Summary

Marble, Bacchus with panther, Italian (Roman) School, c. 1730, with ancient Roman fragments. A colossal marble statue of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, after the Praxitelean Apollo Lykeios type. The god standing in contrapposto, nude, save for a hide tied across the torso over proper left shoulder. He leans against a vine-entwined tree trunk with his proper left elbow and holds a bunch of grapes in the proper left hand. The proper right arm is raised, the forearm resting on the top of the head covered with long curling locks. A panther seated is seated by the tree trunk and looks up at Bacchus with its proper right forepaw raised. On an integral marble base.

Full description

Purchased in Rome as a trophy of the Grand Tour, this ‘antique’ statue of Bacchus is in fact an eighteenth-century pastiche reconstituted from Roman fragments. Such statues were regularly sold to British collectors in Italy as true antiquities. Analysis of the figure has revealed that the life-size head, disproportionate to the over-life size body, probably came from a statue of a Roman goddess and was re-sculpted to be male. Stone was added to the cheeks, the lips thinned, and the ear lobes originally pierced suggesting that earrings would have once hung from them. The torso and limbs are eighteenth century, but the left foot, the lower section of the tree trunk, and the hindquarters and front left paw of the panther, though heavily reworked and polished, are probably ancient Roman. The statue follows a Dionysus/Bacchus type popular in the Hellenistic and Roman periods that was based on the Apollo Lykeios. The Lycean formula shows Apollo in pronounced contrapposto, leaning on a support, his right forearm resting on top of his head. The most famous example of the type is Apollino in the Uffizi, Florence. As Hellenistic and Roman depictions of the youthful Dionysus/Bacchus were not easily distinguished from those of Apollo, the Lycean stance was reproduced in sculptures like the Ludovisi Dionysus (National Roman Museum, Palazzo Altemps), the Dionysus of Cyrene (inv.no. 14.237) and statues of the god in the Louvre (inv.no. MA 622 and MA 87), Vatican (inv. no. 1375, Musei Vaticani, Galleria Chiaramonti) and other collections. This colossal Bacchus has a provenance of equal proportion, having entered and exited a succession of significant British collections to the extent that it has been nicknamed ‘Bacchus the wanderer’. First bought in Rome by Charles Hamilton (1704-86) in around 1732-35, upon its arrival in Britain the oversize statue immediately garnered attention, not least of all because of its price. It was said to have cost Hamilton £2000, equating to over £235,000 in today’s money and making the statue one of the most expensive pieces of classical sculpture to have been imported into Britain in the eighteenth century (Laing 2008, p. 22). The first contemporary reference to it is by Joseph Spence (1699-1768) who reveals that Hamilton: ‘has been twice in Italy, first at the Jubilee for ’25, and afterwards, in ’32…[he] Has lived 22 months in Rome (palace in the Corso) and kept company with the nobility of the country. Bought his noble Bacchus of one of them with a promise of secrecy. Would not part with it for its weight in gold – the best on this side of the Alps (he remarked) twice or thrice.’ (Spence in Osborn 1966, vol.I, p. 418, no. 1103) According to Spence’s account the statue came from an Italian nobleman’s collection and was bought as a true and rare antiquity. However, no records of an excavation of an equivalent antique Bacchus exist – the unearthing of a relatively complete statue surely would have been documented – nor has a description of an equivalent statue been found in any Italian inventory. Alastair Laing has suggested that Hamilton himself ‘may not have been such an innocent’ in all this, and that he may have bought Bacchus from a less reputable source with the intention of selling it in Britain, with an inflated pedigree and price tag (Laing 2008, p. 22). Laing points out that Hamilton, as the ninth son of the Earl of Abercorn, was unlikely to have been very wealthy, and may have boosted his income by trading in works of art with the dealer Arthur Pond, in whose journal Hamilton is associated with 18 transactions, some of them in the capacity of shipping agent (Laing 2008, p. 22 and Lucy Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond, New Haven and London 1983, pp. 44, 112, 174 no. 48). Bacchus was brought from Rome to Hamilton’s seat of Painshill in Cobham and some decades later erected a purpose-built temple to house it. The temple notwithstanding, Hamilton still tried to