Edward Hodges Baily

Joseph Neeld (1789-1856), Grittleton House, Wiltshire:
his sale, Christie's, 22 September 1966, lot 6,
Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti (1927-2015), Henbury Hall, Cheshire

Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1849 (1209)

Author Unknown, ‘The Graces: From the Group in Marble by E. H. Baily, R. A.’ The Art Journal, vol. XII, 1850, p.198 (illustrated);
A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors, London 1905, pp. 93-5;
R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660-1851, London, pp. 32-6;
J. Kenworthy-Browne, ‘Marbles from a Victorian Fantasy’ in Country Life, 22^nd September 1966, vol. 140, pp. 708-12 (illustrated);
I. Roscoe, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660-1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 55-64

Overall, the condition of the marble is very good, with minor dirt and wear to the surface consistent with age. The marble is composed in sections, and joints are visible, including: through the rocky base, which is divided into three principle sections; at the left Grace's proper left arm; and at both the right Grace's arms. There is a smaller carved section at the base at the back to the right of the signature. The marble exhibits a beautifully carved and polished surface. The marble may, however, have been briefly outside for a period of its life, as there is a small degree of loss of surface detail in a few areas. In particular to the ringlets of hair falling down the back of the right Grace, and slightly to the tops of the heads. There is natural veining to the marble throughout, consistent with the material, in particular to the middle Grace's legs, abdomen and back; and to the right Grace's proper right side. There is a prominent natural vein running across the left Grace's face and down into her neck. There is also natural veining to the middle Grace's face. The right Grace's proper left big toe and the toe next to it are restored, as are the tips of three of her proper right toes. The tips of two of the left Grace's proper right toes are reattached. There are minor naturally occurring inclusions to the marble, including to the middle Grace's upper back and proper left arm.There is a large inclusion to the right Grace's middle back. There are a number of small filled naturally occurring inclusions, including at the middle Grace's chest on the proper left side; to the left Grace's chest at the middle and proper left side, to her proper right cheek, and to her proper right wrist and proper right thigh. There is a loss or large inclusion to the left Grace's proper left cheek by the lip. There is particular wear to the right Grace's nose, where there are abrasions. There are some very minor chips and abrasions to the drapery and to the flowers, such as to one of the flowers held by the middle and left Graces. There are some prominent, slightly open veins, running horizontally through the base behind the middle Grace above the signature. There are some large naturally occurring inclusions to the left Grace's proper left shoulder blade. There is a series of very small inclusions to the left Grace's proper right lower leg. There are some blue-ish dirt residues beneath the proper right foot of the middle Grace. The marble base is in good condition, with various chips and abrasions to the edges. The lower part of the base appears to have been inserted into another base, leaving a horizontal line of dirt and paint running around the base.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Edward Hodges Baily (fig. 2) was considered the greatest exponent of ‘ideal’ sculpture in mid-nineteenth century England. His monumental Three Graces, commissioned by Joseph Neeld (fig. 1) for Grittleton House, was his most ambitious ‘ideal’ work. It was a seminal subject, made popular in the early nineteenth century by the celebrated versions carved by Antonio Canova (1757-1822) and Bertel Thorvaldsen (1797-1838). Baily radically reimagined the Three Graces by positioning his goddesses seated and reclining, in a composition which his tutor John Flaxman predicted would ‘establish at once his reputation[1].’

The Three Graces represent the daughters of Zeus: Thalia (youth and beauty), Euphrosne (mirth) and Aglaia (elegance). In Antique times the three sisters embodied all that is pleasurable in life and the subject had an enduring appeal in Western Art, particularly in the nineteenth century. Baily’s imposing life-size rendering of the Three Graces is both inventive and alluring. The eye is drawn through and around the sculpture by way of the curves and interconnecting gestures of the sisters. Unhindered by a slavish reverence for precedent, Baily cleverly bestowed a tenderness and grace to a subject which had often been treated with iconic formality.

