A Strange Business

5

SCULPTOR: CREATING INTELLIGENT LIFE

Sculpture in Britain in the eighteenth century was the liveliest and most vibrant of art forms, carrying the nation’s reputation for creativity and artistic invention in a way that painting never did. As a consequence, the nineteenth century had as firm a foundation for the continuation of a national school of sculpture as could be desired, and, further, a fresh supply of military victories to be commemorated, new heroes to honour, new dead to be praised, and – as time went on – a burgeoning industrial economy to pay for it.

As early as the 1730s, four supremely talented sculptors from the continent had set up shop and settled in London: the elder John van Nost from Malines, who generated a dynasty of sculptors, Michael Rysbrack and Peter Scheemakers from Antwerp, and Louis-François Roubiliac from Lyons via Paris. All were attracted by the growth in the building of grand houses, the demand for church monuments throughout the country, religious toleration as a national characteristic, and relatively easy communication within a small island. They created a platform of talent and opportunity at home for younger native sculptors, including Henry and John Cheere, Joseph Wilton, Joseph Nollekens and Thomas Banks. While the latter three spent some years in Italy, all grew in skill and stature in the presence of piquant influence from continental sculptors in London. Their businesses thrived in response to opportunity and familiarity, and fluctuated as rivalry compromised individual market share.

Sculpture-making was expensive, heavy-going and hungry of space; in both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries it was not an occupation for the faint-hearted, nor for those afraid of high overhead costs. The younger generation that looked in awe at new work by the cheerful Rysbrack in Westminster Abbey, Blenheim and Bristol, and by the witty and cultivated Roubiliac in Westminster Abbey, Cambridge and Windsor, knew that they were succeeding a race of giants. These capable men had employed small armies of assistants and studio apprentices, required plenty of space for the delivery of materials and the despatch of completed works, and needed plenty of room indoors and out to build up a clay modello, raise a plaster cast and carve a marble block. Sculpture was an industry; the ‘studios’ at Hyde Park Corner, Westminster and Millbank became factories. They required lifting gear, rollers, wedges, hammers and crowbars, foundries and furnaces, and fresh air to disperse noxious fumes. Scheemakers, the maker of giant monuments at his works on Millbank, at under 5 feet tall was himself no giant; but given equipment and assistants, what he needed was agility, not height. The sculptor’s workshop was to a painter’s studio what a slaughterhouse is to a chicken run: noisier, bigger, busier, bloodier.

Studio apprentices would grow into sculptors themselves, and it was in Roubiliac’s studio that young John Flaxman encountered the art that would become his own. He followed in the footsteps of his father, the elder John Flaxman, an artisan sculptor who had also worked with Roubiliac and Scheemakers. Joseph Nollekens was trained across seven years with Scheemakers at his works in Vine Street, Piccadilly, and Rysbrack employed assistants including Gaspar van der Hagen, and many others whose names are yet unknown, in his studio in Vere Street, off Oxford Street. Sir Henry Cheere and his brother John Cheere, the latter known as the ‘man at Hyde Park Corner’, ran two separate and equally successful statuary businesses, Henry specializing in stone in his workshop conveniently near Westminster Abbey, John in lead and plaster. Henry employed assistants including William Collins and Robert Taylor, later a successful architect. After John’s death, one of the leading buyers of his work was Samuel Whitbread, of Southill, Bedfordshire.

Sculpture also ran in families – the Nosts, who rapidly dropped their Flemish ‘van’, the Cheeres, the Flaxmans, the Gahagans, the Westmacotts: Sir Richard Westmacott RA was taught by his sculptor father Richard Westmacott the elder; John van Nost’s cousin, John Nost II and his son, John Nost III, carried on the family trade; Peter Scheemakers and his brother Henry, also a sculptor, were the sons of the elder Peeter Scheemakers, sculptor of Antwerp; Lawrence Gahagan had four sons, three of whom became sculptors. The demanding dynastic threads would tend to ensure that the high cost of premises, materials and equipment would pass down the generations. It is thus not so surprising that monumental sculpture, the art that most powerfully and permanently commemorates dynasties, tended to run in dynasties of its own.

Joseph Nollekens – long-lived, highly productive and successful but something of a misanthrope – travelled to Italy as a young man after serving seven years as apprentice to Peter Scheemakers. He had won a string of prizes at the Society of Arts which launched him on his journey to Rome where he lived and worked from 1762 to 1770. There he perfected his skills in the workshop of the sculptor, faker and dealer Bartolommeo Cavaceppi, and started a business of his own in the vibrant area of workshops around the Spanish Steps. In Rome he laid the foundations for his popularity and large fortune by making sculpture for British Grand Tourists, many of whom continued to be patrons when he returned to London. Nollekens naturally sought out ‘the works of Michelangelo and other great men’, as his biographer J. T. Smith put it, and gained experience in dealing in antiquities. Like Cavaceppi, he restored and even faked some when the market lured him that way. Setting up in Mortimer Street, Marylebone, soon after his return to London, Nollekens became the most successful monumental and bust sculptor of his generation, a productive successor to Rysbrack, Roubiliac and Scheemakers, and a characterful forerunner who set a high standard for Flaxman, Chantrey and Westmacott.

The trade in sculpture was satirized on the London stage by the actor-manager Samuel Foote, who performed in his own play Taste. This is a scene in an auction room:

Puff: Upon my honour, ’tis a very fine bust; but where is de nose?

Novice [i.e. amateur collector]: The nose? What care I for the nose? Where is de nose? Why, sir, if it had a nose, I would not give sixpence for it. How the devil should we distinguish the works of the ancients, if they were perfect? The nose, indeed! Why, I don’t suppose, now, but, barring the nose, Roubiliac could cut as good a head every whit.

The most expensive item that monumental sculptors had to buy was the stone they would carve. While limestones or alabasters would come from relatively local sources, the material that their clients overwhelmingly insisted upon was marble. There is no marble in the British Isles – so-called Derbyshire and Kilkenny marbles are in fact very hard limestones which will take a high polish. The most convenient place to find marble of a quality adequate for sculpture was Italy, specifically the marble quarries at Carrara on the Mediterranean coast north of Pisa. Marble merchants in London with direct connections to Carrara included Giuseppe Fabbricotti at Thames Bank, Egisippo Norchi in King William Street, Strand, and Francis and White at Vauxhall. John Flaxman’s suppliers included Cock and Crowder, McDaniell, and Wallinger and Turner of Millbank. This was big business in every way. J. T. Smith reported that:

So immense are the blocks now imported into England for works of sculpture, that at this moment [1828] Mr Chantrey has one weighing many tons for which he paid about £600.

‘Patience on a monument, smiling at grief’, as Viola described Olivia in Twelfth Night, would have been carved in white, shining Carrara marble; so indeed would the ‘piece many years in doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master Julio Romano’, as the Third Gentleman breathlessly imagines in The Winter’s Tale.

