Canova and Thorvaldsen at Chatsworth

Canova and Thorvaldsen at Chatswort

John Gibson and the Anglo-Italian sculpture market in Rome: letters, sketches and marble

John Gibson and the Anglo-Italian sculpture market in Rome: letters, sketches and marbl

John Gibson and the Anglo-Italian Sculpture Market in Rome: Letters, Sketches and Marble

John Gibson established a hugely successful sculpture studio in Rome, and despite strong reasons to return to London, such as the cholera outbreaks in Rome in the 1830s, he remained steadfast in his allegiance to the city. His status and success in this intensely competitive environment was promoted through a sympathetic engagement with a wide variety of friends, fellow sculptors and patrons. This paper explores this method of engagement, notably through Gibson’s works for and correspondence with the 6th Duke of Devonshire

Anne Seymour Damer: a sculptor of ‘republican perfection’

© Cambridge University Press 2013. The attainments of Anne Seymour Damer as artist, author and student of classical antiquity secure her place in this company of brilliant women. Although during her lifetime she was not directly referred to as a ‘bluestocking’, she operated within a network of friendship and acquaintance in her pursuit of arts and letters in ways that linked her with other like-minded women across Europe. One indicator of this intellectual alignment was her sustained study of the art, languages and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome. Evidence of this is scattered in her correspondence and that of others; for example her kinsman, Horace Walpole, writing to their mutual friend Mary Berry commented, ‘they say, Madam, you speak Latin as well as Madam Damer the great statue woman’. To obtain public recognition as a sculptor, to be ‘the great statue woman’, was Damer’s primary ambition and one that she pursued tenaciously, participating in the annual Royal Academy exhibitions and creating works for public settings. Her remarkable career, spanning four decades, was sustained throughout by a reserve and strength of character often noted by close friends and acquaintances. However, it was her apparent innate deviant sexuality and erratic enthusiasms, not least her involvement with Foxite politics and the theatre, that became the focus of public attention in the years immediately before and following her husband’s suicide in 1776, that shaped her lasting reputation. In brilliance, judged from this public perspective, she could be said to be more diamanté than diamond

Christopher Hewetson: sculpture, commerce, and sociability in Rome

The volume is the catalogue of the exhibition held at the Ashmolean Museum and the Yale Center for British Art 2012. This chapter is concerned with the portrait sculpture by Christopher Hewetson, part of the Westmorland's cargo captured in 1779, which with the majority of thatship'scargo purchasedby Carlos III of Spain found its way to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. The exhibition was the result of a decade of research, an internationalprojectheaded by Jose Maria Luson Nogue, and builds on the earlier exhibition El Westmorland: Recuerdos del Grand Tour staged in Spain in 2002. The chapter discusses Hewetson's role as portraitist to Grand Tourists visiting Rome from the late 1770's to his deathin 1798,in the light ofhis works on board and other further documentary and material evidence. It includes a previously un published terra cotta bust of the 5th Duke of Devonshire (Chatsworth), a companion piece to the bust of Watkin WilliamsWynn (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin)