Details of Sculptor

Surname

Coffee

Alternative Surname

First Name

William John

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

1773

Flourished

Year of Death

after 1846

Biographical Details

Coffee was a modeller, sculptor, painter and one of the first British sculptors to establish a career in America. He was the son of William Coffee, a modeller for Eleanor Coade, and Catherine, née Lee, and was baptised at St Clement Danes, London, on 12 September 1773. Coffee, like his father, was employed as a modeller by Coade, but he left Lambeth in mid-1792 when a dispute with another employee, a Mr Pritchard, brought him into conflict with Coade’s manager and junior partner, John Sealy.
He married Martha Dudley on 21 May 1792 and their son, Henry, was born at the Lying-in Hospital for the Distressed Poor on 23 May 1793. The couple lived at Tottenham Street, London. On 3 November 1792 he registered for admission to the Royal Academy schools, but his admission was not completed. In April 1793 he considered an offer of employment from the Derby China Manufactory and on 28 May signed an agreement with William Duesbury II to become resident modeller at the Derby Works in succession to John James Spängler. Coffee received 3s 6d for each ten and a half hour day and was expected to work 63 hours a week. In 1794 changes in Duesbury’s methods of payment (offering piece work in place of a flat rate) caused trouble with several of the staff including Coffee, who objected in writing. Joseph Lygo, Duesbury’s assistant, did not ‘much admire Mr Coffee’s modeling’ anyhow (quoted in Bricknell 1998, 25) and Spängler was re-employed at Derby where he worked with Coffee for about two months, before Coffee left the manufactory. A list of the designs thought to have been modelled by Coffee for the Derby works is given in Bricknell’s monograph of 1998.
On 4 June 1795 Coffee was employed by another local firm, the Church Gresley China Factory, near Burton-upon-Trent. This business was short-lived and in September 1795 Coffee was in London looking for work. At his father's request, he was re-employed at Derby when Duesbury’s attempt to appoint Henry Webber as chief modeller failed. In the autumn of 1796 he joined another short-lived ceramics manufacturing enterprise, this time a small white china factory in Friar Gate, Derby, which closed in 1798. On 3 November 1798 he became a travelling salesman for the Pinxton China works at 4s 2d a day, their highest paid employee. He travelled to London and took the opportunity to show specimens of his animal pieces at the Royal Academy (59, 60).
In 1803 he left Pinxton to establish his own business as a modeller and sculptor in Derby. His output expanded to embrace all kinds of sculptural work, including busts, monuments and reliefs, not only in terracotta and plaster but also in marble, alabaster, composition and artificial stone. His busts included local celebrities, such as a fiddler (15) and a women from Tutbury famed for feats of fasting (46). His bust of the Derby scientist Erasmus Darwin in artificial stone, was lauded by the national press (9): ‘the materials of which it is composed not being liable to be injured by the properties of atmospheric air, it is admirably calculated to convey to posterity the image of one of the greatest physicians and philosophers of the age’ (Monthly Mag, 1804, 557). In 1808 he exhibited at the Royal Academy from a London address, 32 Stanhope Street, though he continued to live and work in Derby. In 1810 he executed in marble a copy of the Calydonian Boar for Joseph Strutt (3), and also a full-size figure of Aesculapius for the Derby Infirmary (2). Coffee advertised his decision to ‘carry [on] the business of sculptor in marble, alabaster etc’ at his premises in Bridge Street, Derby in the Derby Mercury of 26 September 1810. He flattered himself that because of ‘his knowledge of the antique (beyond which he has not the vanity to aspire) … he is capable of producing such designs as will meet with the approbation of the amateur’ (Bricknell 1998, 38).
John Haslem relates that in 1812 Coffee moved to London where he opened an establishment in Oxford Market. He was certainly in London in 1814, where he witnessed the myriad celebrations marking the end of the Napoleonic Wars. That year he was back in Derby, where he painted a large number of transparencies for Derby’s own festive illuminations. In May he advertised for two apprentices, indicating that ‘boys from the country will be preferred, with whom a small premium will be expected’ (Derby Mercury, quoted in Bricknell 1998, 39).
Coffee’s diverse activities probably reflect a lack of patrons, and in late 1816 or early 1817 he emigrated with his daughter Catherine to America. Other sculptors, such as Coffee’s acquaintance J C F Rossi, spoke of emigration in the difficult economic conditions of post-war England, but Coffee appears to be the first notable British sculptor to have done so. He set up in New York as a sculptor, modeller and painter. In 1817 he exhibited at the American Academy of the Fine Arts (70), and in 1818 he attracted the patronage of the former President, Thomas Jefferson (31). Through Jefferson's influence he modelled busts ad vivum of President James Monroe (25) and ex-President James Madison (24). In 1818, he wrote from 501 Greenwich Street, New York, to another former President, John Adams, outlining his working method: he needed sittings of one hour each day for 4 or 5 days, and his subject could sit, stand or move around freely. He charged $35 for a clay model and $10 for each copy.
Coffee was invited to Monticello, Jefferson’s home in Virginia, on three occasions between 1818 and 1822. He advised Jefferson on engineering repairs using concrete for his country house and executed extensive decorative work on classical themes for the new buildings of the University of Virginia (53). By 1820 he was a naturalised American citizen. Despite his distinguished patrons, Coffee found it difficult to make a living. He worked as a portrait-painter and restorer and wrote to Jefferson about numerous unexecuted schemes that he hoped might bring in enough money to pay for a passage back to England. In 1824 he entered the competition for the commission, worth $500, to execute the tympanum relief for the portico of the Capitol in Washington. His design was for Justice on a pedestal with figures of Wisdom and Truth. The judges felt Coffee’s design to be the best of the numerous works submitted, but decided, to Coffee’s ire, not to choose any of the entries. In 1826 Coffee made ornaments in Roman cement for the Gothic church of Notre Dame in Montreal, Canada (54). That year his great patron, Thomas Jefferson, died.
In 1827, despite his hankering for England and his loathing of the cold climate of the East Coast, Coffee settled in Albany, New York State, where he appears to have remained for the rest of his life. Living at 13 Washington, he advertised in the Albany Argus on 3 December 1829 offering ‘superior enrichments either in plaster or Roman cement, for external decoration’ (Bricknell 1998, 51). He planned a subscription bust of President Andrew Jackson, and continued to canvas leading politicians such as Governor William Henry Seward for patronage (43). In 1839 he offered Seward a life-size plaster bust with drapery for $100 with $30 for each copy. The directories and census records list Coffee living in Albany in the 1840s with four of his relatives. There is no mention of him after 1847. Until the last decade of his life Coffee complained of hardship: in a letter penned in January 1841 he moaned that a lack of patronage and competition from Henry Kirke Brown (1814-1886) had left him uncertain ‘how to obtain either wood or bread’ for his family (Bicknell 1998, 53). Even then he still hoped to return to England.
The relatively small number of surviving works makes it difficult to assess Coffee's merits as a sculptor. The importance of his early work as a modeller is manifest in the detailed and expressive modelling of the busts of Darwin (9) and the portrait of an unidentified man, whose fat lips, sagging eyes and bursting waistcoat convey a real sense of character (14). His extant American work is also naturalistic, though the nobility of some of his subjects is indicated by the herm form (16), or by the use of pinned drapery all’antica (17). The detailed documentation of his life and career by Brian Bicknell has given an important case study of the economic difficulties faced by a professional modeller and sculptor in England and America in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.
At least one of Coffee’s offspring followed him into the profession. Notes on a lawsuit of 1818 relating to the Derby China Works in the British Museum, mention ‘Coffee’s son who lives in Tottenham Court Road & is a modeller’ (Bricknell 1998, 71).
MGS
Literary References: Haslem 1876, 156; Jewitt 1878, 1, 1878; Graves II, 1905-6, 95; Rutledge 1945, 297-312; Groce 1946, 14; Gunnis 1968, 109-110; Bricknell 1995, passim; Bricknell 1998
Archival References: GPC
Portraits of the Sculptor: Edward Foster, silhouette, private coll (Bricknell 1998, frontispiece)