Francis Harwood (fl. 1748-1783) Italian, Florence, 1757 After the Antique

By repute Powerscourt House, County Wicklow, Ireland;
Canon Joseph Furlong (d. 1971), Ireland, by circa 1960;
by descent to the present owner

Overall the condition of the marble is very good with minor dirt and wear to the surface consistent with age. There is a minor chip to the end of the nose and one of the locks of the beard is lost underneath the chin on the proper right side. There are a few small abrasions and chips to the edges and drapery, notably one at the centre of the chest and another at the proper right shoulder. There is naturally occurring veining, including to across the chest. There are a few paint marks, including at the crown of Homer's head, and a dirt mark at the chest. There is wear to the socle, including small chips and a loss at the back. There is wear to the column, including losses to the corners of the base.
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This important marble bust was carved by Francis Harwood, a British 18th-century sculptor who spent most of his life working in Rome and Florence. Harwood gained an international reputation for himself by creating fashionable, brilliantly executed, library busts and figures carved after the antique. His patrons included some of the most influential collectors and tastemakers of the day, notably Catherine the Great of Russia, the 1st Duke of Northumberland, and the Neoclassical designer par excellence, Robert Adam.

Sculptures by Harwood are rare: Ingrid Roscoe lists only seventeen figurative models and records an oeuvre of less than forty marbles (excluding architectural work). The present bust was recently rediscovered in Ireland and is particularly significant as it is dated 1757, making it one of the sculptor's earliest known essays in marble, carved at a point in Harwood's career when he was forging his reputation as one of the leading sculptors in mid-18th-century Florence. The bust appears to be the prime version of the artist’s Homer, of which only two others are known, one, dated 1760, at Castle Ashby in Northamptonshire, and the other, from 1764, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (inv. no. A8-1958).

Francis Harwood has come to be celebrated for his ability to adapt famous ancient models and create stirring visions of the past, which follow the formal characteristics of their original prototypes, but are infused with a sense of 18^th-century originality. The present bust of Homer is an exemplar of Harwood’s approach. It follows a well-known antique model described by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder (23/4-79 CE) as having been invented for the library of the Attalid kings of Pergamon in the 2^nd century BCE. This engaging portrait shows the blind poet of Greek antiquity staring into the black distance, ‘seeing’ the events of his epic Iliad and Odyssey unfold. The success of the portrait lies in the inherent irony that its focus is found solely in the deeply drilled ocular orbits and the frowning brow: the poet’s blindness is apparent only because of his transfixed gaze. Multiple ancient Roman versions of the model exist, the most notable being the Homer Caetani in the Louvre (inv. no. MR 530), which was purchased by Pope Clement XII in 1733, before being confiscated by France in 1797. Given that Harwood resided in Rome in the 1750’s, he would probably have known this particular bust and may have used it as the basis for his own invention.

With its deeply undercut hooded brow, matched only by the superbly drilled beard and ringlets of hair, Harwood’s Homer follows the spirit of its Hellenistic prototype. However, rather than slavishly following precedent, the sculptor has added a deep torso, which recalls heroic Roman portraiture. Harwood appears to have favoured deep torsi at this time as he chose to adopt the same format (but with bared chest) for his masterpiece, the Bust of an African in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (inv. no. 88.SA.114). The later version of the Homer in the V&A, dated 1764, has a noticeably shorter truncation and more rounded shoulders. Significantly, both busts, along with the version at Castle Ashby, bear the titular inscription HOMERVS and are signed and dated. The presence of signatures on such works, which are clearly derived from antique models, can, according to Roberta Cremoncini, be read as a declaration by Harwood of his belief in the originality of the sculptures he produced and as an affirmation of his status as an artist and not merely a copyist (Cremoncini, op. cit., p. 69).

Relatively little is known of Harwood’s life. His biography is formed principally by a series of anecdotes and snapshots, of which the most amusing is Joseph Nollekens’ badly written line in a letter dated 1769 referring to an ‘FH… [who was] knocking the marbil about like feway [fury] & belive he as got more work to do than any One sculptor in England’ (Roscoe, op. cit., p. 584). What is clear is that Harwood spent most of his life in Italy, arriving in Rome in 1752. He subsequently settled in Florence (from 1753), where he worked in the studio of Giovanni Battista Piamontini, which he ran after the latter’s death in 1762. The awarding of a public commission for a statue of Equity to surmount the new Porta San Gallo underscores Harwood’s burgeoning status as an important sculptor. It was this commission which brought Harwood to the attention of visiting Grand Tourists and, in particular, to the British envoy and revered aesthete Horace Mann, who praised the sculptor’s talent and later gave him the commission for his own tomb. Prominent patrons included James and Robert Adam, who instructed Harwood to create the lifesize Apollo for the magnificent dining room at Syon House in Middlesex.

The present bust is remarkable for its superlative quality, witnessed particularly in the masterful carving of the hair, beard, and carefully delineated folds of flesh around the brow. It is reputed to come from the palatial Irish 18^th-century country house, Powerscourt, formerly the seat of the Wingfield family. The Homer would certainly have been acquired by a Grand Tourist of considerable financial means, adding credence to the reputed provenance. Like the Homer in the V&A, which is paired with a Seneca, the present bust may have once had a pendant.

RELATED LITERATURE

J. Fleming and H. Honour, ‘An English Sculptor in XVIII Century Florence,’ Festschrift Ulrich Middeldorf, Berlin, 1968, pp. 510-516; D. Bilbey and M. Trusted, British Sculpture 1470 to 2000. A Concise Catalogue of the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2000, pp. 88-89; R. Cremoncini, 'Alcune note su Francis Harwood. La bottega di uno scultore inglese a Firenze in via della Sapienza: nella purezza del marmo, classicità e storia,' Gazzetta Antiquaria, December 1994, pp. 68-73; I. Roscoe, E. Hardy and M. G. Sullivan, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660-1851, New Haven and Yale, 2009, pp. 583-585