Portrait bust of Walter McGeough Bond (1790-1866)
Joseph Watkins (1838 - 1871)
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
1866
Materials
Plaster
Measurements
800 x 584 mm
Place of origin
Dublin
Order this imageCollection
The Argory, County Armagh
NT 565238
Summary
Sculpture, plaster; Portrait bust of Walter McGeough Bond (1790-1866); Joseph Watkins, RHA (1838-1871); 1866. A portrait bust of the builder of the Argory, Walter McGeough Bond, made in the last year of the sitter’s life, depicting him heavily bearded and wearing a loose cloak.
Full description
A portrait bust in plaster of Walter McGeough Bond (1790-1866), made by Joseph Watkins, RHA (1838-1871) in 1866. The sitter is depicted heavily bearded, looking to his right, dressed in a loose drape. On a turned socle, also in plaster. Walter McGeough Bond (1790-1866), the builder of the Argory, was an active patron of sculptors throughout his life. As a young man, he commissioned his portrait from the then promising young sculptor William Behnes (NT 565243), as well as several works from the Irish sculptor Thomas Kirk (NT 565241, 565244, 565245). His portrait by the Dublin-based sculptor Joseph Watkins was however made at the very end of his life. Showing him in a patriarchal mode, now balding, jowly and with a massive beard, it contrasts strongly with Behnes’s portrait of 40 years earlier. There are three versions of this sculpture at the Argory, the prime version in marble (NT 565242) and two versions in plaster (the other NT 566418). Joseph Watkins trained mostly in Dublin at the Dublin Society’s schools, but spent a period as a young man in Rome during the mid 1860s, before returning to Dublin, where he settled. In the few years before his early death in 1871, Joseph Watkins exhibited both at the Royal Hibernian Academy and the Royal Academy in London. He seems to have been particularly successful and prolific as a portrait sculptor, although it was suggested after his death that his last years had been clouded by disappointment. After his death, friends and patrons had to club together to create a fund for the support of the sculptor’s widow and children. The portrait of Walter McGeough Bond is one of the earliest works by Joseph Watkins to survive. According to Walter Strickland, Watkins was in Rome between 1865 and 1867, but the inscription on the busts at the Argory, stating that they were made in 1866 in Dublin, would indicate that he had returned to Ireland in that year. The marble version was exhibited after the sitter’s death at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1868, as ‘The late McGeough Bond, Esq., Armagh’ (no. 414). Jeremy Warren November 2022
Provenance
Commissioned by the sitter; by descent; given by Walter McGeough Bond (1908-86), in 1979.
Marks and inscriptions
Back of bust: : JOSEPH WATKINS Sc. / DUBLIN. 1866.
Makers and roles
Joseph Watkins (1838 - 1871), sculptor
References
Strickland 1913: W. G. Strickland, Dictionary of Irish Artists, 2 vols.1913, II, pp. 505-07. Stewart 1985-87: Ann M. Stewart, Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts: Index of exhibitors and their works 1826-1979, 3 vols., Dublin 1985-1987, III, p. 254, 1868, no. 414. Murphy 2014: Paula Murphy, ed., Art and Architecture of Ireland. III. Sculpture 1600-2000, Dublin/New Haven/London 2014, pp. 356-58, esp p. 357.