Flaxman revealed something of the centrality of marble to the sculpture trade by describing the complexities of working rival materials, and their shortcomings:

Granite and Basaltes are not to be classed together for the manner of working, as Basaltes is much softer than granite and may be worked with the same tools as are used for the same operation on other Marbles; Granite is worked with steel points, and matting tools case-hardened, the surface so worked is then ground to a smooth surface with sand and water and lastly polished first with Emery then with Putty. It is very possible that a tool with a leaden end might be used with Granite powder, or that of Porphyry or any other hard stones to assist in smoothing the surface or giving a polish, because friction will insinuate the particles of hard stone into the surface of the leaden tool which by this means becomes a surface of hard, sharp particles, capable of grinding the granite. For this reason seal engravers use leaden pointed tools with oil of Brick and Diamond powder to cut gems and precious stones, and this is the only way in which I see the possibility of using lead to advantage for this purpose.

The high cost of the material was such that the sensible sculptor would cut a rectangular block as carefully and as economically as he could: waste cost money. Chantrey’s statue of George III, commissioned in 1811, was ‘cut out of a single block of beautiful Italian marble, with the exception of one of the arms, and cost 1,200 guineas before the chisel of the sculptor had touched it’. Flaxman paid sums of up to £400 (£20,000 in twenty-firstcentury prices) to his marble suppliers in the first decade of the century. He seems to have discussed his business costs with Farington:

Though [Flaxman] received £4,000 for the monument to Captain Montague, his expenses were so great for marble and good workmanship that he did not derive more than £700 for his own use from it, which was a very moderate payment for his time.

Nollekens reportedly ‘cunningly economized’ on cutting a marble block by removing the corners carefully to preserve the shape of a future bust and contriving ‘to drill out a lump from between the legs large enough for the head, which he put on the shoulders of the block’. This was no more than good sense, although the anecdote in Smith’s unsympathetic biography was written to display something of Nollekens’s alleged meanness rather than his sensible domestic economy. The marble which Nollekens cut so carefully was intended for a statue of William Pitt, a work which, according to Smith, earned the sculptor more than £15,000. This money came through Nollekens’s marketing of versions and reproductions of the image of the controversial politician – as clever a way of going about things as the politician himself. The sculptor was paid 4,000 guineas by Trinity College, Cambridge, for the statue and pedestal itself (installed in the Senate House in 1812); earned 120 guineas for each of the seventy-four busts he is said to have carved from the same design; and a further 6 guineas each for more than 600 plaster casts of the bust. While some of these figures may be optimistic and partial, there is no doubt that Nollekens knew how to keep his business costs low and his sales income high.

To run such a successful practice, from which across thirty years he turned out over 140 church monuments, forty statues, and busts of 300 or more individuals, Nollekens will have needed a ready supply of assistants, with good managers and reliable sources for his materials. Marble had to come in as well as go out, so it would not have been so unusual in Marylebone for passers-by to see rough grey cuboids being taken to the workshop and curvaceous polished white figures coming out of it on the back of a wagon. The patterns, casts and models that Nollekens needed to work from caught Smith’s eye around the studio, which was

principally covered with heads, arms, legs, hands and feet, moulded from some of the most celebrated specimens abroad, together with a few casts of bas reliefs of figures, and here and there a piece of foliage from the Vatican; all of which were hung up without the least reference whatever to each other.

While we know about Nollekens’s terrifying housekeeper, Mary Fairy, who scolded both the artist and his wife, and was ‘indeed frequently rude to his visitors’, only two of Nollekens’s studio assistants are known: Lucius Gahagan and Lewis Goblet. Gahagan was himself a sculptor’s son, a member of the dynasty of London sculptors founded by his father Lawrence. Smith tells us that Nollekens paid Gahagan and Goblet only £24 for making the busts which he sold on for five times that sum; but that surely is how business works. The assistant is trained and paid for his labour, while the owner pays the overheads and takes both the risks and the profits. Lucius Gahagan moved on from Nollekens’s employment and had set up business in Bath by about 1820. Lewis Goblet stayed on until Nollekens died in 1823, and while he exhibited at the Academy under his own name (including in 1816 a bust of Nollekens himself), he remained within the orbit of Nollekens’s practice, helping to care for him in his final illness, ‘at all times ready, night and day, to render him every assistance in his power’. Goblet was loyal and attentive to his master, qualities that led to Nollekens bequeathing to this young man all his tools and the materials left in his yard. Much of this information comes from Smith’s biography, a book as vilified for its tone as Walter Thornbury’s biography of Turner (1862) was disdained thirty years later. But this is less than fair to both authors. While Smith and Thornbury identified colourful and enticing soap-opera story-lines, many have the ring of truth, and readers just have to take care.

The way that cash for sculpture and marble architectural fittings flowed in the first years of the nineteenth century is revealed in the many account books used by John Flaxman, who had his studio at 7 Buckingham Street, between Portland Place and Fitzroy Square. A box containing twenty-nine of his account books is in the British Library, the largest no more than 7 inches by 5 and about fifty pages long, all of a size which could be carried in the pouch of a sculptor’s apron. Some are leather- or vellum-bound, others marbled; many carry the year of their use on their covers, from 1789. The books, which include five which show sums paid into and drawn from Messrs Herries, Farquhar Bank, reveal the clarity with which Flaxman ran his business, a habit which developed in his years in Italy, where all daily expenses, down to coffee and breakfast, as well as model fees, rasping and battering tools, pencils and so much else, are carefully noted down. In Rome we see he had to pay £1 for ‘mending Sr Canova’s Carr[iage]’ and giving it a new axle – perhaps the weight of marble had snapped it. Back in England, running his own workshop, Flaxman made weekly payments to recurring names, including known sculptors Gahagan and Gott. In 1805, for instance, these names recur: Bone, Bridges, Broadrick, Burge, Butterfield, Dowling, Farrell, Hinchliff, Howard, Langley, Laycock, Lovat, McKandlish, Paris, Perkins, Thomas. They are all paid in January 1805, and most are still on the payroll the following December. Their weekly wage ranges from around £1 a week to odd sums of about £3 or £4, presumably denoting both their value to Flaxman and the hours worked in a particular week. Many of these names are still appearing in the accounts in the 1820s, clear evidence of their loyalty and of the good sense of Flaxman as an employer.

The most detailed book contains the accounts of commissions undertaken by Flaxman between 1795 and 1808, for statuary from busts to monuments, as well as architectural fittings such as fireplaces, pediments and friezes. Each entry is cancelled by a vertical pen line, made presumably when the job was fully paid for. Lucrative commissions came from the Lords of the Treasury, through the Committee of Taste set up in 1802 under Pitt’s Treasury minister Charles Long to commission monuments to victory and kingship. From them Flaxman received in May 1803 a commission to produce a monument to Admiral Howe, the victor of the Battle of Ushant in 1794, in which the French fleet was destroyed on the ‘Glorious First of June’. He was paid £2,100 on account of £6,300 (6,000 guineas), the first of three equal instalments for the monument to be erected in St Paul’s Cathedral ‘without further expence’. Eighteen months later, as Flaxman admitted to a friend, ‘Lord Howe hitherto is but an Embryo miracle of Art, and my smaller fry are scarce worth mentioning.’ The second payment for Howe was made six years after the first in April 1809, and the final settlement on installation in December 1811. Thus, the work was completed, paid for and installed across a period of just over eight years.

A typical way of arranging public commissions was by open or invited competition. Flaxman would have none of this, however. Writing to the poet William Hayley, a friend to many artists, Flaxman explained why this was ‘not the best way of proceeding in my opinion’:

As I have no great confidence in the judges who will determine on the merit of the works I shall have nothing to do with it, especially as I am more anxious to perform what I undertake in the best manner, than greedy of new employment.