sell the statue in 1765, first offering it to the Whig politician Charles James Fox who refused it, and later to Robert Clive, as a ‘most capital Grecian Statue entire seven feet four inches high, a little taller than the Apollo Belvedere’. The Greek attribution may have been an attempt to enhance its significance, however it was not until the publication of Winckelmann’s Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (in German 1755, in English 1765, 1767) that collectors began to understand the difference between ancient Greek sculpture and Roman replicas. The Painshill Bacchus was praised by a series of noted visitors from Henry Hoare the Magnificent to William Gilpin who called it ‘one of the best antiques perhaps in England’ (Michael Symes, William Gilpin at Painshill, 1994, pp. 32 & 34). By contrast, the French writer Jacques Cambry (1749-1807) thought it an ugly hybrid: ‘the colossal statue of Bacchus, which I am sorry to see has been disfigured by the barbarity of some Englishman, who has not been ashamed to mix in his marble, badly trimmed, with the marble which was animated by an ancient Greek; which forces your eye to run over the lines he has traced, and prevents you from following those which, without his clumsiness, the Antique would indicate to a practised eye’. (Jacques de Cambry, Promenades d'automne en Angleterre, Paris 1791, pp. 140-1) In 1773 Painshill was sold by Hamilton to settle debts and the estate was purchased in its entirety by Benjamin Bond Hopkins (1747-94). Bacchus remained there until 1797 when Hopkins’ executors auctioned the Painshill collection at Christie’s. Valued ‘upwards of £2000’, bidding ended at 400 guineas and the statue was bought by Joseph Nollekens on behalf of the hedonist art collector William Beckford (1760-1844), great-nephew of Charles Hamilton. It was installed in the Great Dining Room at Fonthill Splendens until 1807, when the property was demolished to make way for ‘Beckford’s Folly’ Fonthill Abbey, an elaborate neo-Gothic edifice with glittering interiors against which Bacchus may have looked odd. The statue was sold in August 1807 to a ‘Mr Abbott for 210 guineas’ (Laing 2008, p. 27, originally quoted in the Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 7 September 1807). Abbott was the claims adjuster for the MP and landowner Thomas Johnes (1748-1816) and appears to have been engaged by Johnes, whose house Hafod had the same year been ravaged by fire, to bid for the statue and other furnishings on his behalf. In 1815 a ‘grand heroic figure of Bacchus, Grecian sculpture’ is described as standing in the entrance to the recently-reconstructed Hafod (Thomas Rees, Beauties of England and Wales, 1815, p.423). After Johnes’ death in 1816 the estate was embroiled in lawsuits until 1833 when it was finally purchased by the 4th Duke of Newcastle. From Cardiganshire Bacchus was sent to London to be sold by Christie’s, the statue ‘conveyed to Shrewsbury’ in 1839 from Aberystwyth by the Duke’s clerk of works, ‘and thence by Crowley & Co’s Canal Boats to London’. There is no known record of its sale or subsequent purchase so it may have been sold by private treaty. The statue’s next recorded location was Ashridge, seat of the Earls of Bridgewater until 1848 when the estate passed to the Earls Brownlow. Legal transfer of the estates and titles did not happen until August 1853, when the then Earl, John William Spencer Egerton-Cust (1842-67), was just twelve years old. It is likely that the statue was purchased a few years hence when Lady Marian Alford, the Earl’s mother, created the pleasure grounds at Ashridge in 1857 and mounted Bacchus as a garden ornament. The ‘peregrinations’ of Bacchus finally came to an end when Ashridge sold in 1928 and was purchased by Urban Hanlon Broughton (1857-1929), the father of Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896–1966) of Anglesey Abbey. Urban Broughton donated Ashridge to the Conservative Party and died the following year. The contents of the estate were auctioned off by Perry & Phillips in October 1928, the statue of Bacchus catalogued simply as ‘Large statue of a man’, ‘8ft. 6in. high’ with ‘lion’, ‘extreme size’. Unrecognised, it sold for £13 and soon came into the hands of Thomas Crowther, the favoured statuary dealer of the 1st Lord Fairhaven. Presumably in memory of his father’s connection to Ashridge, on 23 September 1928 Lord Fairhaven purchased from Crowther the statue of Bacchus along with a ‘Stone Vase from Astridge [sic] Park’ (NT 516653) and three stone figures of saints (NT 516613-16, mounting Bacchus on the South Lawn of Anglesey Abbey (Roper 1964, p. 40, pl. 13b) Alice Rylance-Watson 2020