Summary

Sculpture, marble; portrait bust of William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806); workshop of Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823); c. 1806-1815. A portrait bust of William Pitt the Younger, the statesman who became, late in 1783, at the age of 24, Britain’s youngest ever Prime Minister. A great public speaker and a highly able administrator, Pitt was Prime Minister through the turbulent times of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. He also engineered the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland in 1801. Based on a death mask, this was Joseph Nollekens’ most successful portrait, with numerous replicas being made in his workshop, of which this is one.

Full description

A marble portrait bust of William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806), made in the workshop of Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823), showing the subject facing slightly to his right, his long sharp nose prominent, dressed in a loose toga-like drape. On a turned white marble socle, the bust displayed on a scagliola half-column. William Pitt the Younger was one of the greatest Prime Ministers in the history of Great Britain and Ireland, taking up office in December 1783 at the age of just 24, which makes him the youngest ever person to occupy the office. He was also one of the most long-serving, remaining in post during two separate terms for a total of nearly nineteen years. Pitt was in office as Prime Minister during some of the most dangerous and turbulent times in the country’s history, notably the latter years of the wars of American independence, the French revolution from 1789, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and the outbreak of war in Europe. In the aftermath of the 1798 uprising, which he repressed with severity, Pitt decided that enforcing political union of Ireland with Great Britain would be the best means by which to reduce the threat of Irish support for France, but also was necessary if the long-term tensions between Ireland and Britain were to be addressed. However, his attempt to include the major reform of Catholic emancipation within the 1800 Act of Union was prevented by King George III. Pitt was a brilliant orator and also a superb administrator, who brought about numerous reforms to public administration, modernising the country in many ways. He was a severe man, as Nollekens’ portrait shows, dedicated to his work, unmarried and with few friends. This persona meant that Pitt was generally much less popular with the public than his efforts on its behalf might have merited. Joseph Nollekens was born into a family of artists from Antwerp that had settled in London. As a young man, he was apprenticed to Peter Scheemakers (1691-1781) before travelling to Rome, where he lived for some ten years from 1760. On his return to Britain, Nollekens became one of the most successful sculptors of the day, making many church monuments, but also large numbers of portraits. The finest portrait sculptor working in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Nollekens had a remarkable ability to create lively likenesses in which the characters of the subject are strongly expressed, as can be seen in his 1809 bust of Viscount Castlereagh at Mount Stewart (NT 1220131). Nollekens’ portrait of William Pitt is a posthumous likeness, based on a death mask. The sculptor’s biographer, J.T. Smith, whose book is an exercise in denigration of his former friend, wrote that Pitt refused ever to sit to the sculptor for his portrait, after Nollekens had supposedly gone over the head of the Prime Minister directly to King George III, to petition the king for the epitaph for Nollekens’ monument to the three Captains in Westminster Abbey (Whinney 1988, p. 295). According to Smith, it was the sculptor’s practice to scour the newspapers for notices of deaths and then, for those individuals he thought might merit commemoration, to hurry to take a death mask, a plaster model made from taking a mould of the dead individual’s face. This he did after William Pitt’s death in January 1806, hurrying to the dead man’s house on Putney Heath and observing to his assistant Sebastian Gahagan on the coach back to the centre of town that ‘I would not take fifty guineas for that mask, I can tell ye.’ (Nollekens and his Times, I, p. 368). Indeed, the portrait of William Pitt became Joseph Nollekens’ most successful work commercially, along with his portrait bust of the reformer Charles James Fox. When making his sculpted portrait, Nollekens had the assistance not only of the death mask but of the painted portrait of Pitt by John Hoppner (Farington 1804, VII, pp. 2705-06). In September 1806, Joseph Farington recorded a conversation with Nollekens in which the sculptor explained that he had thus far received 35 orders for copies in marble of his bust and a long list of orders for casts. However, he would not permit any casts to be made for at least twelve months, as ‘it wd. soon make the Busts so common as to be sold as 5s. a piece’. (19th September 1806; Farington 1804, VIII, p. 2853). By June 1807 he had received orders for 52 marble versions (Farington 1804, VIII, p. 3059). Nollekens’ most significant portrayal of Pitt was the full-length statue in Senate House, Cambridge, whilst Nollekens and his workshop reportedly produced no fewer than 74 replicas of the portrait bust, which were sold for 120 guineas (£126) each, as well as around 600 plaster casts, which cost six guineas (£6 6s.) (Nollekens and his Times, I, p. 371). The Argory bust, which is competently carved, seems very likely to have been one of the many versions of this popular image made in Nollekens' workshop. The coldness of William Pitt’s character comes through but, at the same time, the noble stoicism of a man who bore the burdens of governing for so many years. The question of the accuracy of the likeness of William Pitt in the portraits made of him seems to have much preoccupied artists in London in the years after Pitt’s death, to judge from the number of times it crops up in Joseph Farington’s diary. On 6th June 1807, for example, he went with the architect George Dance (1741-1825) and two others to Nollekens’ studio to view the bust of William Pitt: ‘On our coming away Dance told me that He thought the Bust of Mr. Pitt had much of his air & look, but it seemed to Him not to be true to the proportions of Mr. Pitt’s head, the upper part of the head being too small, & the nose not the true form. He added that having conversed with Mr. Pitt He had a full recollection of him & noticed that His look, the peculiar look of his eyes had something in it, when speaking upon business, that “had more of spirit than flesh in it.” On the whole, however, He thought this Bust the best representation of him.’ (Farington 1804, VIII, p. 3059). A few weeks later, Dance again criticized Nollekens’ portrait but also the painted likeness by Sir Thomas Lawrence, whilst admitting that ‘they are both sufficiently like Him to give to posterity a good idea of what sort of man He was in appearance; and that likenesses which had as much resembled Cicero, Shakespeare & c. wd. now be very valuable indeed.’ (20 July 1807; Farington 1804, p. 3092). The painter Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), when asked his opinion of Nollekens’ portrait, replied that ‘there was great power expressed in it abt. the forehead, and Haughtiness, in the mouth; that perseverance & obstinacy, were strongly manifested.’ (20 July 1807; Farington 1804, p. 3093). When he spoke to Joseph Farington in September 1806, Nollekens told him that it would take four years to finish the 35 copies of his bust that had been ordered. Given that he eventually made more than twice that number, the production of replicas is likely to have occupied him for much of the remainder of his life. An example in the Government Art Collection is dated 1813 (Inv. 0/226). There are no fewer than eight other versions of Nollekens’ portrait in National Trust collections, most of them likely to be products of Nollekens’ workshop: Attingham Park (NT 609427); Belton House (NT 436765); Felbrigg Hall (NT 1401969); Ickworth (NT 852214 and NT 852227); Petworth (NT 486398); Tatton Park (NT 1298520); The Vyne (NT 719600). The bust of William Pitt was formerly at Drumhill House, together with a bust of Viscount Castlereagh (NT 565211). Both came to the Argory with the contents of Drumsill in 1916. Their display as a pair in the West Hall probably reflects the way they were shown at Drumsill; and their pairing the fact that both men were instrumental in enabling the 1801 Act of Union's passage through Parliament. Jeremy Warren November 2022