Hayley evidently urged Flaxman to do more in the way of public monuments, but the sculptor was adamant about not entering competitions:

It will become me better to exert myself in finishing creditably the laborious works I am already engaged in, than to seek out others by competition which I was always averse to. I don’t covet riches, but I should like to do whatever I engage in well.

Confident in Flaxman’s abilities, the Lords of the Treasury then commissioned him in December 1807 to make a monument to Lord Nelson, also for 6,000 guineas, again to be paid in three equal instalments. The monument was installed in St Paul’s Cathedral in April 1818, after an eleven-year process of creation. So, during the years 1807 to 1811, Howe and Nelson stood together in Flaxman’s studio in various states of completion. Ann Flaxman, the sculptor’s wife, wrote a lively account of work in progress in a letter of 1810 to their friend the Rev. William Gunn, vicar of Smallborough, Norfolk. Touching first on the home life of the Flaxmans, Ann makes some charming revelations when writing to thank the Gunns for the gift of a ‘very fine Turkey’ and of a hare ‘which stares me in the face truly’:

I send you a peep, and but a peep, into Flaxman’s Studies. First then Lord Howe is nearly compleated, and will decorate St Paul’s Cathedral towards midsummer. Lord Nelson is advancing slowly, and for the same cathedral, as also a fine, simple Statue of Sir Jo. Reynolds. Pitt’s Statue for Glasgow is on the Eve of its journey northward. Lord Cornwallis for India and Mr Webber for the same place will set off next year. A pretty little gothic thing with two female figures for Salisbury. An interesting figure mourning the loss of 2 young men who died in their country’s cause for Leeds, and a few others fill up the muster roll. He has refused to make any competition model for General Moore being already so overstock’d. He has been much thrown back by modelling a long frieze for the facade of Covent Garden Theatre. The mighty master of the Stage rought [sic] his genius to it[s] highest pitch and he [Flaxman] has succeeded accordingly. I must say I think if Shakespeare’s self could look down his spirit would be pleased and he would cry content, as also to a most beautiful (tho not fantastic) statue of Comedy . . . Evenings are spent in making designs from the Shield of Achilles for a Royal salver and our odd moments are engaged in making out sketches from Nature.

Ann Flaxman goes on to disclose yet more burdens of work for her busy husband to bear:

The naughty Academy have elected him their Professor of Sculpture, indeed they made their Professorship on his account. So now he will have to teach the Boys, and this I fear will be a new and very unexpected impediment to his next summer’s recreations.

During the five years from January 1808 to December 1811 Flaxman had at least sixteen works on the go. Some of these are echoed in Ann Flaxman’s account: from a modest tablet and trophy to Admiral Millbanke and reliefs for churches in Penang and Madras, to the grand statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds commissioned for St Paul’s Cathedral in September 1808. Efficient transport systems allowed Flaxman’s practice to serve both the nation and the empire.

The average length of time for the execution of a large commission was two or three years, but Flaxman could turn one around quickly if he had to, particularly if he was being paid well: for his monument to the Baring family he received 750 guineas, plus transport and installation costs; it was completed in just over a year. The accounts for the Baring monument includes £2.3s for ‘Wagon to Warwick Lane’, which gives an idea of how the monument might have made its onward journey. Warwick Lane runs south from Newgate Street, past St Paul’s Cathedral to Puddle Dock. From there the work would be shipped on the river, either downstream to be taken around the Kent and Sussex coast to Southampton and then on by wagon, north to Micheldever in Hampshire, or upstream to Reading, where it would be unloaded and carted south. There were no other routes. Other costs that Flaxman faced – ones that were common to monumental sculptors of his kind – included the supply of packing cases (£40.16s.3d for the Barings, so these must have been very substantial cases); plugs and cramps (iron or copper fixing rods) to attach the marbles high on the chancel wall; rails (where required) to protect them; polishing for the final touches, and travelling and accommodation expenses that Flaxman or his assistants might incur to install the work themselves.

The studio was a sculpture factory, with Flaxman in charge of the production and activity. Letters to clients reveal his concern for detail and his willingness to revise initial ideas. To John Hawkins, concerning a revision for a tablet in a Cambridge college, he wrote:

I have made another design, with the Chalice and Paten (as before) united by a small sprig of vine on each side, an ear of corn grouped with each to a garland of olive the emblem of peace as well as every liberal attainment and beneficial pursuit, to enclose the inscription, instead of the flowers.

Then, on acceptance by the client, he rapidly puts in his bill. ‘I have made the small model . . . and am proceeding with the Marble, I shall therefore be obliged . . . for Fifty pounds, one third of the price in advance usually paid in Monumental works.’ Flaxman priced another monumental work in a letter to Rev. William Gunn, who was considering the possibility of raising a monument to Nelson in Norwich: a statue 9 feet high, on an 11-foot-high pedestal with steps. This would cost, the sculptor estimated, £4,000,

with proper decorations, affixing and other etceteras of expence . . . You will perceive that such a work must differ in its price according to whether it is a group, or single statue; accompanied by Trophies or not, a decorated marble pedestal, or plain stone pedestal being its support. I would willingly send more particular and minute information, but to do this it is absolutely necessary I should see the places proposed to receive it, attending to, and weighing, many relative circumstances on the spot.

The monument was never made.

Day by day, Flaxman was an active presence, producing drawings to discuss with clients and making small clay models from these designs. The clays would be enlarged into marble or an interim plaster by his assistants, of whom there were fifteen or sixteen at any one time. Among them, in addition to the mason staff listed above, were some who would go further in sculpture: Lucius Gahagan and Joseph Gott already mentioned; Thomas Hayley, William Hayley’s son, a promising sculptor who died aged only twenty in 1800; James Smith; Flaxman’s brother-in-law Thomas Denman; John Ely Hinchliff; E. H. Baily – all became sculptors of greater or lesser distinction in their own right. The assistants roughed the composition out in marble, after Flaxman had made his amendments to the plasters, and gradually carved the work to completion. The sculptor Charles Rossi observed to Joseph Farington, perhaps over-critically, that Flaxman’s strength lay not in the carving, but in the designing and modelling of his works.

Rossi’s observation may explain the chilliness of Flaxman’s finished sculpture, an air of detachment that suggests that the artist’s interest has long since moved on to the next project. Flaxman’s marble figures could be locked up in a cold church, standing around with their torches and togas like so many undead, and always feel at home. While there are a small number of commissioned busts in his oeuvre, the capture of likeness and the transmission of personality were not his intention; his works began, and remained, funerary. With the armies of the dead increasing in number month by month, Flaxman could with good reason tell Farington in 1808 that he had ‘work in hand that would employ him near seven years’.

Having a multitude of white figures carved in the round or in relief, Flaxman’s studio must have resembled the entrance to purgatory. Nevertheless, it was a good turnover. Money paid to him in 1810 and 1811 alone totalled £6,797 – that is about £3,400 per year, or about £150,000 in early twenty-first-century terms, to run his studio. Relatively speaking, it was a considerable thriving business. But Flaxman mused to William Gunn on the perishability of monuments, in a manner that prefigures Humphry Davy’s thoughts on the mutability of civilization in Consolations in Travel (1830):

As piety or patriotism raise the golden or bronze statues, avarice will melt them and convert them into money, not caring that opus superat materiam. Necessity and barbarism will take stones from the finest palace arch or pillar to build a cot or a hovel, so that argument against any species of monument because it was not imperishable, would rather be arguments against raising any monument at all.

