Oliver Cromwell
after Joseph Wilton (London 1722 - Wanstead 1803)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
circa 1850 - 1900
Materials
Marble
Measurements
700 x 620 mm
Place of origin
United Kingdom
Order this imageCollection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 516575
Summary
Marble, Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), after Joseph Wilton (1722-1803), c. 1850-1900. A marble bust after Joseph Wilton, depicting Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England from 1653 until his death. Cromwell is shown looking sharply to his right and wearing armour, with lions head pauldrons (shoulder pieces) and a Medusa head in the centre of the breastplate; a broad strap for his sword runs over the right shoulder and at his neck is a knotted scarf that is twisted slightly to his right. He is moustachioed and with long hair that falls to his shoulders. Mounted on a circular marble socle.
Full description
Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) was a minor landowner who became Member of Parliament for Cambridge and a strong supporter of the Parliamentary side during the Civil War, which resulted from a long struggle for power between King Charles I (1600-49) and Parliament and was fought, mainly in England, between 1642 and 1649. Cromwell proved himself a gifted leader and strategist, who led the Parliamentary cavalry to a decisive victory at the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, then scoring another key victory over the Royalist forces at the Battle of Preston in 1648. Cromwell was one of the 59 signatories to the warrant authorising the execution of King Charles I in January 1649. Cromwell subsequently rejected Parliament’s offer of the Crown, but In 1653 accepted appointment as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, a post which he held until his death. In eighteenth-century Britain there was a strong demand for portraits of figures from British history, which resulted in the creation of numerous historicising sculpted portrait busts. Joseph Wilton, who trained in Paris and in Rome, returning to Britain in 1755, exhibited busts of Oliver Cromwell at exhibitions of the Society of Artists in 1761, (no. 168, a bust ‘in marble of Oliver Cromwell’) and in 1768 (no. 221, a bust of ‘Oliver Cromwell, from the noted cast of his face, preserved in the Great Duke’s Gallery at Florence’) (Algernon Graves, The Society of Artists of Great Britain 1760-1791. The Free Society of Artists 1761-1783, London 1907, pp. 283-84). Despite his ambiguous role in recent British history, Cromwell seems to have been as a popular an historical figure as any, so that Wilton was just one of a number of sculptors who depicted him, others including John Michael Rysbrack (terracotta version in National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, inv.no. SCU0014), Francis Harwood (marble version in Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Nicholas Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum. 1540 to the Present Day, 3 vols., Oxford 1992, no. 558; another sold Christie’s London 4 December 2018, lot 69) and Louis-François Roubiliac (terracotta version in British Museum, inv.no. 1762,0528.7; Aileen Dawson, Portrait Sculpture. A catalogue of the British Museum collection c. 1675-1975, London 1999, no. 23). As stated in the 1768 Society of Artists catalogue, Wilton is said to have used for his likeness of the Protector the cast of Cromwell’s death mask, in tinted plaster with glass eyes, which was recorded in 1738 in the Medici collections in Florence and is today in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello (David Piper, ‘The contemporary Portraits of Oliver Cromwell’, The Walpole Society, Vol. 34 (1952-1954), pp. 27-41, pp. 36-37, PL. XIII). The Florence model is likely to be a cast of one of the masks made for the effigies of Cromwell which were displayed in Westminster Abbey until the Restoration, when they were destroyed. Allan Cunningham in his Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (London 1830, Vol. III, pp. 76-77) gave rather qualified praise to Wilton’s image of Cromwell: ‘There is an air of nature and reality in the portrait of Cromwell; but it is coarse – even ferocious: such vulgarity of looks is at odds with all the descriptions I have read, and with the famous Florence mask of the usurper’s face, whence Wilton professed to have copied his features.’ However later commentators have regarded Wilton’s image of the Protector more positively, as one of the most dynamic eighteenth-century portraits of historical figures. Several versions of Wilton’s bust survive. The prime version seems to be the marble in the Victoria & Albert Museum, signed and dated 1762 (Diane Bilbey and Marjorie Trusted, British Sculpture 1470 to 2000. A Concise Catalogue of the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London 2002, no. 220). The V&A also has a terracotta version (Bilbey and Trusted, no. 219), whilst there is another signed version in the Government Art Collection (Inv. GAC 274), and an unsigned example in the Cromwell Museum, Huntingdon. The Anglesey Abbey bust is on an identical circular marble socle to the version in the Cromwell Museum, which is now considered to be a nineteenth-century copy. Much inferior in its handling to the marble in the V&A, it too is most likely to be a later copy. Jeremy Warren 2019
Provenance
Acquired by Urban Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966) before 1940; Identifiable in the Anglesey Abbey inventory, 1940, p. 26, Entrance Hall, valued at £60; bequeathed to the National Trust by Lord Fairhaven with the house and the rest of the contents.
Credit line
Anglesey Abbey, The Fairhaven Collection (The National Trust)
Makers and roles
after Joseph Wilton (London 1722 - Wanstead 1803), sculptor
References
'Anglesey Abbey, Lode, Cambridgeshire. An Inventory and Valuation of Furniture, Books, Ornamental Items & Household Effects .. prepared for Insurance Purposes’, Turner, Lord and Ransom, April 1940, p. 26. Christie, Manson & Woods 1971: The National Trust, Anglesey Abbey, Cambridge. Inventory: Furniture, Textiles, Porcelain, Bronzes, Sculpture and Garden Ornaments’, 1971, p. 142, Entrance Hall.