A Small 18th Century Terracotta Bust
probably not Allan Ramsay (1713 - 84).
Sotheby's Lot 140 July 2020.
Overall Height 11inches.
Photograph courtesy Sotheby's.
This competant little bust has been trying to escape from the trade for quite a few years.
When I first saw it it was very dirty and it has obviously recently had a thorough clean up.
At the time it was suggested to me that it was a bust of Allan Ramsay.
It is hard to reconcile the attribution given the known self portraits of Ramsay.
This attribution appears to be based on its resemblance to a drawing in the National Gallery of Scotland (see below).
The hollow head suggests to me a French or perhaps Italian sculptor - Rysbrack terracotta heads are usually manufactured in the Netherlands fashion, the are modelled in the solid and so most frequently cracked during the firing process and had to be filled and painted - whereas Roubiliac modelled his heads hollow with an even depth to the clay - far less likely to be damaged in the firing.
Allan Ramsay
Self Portrait aged about 20
Note the cleft in the chin missing in the little terracotta.
They say
This self-portrait was probably drawn while Ramsay was a young
student living in London. He was evidently proud of his appearance and his
attractiveness; he has depicted himself with long locks of hair that flow to
his shoulders. In a poem written by Ramsay, he referred to himself at around
the age he is shown here as ‘Bold Allan ..., all dressed in frock of Blew and
waistcoat of the Lining Green’ aspiring to ‘… take and bear away' the hearts of
girls, 'who eer they were'.
National Galleries of Scotland
_______________________
There is a carved bust of Allan Ramsay of 1776/7 by the Irish sculptor Michael Foye (fl 1765 -77) with the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland - see -
Little is known about the Irish sculptor Michael Foye. He
entered one of Dublin’s art schools - the Dublin Society School in 1765. In
1767 he exhibited two works at the Society of Artists and by 1770 he is known
to be working in the studio of the sculptor, John Van Nost. Two years later he
had travelled to Italy. It is believed he was the ‘Foy’ who sent a ‘bust of an
artist’ from Rome to an exhibition of the Society of Artists.
Allan Ramsay
Incised M: Foye/Sculpt/Rome/177 (the last figure gone), at
one time in the Lockhart Thomson collection.
Purchased by the NPGS in 1905
Height 59.9cms.
Image courtesy Nation Portrait Gallery of Scotland.
_____________________
Allan Ramsay
National Portrait Gallery
1776
11 3/8 in. x 8 1/2 in. (289 mm x 216 mm).
Inscribed in ink on the back of the paper: A. Ramsay. drawn
by himself in the Island of Ischia/August 1776.
This portrait
One of four drawings, the artist's last important work, [1]
done in Ischia c.1776. The other three are portraits of his second wife
inscribed Begun for Mrs Ramsay in the Island of Ischia but not like 1776,
National Gallery of Scotland (293b); his daughter Amelia, and of a country
girl, [2] both formerly in the collection of Sir Bruce Ingram, now respectively
in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery and the Ashmolean Museum.
Under ultra violet light it appears just possible that the last figure of the
date in NPG 1660 has been changed from '5' to '6'. Ramsay is not known to have
visited Ischia in 1775 and although on his way to Italy that year, he was still
in Paris as late as 24 August. [3]
Footnotes
1) A. Smart, The Life and Art of Allan Ramsay, 1952, p 157.
2) Exhibited 'British Portraits', RA, 1956-57 (643).
3) A. Smart, The Life and Art of Allan Ramsay, 1952, p 156.
_____________________
Allan Ramsay
Self Portrait
Pastel
1755 / 56
National Portrait Gallery of Scotland
The text below lifted from the NGS website
This vivid and characterful self-portrait is testimony to
the technical skills and aesthetic sensitivity that made Allan Ramsay the first
Scottish artist to rival the best of his contemporaries, not only in England
but also in Continental Europe. The eldest son of the poet of the same name,
Ramsay received his first artistic training at the Academy of St Luke in his
native Edinburgh, where he enrolled as a founder member aged sixteen. Quickly
recognised as possessing outstanding talent in his chosen field of portraiture,
Ramsay was sent to London in 1732 to study at the fashionable studio of the
Swedish-born portrait painter Hans Hysing. Although his stay with Hysing lasted
little over a year, it was most probably there that he developed the basic
skills required for the accurate delineation of physiognomy, drapery and
gesture. The artist’s sights, however, were clearly set on more ambitious means
of securing professional advancement than London could offer. By 1736, with
financial support from his father and the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Ramsay was
preparing to visit Italy. This was to be the first of four prolonged study
trips to the Continent, which not only enabled Ramsay to make numerous
influential contacts but also to develop, through close study of paintings by
old master and contemporary artists, his increasingly distinctive and delicate
style of portraiture.