From the coming giant of monumental sculpture, Francis Chantrey, at least four ledgers remain which list his business transactions. One, in the Royal Academy, contains the bulk of Chantrey’s records. When Flaxman was in his mid-fifties in 1809, Chantrey, aged twenty-eight, was beginning his professional career with a very precocious order for four colossal plaster busts, at 10 guineas each, of Admirals Howe, St Vincent, Duncan and Nelson for the Naval Hospital at Greenwich. Over the next five years, approximately the same period that we have examined with the well-established Flaxman, Chantrey began to build his career as the most able and inventive maker of marble and plaster busts, in which likeness and personality are vividly captured. No greater distance in terms of presentation, style and subject matter could there be than that between Flaxman of Buckingham Street and Chantrey of Eccleston Street, Pimlico. Where Flaxman produced monuments for dead gentry, soldiers and government officials, Chantrey created intelligent life in marble for the burgeoning professions. In the early 1810s Chantrey enlivened the name and memory of the Sheffield doctor John Browne, the radical politician Sir Francis Burdett, the surgeon Henry Cline, the agriculturalist Thomas Johnes of Hafod, and the mathematician John Playfair. These were the coming men, and so was Francis Chantrey. Where the generation of Rysbrack and Roubiliac created an iconography for a national identity with their sculpture, Flaxman and Chantrey in their generation expressed national purpose.

Chantrey’s practice reached its first peak of complexity in 1811, when the City of London commissioned him to make the colossal statue of George III, mentioned above, for the Guildhall. This demanded that he efficiently and economically manage his studio, and employ a team of skilled and apprentice assistants. It was the year in which the Flaxman factory was engaged on, or had just completed, their Howe, Nelson, Pitt and Reynolds, and when the City aldermen had also commissioned James Smith, a former assistant of Flaxman, to make a monumental figure of Nelson, and another sculptor, James Bubb, to produce a huge figure of Pitt. This was a busy time for the colossus trade, a measure of the political imperative that the London Council’s Tory loyalty to the Crown at this crucial stage of the wars with France should be visibly demonstrated. As a measure of the relative celebrity of Flaxman and Chantrey at this time, the younger man’s total fee, £2,100, was one third of Flaxman’s fee for his Howe and Nelson statues.

Chantrey’s studio workforce had to expand to take on so important and labour-intensive a commission as the king’s statue, as well as the other commissions that were gradually accruing. Ten assistants are named in one of his ledgers, annotated by his secretary Allan Cunningham, a Scottish poet who had come to London from the Lowlands in 1810 in search of literary fame. Having known Robert Burns and James Hogg in Scotland, and being a talented poet and balladeer in his own right, Cunningham’s ambitions appeared to be compromised when he was employed as a sculptor’s assistant first by James Bubb, and then, in 1814, by Chantrey. Cunningham’s literary career was already developing, with work on the journal The Day as a parliamentary reporter and with William Jerdan on the Literary Gazette. Nevertheless, he put this to one side, perhaps temporarily at first, to become Chantrey’s assistant, trusted studio foreman and secretary. Cunningham continued to write important works, including a life of Burns, and to publish fervent songs of an exiled Scottish character under the pseudonym ‘Hidallan’. Nevertheless, he remained in London in the security of Chantrey’s studio for the rest of the sculptor’s life. In his last decade, Cunningham wrote a life of David Wilkie. His literary and managerial talents were noticed at a high social level: the Sixth Duke of Devonshire described Cunningham as ‘foreman, sculptor, poet’ when he was working for Chantrey at Chatsworth in 1822.

Cunningham’s career reflects something of the conflicts of interest in the artistic world of the early nineteenth century, and the economic pressures to take the safer option. He married his Scottish sweetheart Jean Walker in London in 1811, and the pair settled down in Pimlico in the shadow of the sculpture works to raise a large, happy family. As Cunningham’s family grew and his children played with the marble chippings around the works, so Chantrey’s own studio family expanded. He and his wife Mary Anne had no children of their own, but they did increasingly have a family of assistants coming and going, including David Dunbar, William Elliott, James Heffernan, Francis Legé and Frederick William Smith. Nothing is known of Elliott, but the others all went on to become sculptors in their own right, being more or less successful in breaking away from the master’s orbit. Of the three that stayed on with Chantrey, James Heffernan was an Irishman who had followed the classic course of coming to London, finding work in sculptors’ studios, first with Rossi and then, in about 1810, with Chantrey, studying at the Royal Academy Schools, and travelling to Rome. On his return he went back to Pimlico and worked there for the rest of Chantrey’s life. Heffernan became indispensable and, exhibiting at the Academy under his own name, was rebuked in the press for ‘wasting the summer of his life, like so many other talented men in this town, to increase the already overgrown reputation of another’. He appears to have been dissuaded by Chantrey from embarking on a career of his own, perhaps because he was so useful around the studio. After Chantrey’s death it was revealed, maybe with some accuracy, that he carved ‘almost every one of Chantrey’s busts literally from the first to the last’. Heffernan ‘saw and caught and translated Chantrey into another material’. Reportedly very good-natured, amusing and good-humoured, Heffernan was ‘marred by diffidence, a want of reliance on himself, and broken health’.

Another of Chantrey’s early assistants, Frederick William Smith, was a local boy, born in Pimlico. He too went to the Royal Academy Schools, but failed to win a Rome scholarship. He turned, inevitably, to the security of the Pimlico workshop and became Chantrey’s right-hand man. He too exhibited busts at the Academy under his own name, his subjects including people near to him, Allan Cunningham and Francis Chantrey himself. Smith received high praise from John Flaxman, but in a later account of the studio’s work it was made clear by Peter Cunningham, Allan’s son, that his ‘ambition was limited by the necessities of the week’. In other words, he was trapped in the orbit. He died young. A feeling and sympathetic obituary remarked that Smith ‘was certainly the first of our second class of sculptors; nay, some of his works have the right to stand in the first rank’.

A third long-term assistant was Francis Legé, a Prussian immigrant who had worked as a sculptor’s assistant in Liverpool, alongside John Gibson. He came to Chantrey in 1815 fully formed, having shown a colossal figure of Satan in Edinburgh the previous year, and having evident talent and ambition. But although he showed sculpture at the Academy under his own name, Legé stuck with Chantrey and faded into the anonymity of studio life. One, however, got away. David Dunbar was the son of a Dumfries stonemason, who had trained him. He travelled to Rome in 1805 and came back to London, where Chantrey took him on. He had clear talent, exhibiting a model for a statue of Robert Burns at the Academy in 1815. But by 1822 Dunbar had escaped Chantrey’s gravitational pull and had moved north to Carlisle, where he became a major force in sculpture in the north-west of England. He co-founded Carlisle Academy of Fine Art and built his own influential career, becoming, indeed, the Chantrey of the North. He made busts of important northern figures including the heroine Grace Darling, the peer Lord Lonsdale and the novelist Mrs Gaskell, and through exhibitions and lectures he introduced the work of Canova and Thorvaldsen to the north of England.

