Tuesday 7 July 2020

Terracotta Bust probably not Allan Ramsay Sotheby's July 2020


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
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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.

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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.

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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.


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Circa 1737-1739
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.

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