This work almost certainly dates from 1754–7, during the
second of Ramsay’s Italian sojourns. Unusually, Ramsay travelled with his wife,
Margaret Lindsay, and after his arrival in Rome in December 1754 he sought to
escape from the pressures of the social and artistic life of Rome in order ‘to
preserve the greater part of my time for painting, drawing and reading’ (A.
Smart, The Life and Art of Allan Ramsay, London 1952, p. 82). It was almost
certainly during this period of seclusion and self-directed study that Ramsay
produced a group of six self-portrait studies. All relate to an oil portrait of
about 1756 (private collection) in which he depicted himself sitting at his
easel, paintbrush in hand, at work on the portrait of a woman, possibly his
wife, his head turned towards the viewer as if interrupted in the middle of his
labours. The present work is the most highly finished of the studies, and the
only one coloured with pastel and watercolour. Nevertheless, the drawing
clearly reflects its status as an intensely observed private study. Without the
flattery or softness with which Ramsay increasingly imbued his commissioned
portraits, it presents a notably frank and naturalistic rendering of the
artist’s features. The handling of the medium is firm, in contrast to the
delicate, almost tentative quality that Ramsay’s drawings often exhibit. The
impression is of patient, almost workmanlike care, providing an exceptionally
direct insight into the artist’s approach to his work.
This text was originally published in Facing the World:
Self-portraits from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei, Edinburgh, 2016.
________________________
24 in. x 18 1/4 in. (610 mm x 464 mm) oval
A good version of NPG 3311 with deep red drapery and a pink
turnover, lent by Dr T. Loveday to the Ramsay exhibition of 1958 [1], was
found, after cleaning, to be lettered A. Ramsay Pictor. 1749. Obviously
inscribed rather than signed and dated, the portrait had been in Italy in the
early 19th century. The quality is inferior to NPG 3311 and it lacks the
pentimenti which suggest that the Gallery portrait is the prototype. The date
1749 seems late for the apparent age of the sitter. A copy, framed as a pendant
to a portrait of his first wife, apparently painted at about the time of their
marriage in 1739, is in the collection of W. R. Law. An oil copy in the
Scottish NPG (189) was made by Alexander Nasmyth in 1781 but no date for the
original is given. A drawing in the National Gallery of Scotland (D 2019),
although possibly younger, shows a similar pose; it is perhaps a study for NPG
3311. [2]
Footnotes
1) Exhibited 'Allan Ramsay, 1713-84', Kenwood, 1958 (1);
‘Art Treasures of the West Country', Bristol, 1937 (74), lent by Dr Loveday.
The Loveday family also owned Ramsay's portrait of John Ward (q.v.). Mrs
Goodwin (?1689-1788), whose daughter married into the Loveday family, knew
Ramsay quite well, as she mentions him in letters.
2) K. Andrews and J. R. Brotchie, Catalogue of Scottish
Drawings, National Gallery of Scotland, 1960, p 171.
Physical description
Dark brown eyes and eyebrows, protruding lower lip, chin
slightly cleft, pale complexion, bluish jowl, dark brown hair or wig; white
neck-band and shirt ruffle, rich brown velvet drapery turned down over
shoulder; greyish-brown background; lit from right
Conservation
Flaking in the hair laid; a pentiment along the edge of the
chest and ruffle; surface cleaned and varnished, 1964.
Provenance
Bought, 1946, from Appleby Brothers and by them in Stirling
'a short time before'; believed to have been sold earlier that year from
Dowell's in Edinburgh. [1]
1) Information from A. E. Haswell Miller, NPG archives.
This extended catalogue entry is from the out-of-print
National Portrait Gallery collection catalogue: John Kerslake, Early Georgian
Portraits, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1977, and is as published then. For
the most up-to-date details on individual Collection works, we recommend
reading the information provided in the Search the Collection results on this
website in parallel with this text.