Rather than have the young men idle when work in the studio slackened off, Chantrey (or Cunningham) sent them out into London to clean up city statues in advance of the victory celebrations over Napoleon. While the statue of the king was in progress, Chantrey received in 1812 a commission of similar importance for a 7-foot-high seated figure of Robert Blair, Solicitor-General for Scotland, for the Faculty of Advocates of Edinburgh. At £4,000, this was nearly double Chantrey’s fee for George III and was becoming comparable to the amount that Flaxman could expect. It was patent recognition that Chantrey had become an established sculptor already at the age of thirty-one.

Chantrey’s father was a tenant farmer and carpenter from Norton, near Sheffield, who presumably encouraged the boy in his first apprenticeship to a Sheffield decorative carver and print dealer from 1797 to 1804. He was noticed at this early age by the ubiquitous William Carey, then contributing paragraphs to the Sheffield Iris, and buoyed by Carey’s published support, he was able to travel to London, where through trade contacts he found work carving details in furniture for the collectors Thomas Hope and Samuel Rogers. He clearly had charm and youthful brightness, for he was noticed also by Sarah D’Oyley, née Sloane, the grand-daughter of the collector and philanthropist Sir Hans Sloane, one of the founders of the British Museum. When in London, Chantrey lived in Sarah D’Oyley’s house, as a guest of her butler and housekeeper. He came very sensibly to marry the butler’s daughter, his cousin Mary Anne Wale, and sensibly also must have charmed old Mrs D’Oyley. One thing leading to another, Mrs D’Oyley helpfully provided a large sum of money, ‘said to be about £10,000’, to set the couple up. With this money Chantrey bought his house and studio in Pimlico. This extreme generosity, proto-Dickensian as a rags-to-riches tale where natural genius is revealed and nurtured, became a source of gossip, Farington being one of the perpetrators. But what is also clear is Chantrey’s talent at attracting business:

Chantrey . . . during his progress in Sculpture Study was much assisted in pecuniary matters by Mrs D’Oyley of Sloane St, a Lady now aged abt. 90 . . . He has great employment and visits everywhere. He has 100 or 120 guineas for a Marble Bust. His inclination is not much to Classical reading but he is vigilant in obtaining a great variety of useful information.

But it was also the sitters who pressed for immortality by Chantrey’s hand. Augustus Callcott relayed a story about Chantrey visiting the elderly banker Thomas Coutts, perhaps not with the primary intention of winning a commission. They chatted amiably, when suddenly turning to Chantrey Mrs Coutts said:

‘don’t you think Tommy would make a fine bust. He is the very image of Julius Caesar if you see him without his wig on.’ As she said this she snatched it from his head and he was exposed in all his baldness.

This was Mrs Coutts’s manner: she was the former actress Harriet Mellon, well accomplished at the significant and memorable dramatic gesture. Chantrey did in the event make an image of Thomas Coutts, but a posthumous seated figure, not a bust, which now sits smiling benignly on customers on the first floor of his bank in the Strand. His wig is firmly in place.

Francis Chantrey liked grandeur in sculpture. His full-length figures have a nobility that expresses the gravity of public life in early nineteenth-century Britain and also carries its weight. The human scale was not really enough for Chantrey, however, and there were times when he mused on the super-colossal. His biographer, the painter George Jones, reflected on these ambitions:

[Chantrey] thought a fine representation of man the most imposing of objects, and his desire to impress the world with its importance led him to wish to imitate [the Greek philosopher] Democrates, who offered to cut Mount Athos into a statue of Alexander. Chantrey wished to convert a projecting rock in Derbyshire into a human figure; he also gave a design for a colossal statue of the Duke of Sutherland, to be built up in a rough manner on an eminence near Trentham [Staffordshire].

Chantrey’s studio output was by any comparison prodigious. He and his assistants were turning out sculpture on an industrial scale, with Chantrey as the managing director. While we might reasonably expect the hand of the master to be evident, romantically, in the cutting of the figures, the faces, the gestures, the light in their eyes, his personal contribution would effectively have been limited to composition and finish. The labour would be contributed by others: according to Chantrey’s ledgers, Legé spent 142 days and seven-and-a-half hours, across five months, working on The Sleeping Children for Lichfield Cathedral in 1817.

Chantrey’s genius was to take a modern route and make drawings of sitters by way of an optical drawing instrument, the camera lucida, invented and patented by Cornelius Varley, brother of the wayward John. He sat his subjects down on a chair in front of this instrument, made conversation with them, made them smile and laugh and animate, and made rigorous studies of them, full-face and profile with marks for shading and pointing. In many full-face drawings he marked a determined centre line which reveals that Chantrey understood that the human face was asymmetrical. The next stage in the process was for Chantrey to make a clay model, on a supporting armature, which would be worked persistently and with deliberation to capture the personality of the sitter and to develop a characteristic pose: James Watt’s wide brow and firm, decisive mouth; William Wordsworth’s diffident avoidance of the viewer’s gaze; John Rennie’s tousled hair suggestive of a man of action; Walter Scott’s quicksilver shift of the head. All these seem from a distance of nearly 200 years to be the projected character of the individual; it is what the sitter showed to Chantrey. Where Renaissance saints have their attributes – St Peter his key, St Catherine her wheel – Chantrey’s men, and his few women, bear the marks of the sculptor’s own expression of their character and profession in the set and temper of the face. There is the art.

The clays, long destroyed by the process, held the touch of Chantrey’s soft fingers. From the clays a mould was taken to make the plaster. When dried, cooled and released from its mother-shape, this was rasped and filed, smoothed and rubbed, undoubtedly by Chantrey himself, before, in the case of busts, being placed within the pointing-machine system to have its dimensions transferred to the marble block. Initially roughed out, the block would be cut back to resemble, touch by touch, the dimensions of the plaster and to reveal Chantrey’s conception of the subject. The rough cutting was studio work; the later smoothing of the cheek or the lighting of the eye was Chantrey’s.

Francis Chantrey became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1816 aged thirty-four, and only two years later was elevated to Royal Academician. For his diploma piece, the obligatory example of work given to the Academy by an elected Academician, Chantrey offered his bust of the Academy president, Sir Benjamin West. This particular choice of subject will have done him no harm among the Academy grandees. That same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, a group, strictly speaking, for scientists (or natural philosophers, as they were then known), but greatly influenced in their activities by their hospitality to artists, moneyed men, and dilettanti whose presence as Fellows came briefly to shift the Society’s centre of gravity. The Royal Society, which shared the Strand-frontage rooms of Somerset House with the Royal Academy and the Society of Antiquaries, praised Chantrey on welcoming him to their number as ‘highly distinguished as an artist and well-versed in various branches of human knowledge’. Becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society enhanced Chantrey’s standing as a portrait sculptor, and Royal Society fellows became a staple of his subject matter. Chantrey was the consummate networker.

Across this period, sculpture came particularly to the fore in the dealings of the Royal Academy. In 1818 there were five sculptor Academicians, with one, E. H. Baily, on the rise as an Associate. Those sculptors who had made the grade were a lively lobbying group, buoyed up by the strength of the market for their art, a benefit in financial terms and public knowledge that painting could not hope to match. Nevertheless, this is a very small number, considering that there were thirty-eight painter RAs and ARAs in 1818. It indicates perhaps that sculptors’ studios had a stranglehold on training and production, and created a strong economic disincentive for young, undercapitalized sculptors to break away and set up on their own. Thus, there was no real hope of Frederick Smith or Francis Legé ever becoming ARAs, nor yet David Dunbar in faraway Carlisle.

