression - and his works do honour to his age and country’ (Losh i, 159).
The 1820s were a turning point for Chantrey, for his reputation was at its zenith, and he now began to develop a grand, increasingly formal style, appropriate for portraits of leaders of the Establishment. The busts of Viscount Castlereagh, 1821, and the Duke of Wellington, 1823, both have partly bared chests, long, manly necks and a noble demeanour (422, 431). A glamorous bust of George IV, 1822 (429), modifies traces of the king’s grossness, presenting him as a patrician with a haughty head, topped with intricately carved curls. The subjects of Chantrey’s statues were presented in much the same manner whether in a church or public square. His figures of professional men and connoisseurs showed them in deep concentration (304, 305, 322), and the politicians and Empire builders were presented as aloof English gentlemen (217, 260, 303, 311, 319, 310, 315). Monuments to leading churchmen, kneeling in prayerful repose, gave an opportunity for the virtuoso carving of flowing robes (201, 259).
In 1831 Chantrey brought in Sir John Soane, whose bust he had carved as a present the previous year (465), to design a new ante-room for his gallery at 20 Belgrave Place, Pimlico, part of a complex of buildings including his home, Allan Cunningham’s home, and his workshops. Soane’s top-lit, decorated entrance led into Chantrey’s own gallery, which he had developed since 1816 as a display space for his full-size plaster models of his busts and statues, set off against an important set of plasters from the Antique, and, occasionally, works by Antonio Canova.
During the last decade of his life Chantrey became particularly interested in producing bronze sculpture, a notoriously difficult material to handle. In 1827 he established his own foundry in Eccleston Place, Pimlico, so that he might closely supervise the casting of two bronze figures, those of the Irish statesman Henry Grattan, for Dublin (303), and George IV for the Brighton Pavilion (306). The king’s figure is an official image in garter robes, his arms arranged to suggest regal munificence. Orders for two equestrian figures in bronze followed in 1828-29: the statue of Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras (320) is grand in scale and has an air of dignified control, reinforced by the motionless stance of his horse. The technically complex work took a decade to complete and was admired in the studio gallery by the Duke of Wellington, who particularly liked the horse. A second, equestrian statue of George IV, ordered at the king’s personal request in 1829 (309), was intended to surmount the Marble Arch in London, but was incomplete at the king’s death and eventually found a home in Trafalgar Square. Chantrey again avoided the conventional prancing steed in order to add to the sense of authority and lofty composure.
In 1830 he was appointed Sculptor-in-Ordinary to William IV and in 1835 he was knighted. By 1838 his health was deteriorating and he had to halt work temporarily on another official image, the bust of Queen Victoria (509). Nonetheless he wrestled again with the technical and compositional problems of bronze-casting in his last major work, the equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, 1839-44, sited outside the Mansion House in the City of London (323). Despite his eminence as a sculptor of the great, the contract was not a foregone conclusion. Supporters of a rival practitioner, Matthew Cotes Wyatt, argued that Chantrey had too much work in hand and that his bronze figures, particularly a statue of William Pitt in Hanover Square (310), were inferior in quality. In February 1839, after nearly two years of discussion and fund-raising, the Wellington Committee at the Mansion House approved his appointment and agreed to a fee of £7,000.The statue was completed under the direction of his assistant, Henry Weekes, after Chantrey’s death, of a heart-attack, in November 1841.
Chantrey ran an efficient studio, sustaining high standards despite his vast output. He employed a large work-force, controlled by his secretary, Allan Cunningham, who came to him as a pointing assistant, became his superintendent of works, and, as an accomplished writer, provided the best possible publicity for the studio. In 1814, when Chantrey started the account-books known as the Derby and Academy ledgers, he had a team of 7 assistants, all of whom were employed on the statue of George III for the Guildhall. They included James Heffernan, who worked for the practice until 1843 and is reputed to have carved many of Chantrey’s busts. Henry Weekes was another long-serving assistant and eventually inherited the workshop and practice. F A Legé worked for him for a shorter time, but nonetheless carried out most of the cutting of the Robinson monument. David Dunbar, Frederick William Smith and three obscure assistants, William Elliott, Mr Purdy and Mr George were all in post in 1814. Musgrave Lewthwaite Watson, a pupil of Dunbar, worked as a modeller, employed on the reclining figure of Charlotte Digby, for Worcester Cathedral (143), but he resigned in 1833 when Chantrey refused his demands for a wage increase. Chantrey was apparently liberal in passing on commissions, for instance to Weekes, and this was a key to his practical success.
The sculptor’s working procedure for portrait busts was described by an early biographer, John Holland, in 1851, and can be pieced together from numerous other sources and eye-witness accounts. Chantrey took pains to study the mannerisms of his sitters, sometimes inviting them to eat with him before work began and frequently introducing a third party into the studio so that the subject might relax in conversation. With the help of a camera lucida he made several drawings of the head in profile and full-face, which served as schematic indications of the sitter’s features. Using these drawings, which were marked with small crosses to clarify the proportions, studio assistants built up the first rough bust in clay. The model was finished by Chantrey himself after as many as seven sittings. He took a cast of the mouth, but otherwise worked with considerable freedom, deciding the turn of the head only after he had finished modelling the face. Since the clay model was liable to crack in drying out, a permanent ‘original plaster model’ was cast from the clay and this plaster was kept in Chantrey’s studio and used for making versions in marble. A large collection of these models survive in teh Ashmolean Museum. The roughing out of the marble block was done by assistants using a version of the pointing machine designed by the sculptor himself, drawings of which survive, and show a finely-engineered mechanism consisting of a pointer on a ball-and-socket joint, attached to a horizontal bar on a moveable track. The instrument, as the assistant’s account-books show, saved considerable time in roughing out the marble block. A more skilled carver, usually Heffernan, then worked up the entire surface with a claw chisel at which point Chantrey again intervened, using a flat chisel to smooth over the surface and cut the finer details. The works were polished with pumice. His attention to the detailed working over of the marble was unique in England.
Detailed information on Chantrey’s prices exists, thanks to the survival of three account ledgers and a day-book. The day-book is an important source for the sculptor’s early years in London, providing lists of the busts, monuments and statues completed between 1809 and January 1813, and also details of payments to workers and sums paid for stone and marble. The three ledgers, all largely in Cunningham’s hand but with annotations by Chantrey, cover transactions between 1809 and 1827 and give detailed information on the activities and wages of several assistants, particularly Legé, who spent nearly 176 days on the Robinson monument, for which he was paid £64 12s 7d. The success of Chantrey’s practice depended on judging his market. His early plaster busts sold at £3-£5 each, but for his first marble heads Chantrey charged 100 guineas. This rose to 120 guineas by 1813 and to 150 guineas following his visit to Italy and his admission as a full Academician in 1819. In 1821, he introduced a charge of 200 guineas for a bust of George IV, which became his charge for prestigious commissions to a large format, such as royal portraits. A full-length statue would average around £3,000.
He was buried in Norton churchyard, Sheffield, close to members of his family. In his will he left a fortune of about £150,000, initially to his wife, reverting after her death to the Royal Academy. The Chantrey Bequest was to be used for the ‘Encouragement of British Fine Art in Painting and Sculpture’ and had parallels with his friend J M W Turner’s bequest of his paintings to the nation. The bequest became the main purchase grant for the new Tate Gallery upon its foundation in 1897, and still exists today. About 180 of his plaster models and casts were given by his wife to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where most of them remain, though more than 40 statues were decapitated in 1939, and the bodies desctroyed, to make way for an air-raid shelter in the museum basement.
Upon his death there were numerous obituaries which proclaimed him the greatest artist of his times, reflecting a widely-held belief that he had done more than anyone to establish a peculiarly British school of sculpture, centred on portraiture. Subsequently his legacy was challenged. A biographical notice in the Evening Mail for 10 November 1851 accused him of becoming ‘greedy of commissions and money and anxious to secure everything’ and the fear of possible insolvency perhaps accounts for his tendency to avoid ideal subjects, an area he could have afforded to explore. As a portrait sculptor he was without rival, but it has been suggested that his readiness in the later years to provide the authoritative public images required by his august patrons, stifled the vitality and characterisation that were his great hallmarks.
IR; revised MGS
Literary References: Cunningham 1820, 3-10; GM 1842, 99-106; Holland 1851; C R Leslie, Autobiographical Recollections, ed T Taylor, 1860, 1, 74-7; Graves II, 1905-6, 40-42; Denvir 1956, 1416, 1418; Gaunt 1960, 626-7; Shearstone 1980; Potts 1981 (1), 17-27; Potts 1981 (2); Potts 1981 (3); Lieberman 1983; Whinney 1988, 398-425; Chantrey Ledgers, 1991-92; Penny 1991 (1), 255-64; Dunkerley 1995; Grove 6, 455-8 (Yarrington); Bilbey 2002, 234-37l; Ward-Jackson 2002, 330-4; ODNB (Stevens); Sullivan 2010, 289-306; Sullivan 2013 (1), 139-157; Sullivan 2015; Sullivan 2016, pp.210-32; Sullivan 2017 (1); Sullivan 2017 (2), 223-234; Sullivan 2020 (2), 227-243; Edward, Harris and Sullivan 2020, 337-360; Sullivan 2020 (3)
Archival References: James Losh, Diary, Carlisle Library
Will: PROB 11/1954 sig 793
Miscellaneous Drawings: design for a monument, exhib RS, 1810 (730), untraced
Auction Catalogues: Chantrey 1842; Chantrey 1861
Portraits of the Sculptor: self-portrait, chalk, c1802, NPG, London; self-portrait, pencil, before 1809, NPG, London; self-portrait, canvas, c1810, Tate, London; F A Legé, bust, 1815, untraced; Thomas Phillips, canvas, c1817, NPG, London; George Crabbe, pencil drawing, s&d 1821, NPG, London; Paul Nixson of Carlisle, bust, 1823, Academy of Arts, Carlisle, pediment; F W Smith, bust, 1826, RA, London; James Heffernan, portrait medallion, 1842, SNPG, Edinburgh; another, 1843, NGI, Dublin; James Legrew, ‘sketch’, exhib RA, London, 1843, untraced; John Bell, statue, 1862, St James’s, Norton, Sheffield; Thomas Earle, portrait medallion, wax, nd, formerly High Hazels Museum, Sheffield, W R Yorks, untraced