English 18th Century Portrait Sculpture: Rysbrack's Bronze Busts of Isaac Newton and Oliver Cromwell

The Bronze Bust of Isaac Newton.

Michael Rysbrack

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Assumed to be lot 74 in the Rysbrack sale catalogue 20 April 1765.

see extract below.

I have posted previously photographs of this bust very kindly provided to me by Victoria Avery of the Fitzwilliam Museum - here are my photographs.

This bust - has been on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge from Trinity College, Cambridge since 2004.

Formerly in the collection of O.V. Watney of Cornbury Park, sold at Christie's on 22 May 1967, together with a bronze bust of Oliver Cromwell (lot 6), bought by Humphrey Whitbread (1912 - 2000) both bequeathed to Trinity - Cromwell formerly on loan to the Cecil Higgins Museum, Bedford.

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Oliver Cromwell

By Michael Rysbrack

Bronze

Height 58.4 cms

Very low resolution website photograph of the bust of Oliver Cromwell from Christie's online catalogue for 5 April 2001

Extract from the text from Christie's Catalogue.

http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/a-bronze-bust-of-oliver-cromwell-by-2016690-details.aspx

It corresponds exactly to a terracotta version, today in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (illustrated in Baker, op. cit., fig. 104), which seems to have been bought by Rysbrack's patron, Sir Edward Littleton, in one of Rysbrack's sales of the late 1760s (14 February 1767, lot 61). In another of these sales (Langford and Son, 1765, op. cit.), lots 74 and 75 are listed as bronze busts of Cromwell and Newton. The present bust, which was sold together with a pendant bust of Newton in 1967 (Christie's; The remaining contents of Cornbury Park, Charlbury, Oxfordshire, sold by order of the Trustees and Beneficiaries of the Late O.V. Watney, Esq.) therefore almost certainly represents the bust of Cromwell which was sold from Rysbrack's own sale in the 18th Century.

"Although the appearance of the present bust, with the pendant bust of Newton, is first recorded with certainty in the collection of O.V. Watney, there is an interesting possibility that it passed to him from the collection of the Earls of Portsmouth. Watney's mother, Lady Margaret, was a daughter of the 5th Earl of Portsmouth. In the 18th Century the Portsmouths had acquired, by marriage to a great-niece of Sir Isaac Newton, Rysbrack's celebrated marble version of the bust of Newton mentioned above, along with a number of other Newton-related items . It is therefore possible that the Portsmouths had, at one time, also owned the bronze version of the bust of Newton - along with the present bust of Cromwell - and that the two passed through the family to Watney through his mother".