The foundation of the Academy’s sculpture interest lay in its large and ubiquitous collection of plaster casts, seen by all, crowding rooms and corridors with their blanched pallor, and already the subject of ten thousand student drawings. The collection was being added to ad hoc by enthusiastic purchases and gifts: Council minutes record, for example, that Flaxman purchased ‘a cast in plaister from the Venus of the Capitol, for fifteen guineas’. A report commissioned in 1810 by the president and Council found that the Academy owned more than 250 large casts and dozens of smaller pieces:

70 statues, 122 busts, 50 bassi-relievi & 12 large fragments, besides 105 pieces from the Trajan Column, 2 marbles from the frieze of the Parthenon, 5 ornamental fragments in marble, 19 architectural casts & a variety of small figures, hands, feet etc.

But the filthy air of London and the smoke from the candles and lamps in the Academy, as well as the necessity of painting and repainting the plasters, had dulled their surfaces and killed their lines, making them by 1814 ‘unintelligible to the student’. Pedestals had been damaged, making them unsafe, and over the years they had been shuffled about the Academy, losing all sense of order in the process. As an initiative following the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the new availability of casts of antique sculpture from collections in France and Italy, the Academy made concerted efforts to procure new casts to replace some of the old ones. At home, casts of the Elgin Marbles, which came to London in 1808, were a new desire; to acquire casts of sculpture on the continent, however, the Academy needed support from the top. After a wordy and loyal approach from the president and Council, the Prince Regent presented the Academy with the superb collection of plaster casts from Paris, Venice, Rome, Florence and Naples which he himself had been given by grateful European states, now freed from Napoleon’s grip. With a wave of the royal hand they were transported to London on navy ships, bringing forth an effusive response reflecting the gratitude of the Academy:

Your Royal Highness’s liberality has renovated the School of Design of the Royal Academy, & provided it with a better stock of appropriate examples than it has hitherto ever possessed . . . Beneficial effects . . . will soon be apparent in the improvement of the students [providing] a new stimulus [to] promote the true principles of Taste; &, with Your Royal Highness’s powerful support, to give to the Arts that effective Energy which is so generally characteristic of this Country, & renders it pre-eminent among the Nations of Europe.

Plaster casts, now that a new, crisp, pin-sharp set had arrived, were once again the gold standard for the coming generation of sculptors.

Taking two years of Francis Chantrey’s output, 1820 and 1821, as a sample, we can see how his studio business unfurled. By comparison, Flaxman’s output ten years earlier had been modest. Work in progress – that is, ordered before January 1820 and not yet completed – comprised three monumental statues, General Gillespie, Francis Horner and George Washington; twenty-five church monuments, both free-standing and to be mounted on a wall; seventeen wall-mounted church reliefs; and twenty busts, many of which were in multiples, so the number of busts waiting patiently on shelves and pedestals in the studio may have been in the thirties or forties. This was when the year 1820 began. The orders that came in over the following two years comprised five statues, seated and standing; sixteen monuments; fifteen reliefs; and sixteen new subjects for busts: statues of Robert Dundas for the Parliament House in Edinburgh, William Hey for Leeds Infirmary, Cyril Jackson for Christ Church, Oxford, James Watt for Handsworth Church, Birmingham, and Joseph Banks for the British Museum. William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, the Duke of Wellington and William Blizard came to the studio in the flesh and left in the marble. With such activity it is little wonder that Chantrey fantasized about carving a living rock in Derbyshire or mounting a colossus on a hill in Staffordshire.

While only a small number of Chantrey’s assistants are known by name, production at this level, as with Flaxman, called for a small army of specialists in the fashioning of rough blocks, architectural carving, decorative design, polishing, plaster-casting, heavy-weight lifting and tool-making. Another vital speciality was lettering, as all or most of the monuments bore inscriptions, some running into elaborate texts of 400 words or more. The order for one monument, to Richard Bateman installed in All Saints’ Church, Derby (now Derby Cathedral), shows that 845 letters cost £8.9s.0d – that is, 100 letters to the pound, Chantrey’s standard charge for inscriptions.

Chantrey himself was charming, entertaining and generous. His hospitality was on a lordly scale, and of a cerebral nature. Indeed, so it should be, bearing in mind the social and intellectual level of the men and women whose patronage he courted and whose likenesses he caught.

With the members [of the RA] Chantrey’s intercourse was frequent: his means and liberality enabled him to establish hospitable association. Sundays he generally passed at home, members of the Royal Academy and other intimate friends dined with him . . . [I]t was common occurrence to meet men distinguished by science and literature; and perhaps no hospitality short of Lord Essex’s, Lord Spencer’s and Lord Holland’s could compare with Chantrey’s. In the evening, the specimens of . . . minerals and fossils were examined and the instructive allurements of the microscope filled every moment with gratification.

However, Chantrey was direct in business, and like all tradesmen he had his share of abandoned orders, a broken supply chain, or bad payments. He took his share of sharp practice, too: a Bristol patron, William Elwyn, proposed a complex agreement over payment for a monument to his wife, with extra for this and changes to that. Then there was a bit of apparent fast dealing by Elwyn over the fees due to Bristol Cathedral, so Chantrey did not really know whether he was coming or going. His rueful note in the ledger reads:

Mr Elwin is a sharp clever man, he managed to make me pay Church fees after I had completed the monument to the full value of 300 guineas.

Of the fifty-eight commissions placed with Chantrey in 1820 and 1821, six were ultimately abandoned, including a (presumably) colossal figure of Satan for Lord Egremont’s sculpture gallery at Petworth, ‘Poetical Figures’ for both the Duke of Devonshire and Lord Dartmouth, and a ‘Figure or Groupe’ for Lord Yarborough. Ideal figures and imaginative groups were not Chantrey’s forte, however; these were more Flaxman’s line, and although he did make friezes, such as subjects from the Iliad and the Odyssey for the Duke of Bedford, Chantrey’s purpose was the commemoration of man in the life, whether the subject was living or dead. It is difficult to determine accurately how much money Chantrey turned over in his business, but the total of payments made or committed to him over the two years 1820 and 1821 approached £13,500 a year – the equivalent of an annual income of about £675,000 today. As a rule of thumb, a standard bust would cost the sitter 120 guineas and a modest monument perhaps £500 to £700. The completed works would leave the studio by wagon, with much heaving and groaning, some making their journey by road, but most using the canal system or the river where possible. The Bateman monument was carted to Paddington (charge: 11 shillings), where it would have been put on the Grand Union Canal and taken by barge to Derby.

As in any large-scale sculptural practice, the comings and goings of materials and products at Chantrey’s workshop could not be carried out invisibly. The removal of sculpture from Pimlico must have been something of a public event, particularly if the departing work was a large statue long in the making. The arrival of a massive mineral specimen in Pimlico caused a sensation:

I am now deeply engaged in improving my own collection [of minerals], having during last week purchased and paid for one Specimen, which weighed eighteen tons, and which was brought to my house by eighteen horses, under the management of fourteen drivers, and accompanied by upwards of one hundred independent electors of Westminster.

