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No. IX.

JOSEPH NOLLEKENS, Esq., R.A.

THE late Mr. Nollekens' life was of such a nature, that if adequate materials for drawing it up could be found, it would no doubt present many amusing, and some not unsalutary details. He was any thing but a common man. He had vanquished difficulties which often discourage persons, not of less genius, but of less persevering courage. He struck out his own path to fame; and he did more, came propensities to licentious enjoyment which were stronger than those of most men, and which seemed at one period of his life to have almost mastered his good resolves.

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Mr. Nollekens was born in Dean-street, Soho, on the 22d of August, 1737, of foreign parents; his father being a native of Antwerp, and his mother a Frenchwoman. In Lord Orford's "Anecdotes of Painting," there is a particular account of his father, Joseph Francis Nollekens; who was an artist of more ingenuity than original talent, and who came over to England very young, and studied painting under Tillemans. He afterwards copied Watteau; and imitated him so closely, that several of his pictures, still in existence, are scarcely distinguishable from those of that celebrated artist. Mr. Nollekens' father died at forty-two years of age, when his son'Joseph was about five years old, leaving a widow and ten children, with little or no provision; his mother soon afterwards married a person of the name of Williams, an inferior statuary, who modelled for the Chelsea porcelain manufactory; and who went to Flanders, where he died; his widow surviving him four or five years.

Mr. Nollekens' juvenile productions gave but little earnest of his subsequent fame. At eleven years of age he was placed under Mr. Peter Scheemaker, the most eminent sculptor then in England, and the mediocrity of whose talent the monuments of Dr. Chamberlain, and of Shakspeare, in Westminster Abbey, sufficiently attest. Under this artist, however, who was then about seventy-two years of age, young Nollekens learned to perform the more laborious and mechanical parts of his profession. The drudgery of the tasks to which he was doomed, and the slender hopes held out to his ambition, seem to have aided his natural inclination for dissipation; and the tradition is, that his pleasures were as coarse and excessive as his fate appeared to be unpromising. The inconvenience and necessity which resulted from this unlimited indulgence, at length brought him back to habits of temperance and industry. He began to apply himself diligently to the study of the works of the ancients; particularly at the Duke of Richmond's rooms at Whitehall, where his Grace, with a laudable anxiety for the progress of the fine arts in this country, had collected abundance of very fine casts from the principal antique statutes. Our tyro's efforts were rewarded, in the years 1759 and 1760, by premiums from the Society of Arts for a drawing from the Bacchus of Michael Angelo, and a clay model of his own composition of Jephthah's Vow. In 1762 he also gained the principal prize for a basso relievo in marble, the subject of which, we believe, was the visit of the Angels to Abraham. Feeling that England was not the place in which he could expect to obtain much professional knowledge, and having by this time saved a sufficient sum of money to enable him to prosecute his studies in Italy, he repaired to Rome, desirous of qualifying himself for what was then the summit of his ambition, the situation of assistant to Mr. Wilton, the sculptor; afterwards for many years keeper of the Royal Academy. At Rome, Mr. Nollekens profited by the instructions of Cavaceppi, a man of considerable note, who behaved very kindly to him, not only by giving him the information and advice of which he stood

so much in need, but by introducing him to the society of the artists and literati of Rome. Mr. Nollekens' progress in his art now became very rapid, and he soon had the honour of receiving a gold medal from the Roman Academy of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture; being the first premium ever adjudged by that Academy to an English sculptor.

With that acuteness which distinguished him through life, Mr. Nollekens quickly discovered that the ignorance and vanity of the greater part of the Englishmen who then visited Rome might be turned to good account; and he became a dealer in antiques, and in the modern productions of Roman art. Many reasons concurred to make his assistance sought both by the needy Italian artists, and by the wealthy English nobility; and he, at once, improved his fortune, gave general satisfaction to his clients of all descriptions, and steadily prosecuted his professional studies.

During a residence of nearly nine years at Rome, the company of Mr. Nollekens was much solicited by his countrymen; who found in his research and intelligence resources which were highly serviceable to them. In consequence, he made many, and valuable friends, who, on his return home, kept up his importance in England as they had done on the Continent. Some of his best busts were executed at Rome; the only one known of Sterne, and a very fine one of Garrick, both formerly in the possession of the late Lord Yarborough (who had the largest collection existing of Mr. Nollekens' works), and above all, the justly celebrated head of Mr. Stephen Fox when an old man, in the possession of Lord Holland, are specimens of his ability at that period of his life. It may be doubted whether Mr. Nollekens ever excelled the last-mentioned work. And yet at that time his price for a bust was only twelve guineas; although it was afterwards gradually increased to a hundred.

There are some stories told of Mr. Nollekens and of Barry the painter, who was at Rome with him, which seem to imply that, although his good sense restrained the former from

availing himself to excess of the means of indulgence then placed within his reach, his moderation was not occasioned by any change in his early inclinations; and was therefore the more creditable to him.

Mr. Nollekens, who had taken out with him to Italy only about two hundred pounds, brought back above sixteen hundred. Soon after his arrival in England (which was on Christmas Eve, 1770), he married the youngest daughter of Mr. Justice Welch, with whom he received a very handsome portion. Mr. Justice Welch is frequently mentioned in Boswell's "Life of Dr. Johnson." The great moralist, it is even said, felt a tender attachment for this very lady; who had the reputation of being a blue-stocking, and was a kind of toast among the literary men of her era. Mr. Nollekens now took up his abode in Mortimer-street, Cavendish Square, and speedily acquired the celebrity and employment to which his pre-eminent merit, as compared with the sculptors of that day, justly entitled him. For a long series of years, he was most extensively and liberally patronized, particularly by his late Majesty, with whom he was a great favourite; a circumstance highly to his honour, for no man was a sounder judge of character than George the Third.

The chisel of Mr. Nollekens was chiefly distinguished by its careful and accurate imitation of nature, and by the total absence of that peculiarity of style called manner. Although he must always have borne strongly in remembrance the choicest relics of Greek sculpture, and had himself made drawings of all the most celebrated antique statues both at home and abroad, they seem to have had little influence in the formation of his taste. His "Venus with the Sandal," upon which he was employed at intervals for above twenty years, is esteemed his chef-d'œuvre. His monument to Mrs. Howard is also a very fine piece of sculpture. But it seems to be generally admitted that his professional reputation must principally rest on his busts. They cannot be surpassed for correctness; and the country is indebted to him for the per

petuation of the features of many men of whom England will be for ever proud.

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It was probably owing to the deficiencies of his education, and to the force of early habits, that Mr. Nollekens could never boast of much refinement in manners. On the contrary, indeed, although he was very much respected by all who were on intimate terms with him, the simplicity of his deportment, and the total absence of any attention to the ordinary usages of polished life, afforded them frequent subjects of amusement. As a specimen of his naïveté, it is related of him, that, in spite of the previous admonition of his friends, he would go up to his present Majesty, when Prince of Wales, take him familiarly by the button, like an every-day acquaintance, ask him "how his father did," and express pleasure at hearing the King was well; adding, Aye, aye! when he's gone, we shall never get such another." Once when his late Majesty was sitting to him for a bust, he fairly stuck one point of a pair of compasses in the King's nose, in ascertaining the distance between that and the upper lip. His Majesty, with his accustomed good nature, laughed heartily at meeting with a person apparently insensible of the interval which separated a monarch from the rest of the world. As for Mr. Nollekens, he handled kings and noblemen as if they were common folks; and had no other notion but that it was his business, when employed upon a bust, to set about it in the regular way, and to make the best thing of it that he possibly could; conceiving that one man's head differed from another's only as it was a better or a worse subject for modelling. There was something in this plainness and simplicity that savoured perhaps of the hardness and dryness of his art, and of his own peculiar severity of execution; for Mr. Nollekens was no flatterer. Strict truth was always his aim. An old friend and brotherartist, not long before his death, was complimenting him on his acknowledged superiority when he was in his prime.

"You made the best busts of any body." "I don't know