The story of the commission provides a fascinating glimpse into what the late Benedict Read in his book Victorian Sculpture called the ‘vanished world’ of private patronage, which played so important a rôle in the development of nineteenth century sculpture[2]. Sculptors were dependent on monuments and portraits to provide a steady income, but these commissions allowed little scope for innovation. Ideal works, based on literary or mythological subjects, were expensive to transpose into large-scale marbles, and needed the financial backing of a wealthy patron. In Joseph Neeld, Baily found the perfect collaborator. Neeld’s impressive gallery at Grittleton House was built specifically to display his collection of contemporary sculpture (figs. 3 & 4). The remarkable nature of this collection was described by Read: ‘Neeld’s works form a coherent collection, showing what in the first half of the century the sculptor’s ideal could express, should the patron’s taste and pocket allow[3].’ Although a number of different artists were included at Grittleton, Baily was clearly the favourite and featured most prominently, particularly in the colossal and magnificent Three Graces.

Joseph Neeld was a London attorney from a modest background, who in 1827, at the age of 39, suddenly became one of the richest men in England. Through his maternal grandmother he was great nephew to Philip Rundell (1846-1827). Rundell was a founding partner in the famous silversmith and jewellers Rundell and Bridge. The firm held the position of Royal Goldsmith from 1797 to 1843 and was responsible for the Crown Jewels used at the coronations of George IV, William IV and Queen Victoria. Philip Rundell was not a silversmith himself, but an astute businessman who brought the firm to an unrivalled position, patronised by all the wealth and nobility of England. He had a reputation as a miser and at his death his wealth was reported at over one million pounds. The greater part of this wealth he left to his great nephew, Joseph Neeld, who had looked after him over the last fourteen years of his life.

Neeld soon set about investing and spending his new-found wealth. As well as shares in the East India Company and banking stock, Neeld purchased land in London and Wiltshire. In 1928 he purchased Grittleton, later acquiring surrounding villages to enlarge the estate. He was a good landlord, ensuring each villager had a new cottage with a pig-sty and building churches, almhouses, a town hall and schools for the local community. For these projects, and for the rebuilding of Grittleton House, Neeld employed the Scottish architect, James Thomson. In 1830 Neeld bought a local parliamentary seat and became a Tory MP in the House of Commons. On 1^st January 1831 he married the daughter of a fellow Tory, Cropley Ashley Cooper, 6^th Earl of Shaftsbury. Unfortunately the marriage was a spectacular disaster and effectively dashed Neeld’s social and political ambitions. The couple separated only days after the wedding, and in the months that followed gossip columns in the newspapers reported scandalous details of the marriage, including illegitimate children on both sides. A painful and public divorce followed.

Following the humiliating disintegration of his marriage, Neeld travelled to Rome. John Kenworthy-Brown suggests that it may have been in Rome that Neeld conceived the idea of building a sculpture gallery at Grittleton, inspired by the great Roman houses, such as the Villa Borghese[4]. After several visits to the studio of the English sculptor John Gibson in Rome, documented in the sculptor’s notebooks, Neeld asked him to create an ideal figure of Venus. This was the first commission for Grittleton. Gibson completed his Venus Verticordia in 1833 and it became one of the artist’s most popular works, causing a sensation at the 1862 International Exhibition when Gibson presented a coloured version of the model as ‘The Tinted Venus.’ Neeld had become, with his very first commission, a significant patron of the arts.

In the short period between this visit to Rome and his death in 1856, Neeld built up a remarkable collection of thirty-five sculptures. The collection included works by Raffaelo Monti, Luigi Bienaimé, Joseph Gott and Scipione Tadolini, but Neeld’s most favoured sculptor, with fifteen pieces at Grittleton, was Edward Hodges Baily[5].

Baily never travelled abroad or visited Rome, his introduction to Neeld came, rather, through his work for the firm of Rundell and Bridge. Baily was the son of a ship carver, who had a natural aptitude for modelling. He began his career in a merchant’s counting house, but took lessons from a wax modeller, leaving the counting house after only two years to pursue the arts. A young surgeon named Leigh recognised his talent, lending him two of the artist John Flaxman’s designs and commissioning Baily to make models after them. Leigh was so impressed by these that he showed them to Flaxman. Baily soon joined Flaxman’s studio and remained there for seven years and reportedly became Flaxman’s favourite assistant. Flaxman provided designs to Rundell and Bridge and through him, Baily began to work for the company in 1815, transposing Flaxman’s designs into models. Baily stayed with Rundell and Bridge as a designer and modeller for nearly twenty years, until 1833 when he joined the rival firm Hunt and Roskill. It was during this period that the sculptor made the acquaintance of Joseph Neeld.  