The study of mineralogy, of fossils, and of the geology of the materials he carved was high among Chantrey’s private interests. To this end he studied and compared his collection of geological samples with his friends, one of whom, the geologist Henry de la Beche, sent him a list of exact figures of the comparative weights of stone samples per foot cube, from chalk to granite.

There are many contributory factors to the wide spread of funerary monuments across early nineteenth-century Britain, and their increasing export to India and the West Indies: the rapid growth in the number of churches, the hangover of medieval attitudes to death, the social influence of the church, the nation’s readiness to go to war, the social obligation to believe in Christian resurrection, the primitive state of medicine, and thus the inability of the wealthy to buy more effective treatment. The natural consequence of the wealthy buying commissions for their sons in the army and navy was the timely appearance of church monuments when they were killed. Away from the heat of battle, sickness and death would also make their way, late or soon, through all classes: certainly those who lived in the clean air and space of the country had health advantages over those in the cities, but the air in Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol and London was as filthy and debilitating for those with money as it was for those without; and cholera and tuberculosis cut through society as cruelly and certainly as a railway cuts through landscape. Chantrey’s worldly success was the direct result of a natural fear in society, fuelled by religion as well as by literature. What Chantrey sold was reassurance. In the twenty-first century, insurance companies sell ‘assessment of risk’ through the suggestion of fear of what might happen, although they market this as ‘peace of mind’. Two hundred years earlier that task was also performed by sculptors, with the local parson acting as insurer’s agent and cheerleader: the nineteenth-century insurance policy was written in marble, at 100 letters to the pound.

The market for sculpture was driven by belief in an idea rather than desire for ownership, and was therefore disproportionate to the market-led pattern of industrial growth and efficiency seen in the factories and the fields. Nobody would contemplate selling for profit a church monument in which they had invested hundreds of pounds: here, the patron is the end-user. This also provides the reason why Nollekens could set up his own successful business after training with Scheemakers, and David Dunbar could break away from Francis Chantrey and find plenty of work from a new base in Carlisle: death was as certain and peace of mind as cherished in the north of England as it was in the south. Funerary sculptors’ markets were aided by England’s unique canal and river system, at the peak of utility in the 1820s and 1830s. To move a 10-ton monument from London to the Midlands, for example, meant a short wagon journey along hard city roads to the Paddington or Pimlico canal basins, followed by a frictionless passage as far as you liked. While wagon costs do appear in Flaxman’s and Chantrey’s accounts, inland barge and shipping costs do not, as they were paid at the other end.

Busts and, less commonly, statues carried the funerary tradition into the world of the living. The features of the Duke of Wellington, Walter Scott, George IV and James Watt are so familiar now because Chantrey created the icon. Reproduced down the decades, they have burned into the national memory: the Duke of Wellington’s nose, James Watt’s mouth, the jowls of George IV, all hang on a marble peg. In 1827, only seven years into the reign of George IV, ‘The King’s Thirteenth Bust’ was ordered from Chantrey, and there were many more to come. The sculptor’s ledger records in 1835 ‘James Watt’s Fifth Statue [Greenock]’, and in the year of his death in 1841 Chantrey was already working on his ‘Third Bust of Queen Victoria’. The business of art in the nineteenth century was as much to promote the status quo as it was to delight, to challenge and to change. Chantrey maintained a tight quality control over his output. He noticed that a bust of the Duke of Wellington, commissioned in 1826, had flaws in the marble. Allan Cunningham noted in the ledger: ‘This bust when executed had some spots on the neck and bosom which induced Mr Chantrey to lay it aside: it was afterwards sold in 1835 to A. Maclellan of Glasgow for one hundred guineas.’

Chantrey was overwhelmingly a sculptor in marble; he came to bronze late. Bronze production on any commercial scale required a foundry, sources of extreme heat, men with skills that were not required in marblecarving, heavy lifting gear, particular tools, and a working knowledge of industrial-scale chemistry. The last of these he could readily glean from his Royal Society friends. Bronze production also required a ready source of metals, but for the right subject, such as the king or Wellington, this was not a problem as the army had captured French cannon to spare.

Chantrey embarked on large-scale bronze sculpture in 1822 when commissioned by a committee headed by Lord Egremont to make a figure of George IV to stand in the Royal Crescent in Brighton. While it was in progress, a variant was commissioned by an Edinburgh committee led by Lord Meadowbank. Unfamiliarity with the medium and process on a large scale caused Chantrey initially to miscalculate his prices and to charge an inadequate figure, 3,000 guineas, for the Brighton statue. This he recouped in Edinburgh by doubling the price. To cast these works Chantrey installed a furnace at Pimlico in 1827, 14 feet long by 12 feet wide by 12 feet high, designed and overseen by the Lambeth engineer Henry Maudslay. Chantrey was extremely proud of his furnace, holding parties around it and dare-devil competitions to see which of his friends, including Charles Babbage, David Brewster and Thomas Lawrence, could bear the heat. David Brewster managed 320 degrees Fahrenheit for two minutes.

From 1828, when the Edinburgh statue was still under way, Chantrey’s business in bronze remained at a high-status level. He continued in marble for his everyday work, in bronze for the spectacular: an equestrian statue of Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras, which took ten years to complete; William Pitt for Hanover Square, London, which took six years, and a version for Edinburgh which took a further two; James Watt for George Street, Glasgow (six years); an equestrian of George IV for Trafalgar Square (nine years); and an equestrian Duke of Wellington for the Mansion House, City of London (commissioned 1837; incomplete at Chantrey’s death). Thus from 1828 to 1831 there were six monumental bronzes in various stages of completion under way and in various bits and pieces in Chantrey’s foundry: two of George IV, two of Pitt, one of Munro and one of Watt. Interestingly, the George IV for Edinburgh and the William Pitt for London were cast in the same year, 1831, as were Munro for Madras and George IV for Trafalgar Square in 1838. This at the very least suggests that Chantrey was looking for economies of scale, and perhaps the retention of trained staff for a particular purpose, by managing a more logical flow of work. The toll the bronzes took on Chantrey’s working pattern and on his rapidly advancing years was considerable. With only a degree of humour he wrote to his friend Charles Turner of the Munro equestrian:

It is done!!! & well done!!! Had it lasted a few days longer it would have done for me! I hope to meet man and horse at East India Dock today.

The general pattern for commissioning large public sculpture for outdoor locations was to raise public enthusiasm through the work of an organizing committee, and then funds from subscription. The statues of George IV in Brighton and Edinburgh were part-funded in this way. The campaign for the Duke of Wellington statue for the City of London was run like a military campaign by a group led by four of Wellington’s former generals, Beresford, Combermere, Hardinge and Hill, who intended it to be sited near London Bridge. The many subscribers included Sir Thomas Baring (20 guineas), Sir Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel (£10 each), Lord Egremont (£20), John Murray (1 guinea), Sir John Rennie (10 guineas), John James Ruskin, the father of the critic John Ruskin (10 guineas), and Sir Robert Peel (20 guineas). At the dinner given by the Lord Mayor to celebrate the progress of the Wellington statue, Chantrey sat next to the journalist William Jerdan, who became excited when the Duke, ‘about half-a-dozen chairs [away]’, gave him a nod of recognition, ‘a very rare compliment’, as Jerdan acknowledged. This gave Chantrey the opportunity to digress to Jerdan on the

singular configuration of the Duke’s ear, which he, as an artist, modelling his head, had naturally observed; it was almost flat, and destitute of the shell-like involutions which are the usual attributes of the organ.

