Summary

Sculpture, marble; portrait bust of William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806); after Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823); British, c. 1820-30. A portrait bust of William Pitt the Younger, the statesman who became Britain’s youngest ever Prime Minister in 1783, at the age of just 24. A great public speaker and able administrator, Pitt led the nation through the turbulent times of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, whilst he also engineered the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland in 1801. The sculptor Joseph Nollekens created the defining image in sculpture of William Pitt, many versions of which exist. Although it is signed, this version is a copy, made probably in the 1820s, when the 1st Marquess of Bristol was acquiring new furnishings for Ickworth.

Full description

A marble portrait bust of William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806), after a model by Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823). The subject is shown facing slightly to his right, his long sharp nose prominent, dressed in a loose toga-like drape. With the signature of Nollekens on the back. On a turned white marble socle. Mounted on a porphyry-effect scagliola column. William Pitt the Younger was one of the greatest Prime Ministers in the history of Great Britain and Ireland. He took up office in December 1783 at the age of just 24, which makes him the youngest ever person to occupy the position of Prime Minister in the United Kingdom. He was also one of the most long-serving, remaining in post during two separate terms for a total of nearly nineteen years. Pitt served 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. 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 Joseph Nollekens’ famous 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. This is one of two portrait busts of William Pitt at Ickworth (the other NT 852214), whilst a third bust, in plaster and signed by Humphrey Hopper (1765-1844), was sold in 1996 (Sotheby’s, The East Wing, Ickworth, Suffolk, 11-12 June 1996, lot 101). The number of these portraits at Ickworth reflects the importance of William Pitt for the career of Frederick William Hervey, 5th Earl and 1st Marquess of Bristol (1769-1859). Pitt’s spells as Prime Minister, between 1783 and 1801 and then again from 1804 until his sudden death in 1806, overlapped with the political career of Lord Bristol, who served as M.P. for Bury St Edmunds from 1796 until 1803 when, after the death of his father, he transferred to the House of Lords. For some of his time as an MP, Lord Bristol also actually served in Pitt’s Government, as Under-Secretary of State in the Foreign Office. But Pitt was also such a dominant figure in national life during these crucial years in the nation's history that almost every country house had at least one portrait of him, many of them versions of the sculpted portrait made by the sculptor Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823). 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. 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 one-time friend, wrote that Pitt refused 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 1992, p. 295). According to Smith, it was the sculptor’s practice to scour the newspapers for notices of deaths and then, for those individuals whom he thought merited commemoration, to hurry to take a death mask. A death mask is a plaster model created by taking a mould of the dead individual’s face. This Nollekens 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). The portrait of William Pitt became, along with his portrait bust of the reformer Charles James Fox, Joseph Nollekens’ most successful work from a commercial standpoint. 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). The sculptor’s most significant portrayal of Pitt was the full-length statue in Senate House, Cambridge, but his bust portraits of the politician are far better known. In them, 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 government for so many years. The prime versions of the portrait are those dated 1806 in the Rosebery collection at Dalmeny and at Mulgrave Castle, whilst there are other early signed versions in the Royal Collection, dated 1807 (RCIN 35429) and the National Portrait Gallery, dated 1808 (NPG 120). 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 the painter 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). In September 1806, the painter 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 at 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). In fact Nollekens and his workshop reportedly eventually 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. or £6.30) (Nollekens and his Times, I, p. 371). 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 his workshop for much of the remainder of his life. Versions of Nollekens’ portrait in National Trust collections include those at The Argory (NT 565212), Attingham Park (NT 609427); Belton House (NT 436765); Felbrigg Hall (NT 1401969); Petworth (NT 486398); Tatton Park (NT 1298520); The Vyne (NT 719600). Although the bust is signed as the work of Nollekens, the incised signature is not in a form that Nollekens used and the bust does not seem to have been made in the sculptor’s workshop. It was probably in fact made in the 1820s, when the 1st Marquess of Bristol was gathering a series of sculpted portraits of family and political friends to furnish the newly completed spaces at Ickworth. Jeremy Warren November 1825