So the Duke of Wellington had a curious ear, as well as a splendid nose.

Chantrey’s fame and fortune rested in great part on James Watt, and not only through his well-distributed busts of the engineer. Watt, offering a further dimension of influence on civilization beyond the invention and development of the mere steam-engine, followed his unbridled ingenuity to the invention of a machine for copying sculpture – equipment which would also be able to scale a sculpture up or down, or indeed to copy or scale any suitable object and carve it from a stone or plaster block. The human benefits of this, in comparison with those of the steam-engine, might be small, but they are by no means negligible. Image bore authority and transmitted purpose. As Michael Faraday showed with his contemporary explorations of improvements in two-dimensional image reproduction through steel-plate engraving, lithography and photography, the end consequence of reproduction was better education for all. Watt’s sculpture-copying machine, developed in his retirement and now in the Science Museum, London, looks like a small guillotine, with a high rectangular framework at one end, a central ‘bench’ supporting the locating and drilling machinery, and a fly-wheel at the far end to transmit the pedal power to the drill. Picking up the dimensions of the sculpture to be copied – this is clamped under the ‘guillotine’ – is a pointer that measures variation in depth, transferring these to the raw block by means of a ball-headed drill which grinds down to the level of the tip of the nose or the curve of the cheek. Thus infinite changes in gradient can be echoed from original to copy, amidst clouds of plaster or marble dust, and much clanking and clattering as the operator works the pedals. Detail, particularly in small objects, was initially poor. This was an ingenious and extraordinary piece of machinery, but how practical it was outside the potting shed is debatable. The simplest way of copying sculpture mechanically, rather than by taking casts, was not with Watt’s rattling contraption, but with a static pointing machine. As used by Chantrey, this measured sample depths, for example between the bust’s nose and the back of the head, and transferred them by means of rigid connecting bars to the new block, the copyist cutting the material back to the depth indicated.

Francis Chantrey ended his life a rich man, famed and lauded, his works spread out across the British Isles and washing up onto the shores of empire. His widow gave his collection of studio plasters to the University of Oxford, to be housed in C. R. Cockerell’s new building for the Ashmolean Museum, where many of them are now dramatically displayed row upon row up a staircase wall – Oxford’s ancestor gods. Mary Anne Chantrey also passed on the Chantrey Bequest, a capital sum bequeathed to the Royal Academy to buy works of art for the nation. It continues to do so. Nollekens before him made money hand over fist, but his frugality set him apart as something of a figure of fun, and he died in 1823 worth £200,000 (then) and owning ‘several London houses’. Flaxman worked to the end, and although he left only a modest sum, he remained buoyant, inspired and productive. His accumulated collection of plaster casts and working models, valued with ‘stock in trade of unworked marble’ for legacy duty by James Christie at £469, was presented in 1847 by Maria Denman, his sister-in-law, to University College, London, where they are handsomely displayed to this day. His posthumous sale of books and engravings raised £300.18s.11d.

It is apparent that Nollekens, Flaxman and Chantrey handled their business affairs supremely well. They knew how to delegate and oversee, and inspired the loyalty of their staff by giving them interesting and challenging occupation. They also gave their assistants the training they needed to enter the mid-nineteenth century with their eyes open and the extra skills they required to manage the additional pressures of improved mechanization and mass production. Other early nineteenth-century sculptors were not so clever. Charles Rossi had all the opportunities of his contemporaries – training in London with the Italian sculptor Giovanni Battista Locatelli, attending the Royal Academy Schools, winning the three-year travelling scholarship to Rome, exhibiting to some acclaim at the Academy – but despite receiving more commissions from the Committee of Taste for monuments in St Paul’s Cathedral than Flaxman, Banks or Westmacott, and becoming sculptor to the Prince of Wales, later George IV, and to William IV, he ‘bequeathed to his family nothing but his fame’, and died the recipient of a charitable Royal Academy pension. His most widely seen works – passed by millions, noticed by many – are the caryatid figures, copied from the Erechtheum in Athens, outside St Pancras Church on Marylebone Road, London. Rossi’s difficulties seem to have stemmed from his practice of being less than generous in payment to his assistants, and thus getting inferior work from them: ‘rather Mason’s work than that of a Sculptor’, as Flaxman described one of his monuments in St Paul’s to Farington. The diarist noticed also that ‘Rossi . . . by employing ordinary men at low wages, got much money by it, but had greatly suffered in reputation.’ He also had sixteen children by two wives and became the landlord to Benjamin Robert Haydon, two factors neither of which would have been easy financial burdens to carry.

The first half of the nineteenth century was a golden age for sculpture in Britain. The following generation did not find the climate quite so invigorating. When Thomas Woolner attempted to become an Associate of the Royal Academy, he suffered the chill of competition, as he described to his influential friend, the writer Frederick Stephens:

I am glad [Solomon] Hart [the painter] gushed about my works for he may vote for me if I want to get into the Academy . . . What do you think? Of course I should not get a single sculptor vote, no sculptor ever votes for another sculptor. My chance would be wholly with the painters, and as you know many of that ilk you might take soundings for me and see what my chance might be when you are talking [to] any of them from time to time.

Woolner was going to work extremely hard to get into the Academy, as Stephens no doubt gathered. He had managed in 1866 to land a commission for a statue of Gladstone for Oxford, and listed the painters William Creswick, Daniel Maclise and Richard Redgrave as supporters for his Royal Academy campaign. Also:

I think Westmacott well disposed, and with a good energetic hint from some one I should not be surprized if he turned towards my claims favourably. I will write and ask him to come and look at Gladstone . . . I shall have to work vigorously among the painters to overcome the virulent opposition of the sculptors, who all hate me like poison, tho’ I never had a personal quarrel or quarrel of any kind with one of them in my life; but they cannot stand any one having a reputation for a higher kind of work than they have themselves.

Woolner had a combative temperament, volatile and impulsive. He was eventually elected ARA, but not until 1871. Thinking he could not succeed as a sculptor in England, he emigrated with his new wife and child to Australia in 1852 – the family is the subject of Ford Madox Brown’s painting The Last of England – but came back a year later. Woolner was not a contented man. He pointed out to Stephens:

Several sculptors, myself among them, have been underpaid for our statues. They first gave the sculptors £1200, then the price was reduced to £1000, then to £800: and this for 7 ft figures; the consequence being a heavy loss to the sculptor. In my own case in order to be able to do it at all I had to spread the work over 5 years.

What could be done to get these several sculptors justice; so that if they should not receive the original sum of £1200 (a small sum really for the work) they ought to have made up to them £200 each to make it up to the middle sum.

Think this over as a public duty like a good fellow and see if you can help to do a bit of sculptural justice. A few such government commissions would lodge in gaol or bankruptcy court.

One of Woolner’s commissions, to be sited in Parliament Square in 1876, was for a figure of Lord Palmerston. Woolner wrote to Stephens when the piece was still in the making to ask him to mention the way he was treating Palmerston’s clothes, in particular that he was dispensing with the subject’s stick-up shirt collar. Such details attracted controversy. There is no reason why a sculptor should be slavish: sculpture, he added, ‘is the art of compromise’.