In 1808 Baily joined the Royal Academy schools and in 1811 he won a gold medal and a prize of 50 guineas for his Hercules rescuing Alcestis from Orcas. Baily’s models for silverware and his large-scale sculptures were closely related, with perhaps his most famous sculpture, Eve at the Fountain, originally conceived as a handle for a soup-tureen. A marble version of the Eve at the Fountain was also displayed at Grittleton. Although Baily’s sculptural practice included commissions for funerary monuments and portrait busts, this was not where his heart lay. His rival Francis Chantrey far outstripped him in these lucrative genres and Baily’s pursuit of ‘ideal’ sculpture, and his somewhat extravagant lifestyle, led the sculptor into financial ruin. He was declared bankrupt in 1831 and again in 1838, when he was imprisoned. His creditors forced him to put up some of his ideal sculptures for sale by lottery. Joseph Neeld came to his rescue and purchased one of them, Maternal Affection (1837), for Grittleton. This work is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The relationship between artist and patron turned Baily’s fortunes around and enabled the sculptor to create some of his most important and critically recognised works, culminating in one of the most iconic sculptures in London, the figure of Nelson on top of the famous column in Trafalgar Square, completed in 1843.

Through Neeld, Baily was finally able to realise his long held ambition to carve a group of the Three Graces. The original composition had been worked out in a sketch model many years earlier, in the studio of John Flaxman, who predicted its success. Kenworthy-Browne noted the precocious talent of the young sculptor revealed in The Three Graces: ‘The modelling of the three figures is remarkably fluent for a man of about 20 – Baily’s age when he made the maquette – and the handling bears out his reputation as a “great master of feminine grace[6].”’ The marble was completed in 1849 and shown at the Royal Academy that year. It was well received, with the reviewer of the Art Journal (fig. 7) reporting that ‘genius had triumphed[7].’ The originality of the seated composition was greatly acclaimed. Baily himself had only seen the subject in standing pose and so set himself the challenge to create an alternative composition. The standing versions of the subject by Antonio Canova (original marble 1812, Hermitage Museum) and Bertel Thorvaldsen (1817, Thorvaldsen Museum, fig. 4) featured prominently in the imagination of the art-going public and would have been the obvious comparisons. Baily’s sketch model would actually have been conceived during the same period as those by his famous confrères. However, by the time Baily’s group was carved in marble and exhibited in 1849, the versions by Canova and Thorvaldsen were already part of the sculptural canon.

The comparison to Canova would have been particularly pertinent to Neeld, who had set out to build a private collection of sculpture to rival the nobility. Neeld was an almost exact contemporary to William Cavendish, 6^th Duke of Devonshire (1790 – 1858). The Duke’s purpose-built sculpture gallery at Chatsworth was completed in 1834 and had the reputation of containing the finest collection of contemporary sculpture in the country. The gallery contains numerous works by the Duke’s friend, Antonio Canova. Canova’s second version of The Three Graces (1814, fig. 3) was famously installed at Woburn Abbey, where John Russell, 6^th Duke of Bedford, had a special ‘Temple of the Graces’ built to house it. Following the mode for purpose-built galleries, Neeld’s own gallery at Grittleton was created to impress. It was formed of a two storeyed, cruciform hall measuring 160 feet in length. The sculptures were top-lit from a lantern under the tower, set in niches, and included that most fashionable sculptor Canova in a marble after his Venere Italica[8].

However, whilst any nineteenth century group of the Three Graces of necessity makes reference to Canova’s seminal version of the subject, Baily’s group is entirely different in style. He has moved away from a strict neo-classicism and infused his group with a Romantic feeling which better befits his pursuit of the ‘ideal’. In sentiment the sculpture is closer to the Danish master Thorvaldsen’s Three Graces, with its emphasis on the interaction between the figures. In his innovative composition Baily departs from both Thorvaldsen and Canova, rejecting the frieze-like arrangement copied from Antique models, in favour of an undulating and twisting triangular line.

Baily’s Three Graces was seen by the wider public in a full-scale plaster cast at the Great Industrial Exhibition of Dublin in 1853 and the International Exhibition in London in 1862. Joseph Neeld’s exceptional collection of sculpture remained complete and in situ until the 1960s, when the majority of the sculptures were sold at auction by Christies in 1966. The Three Graces has remained in private ownership since that time. This extraordinary group is a testament both to the outstanding talent of the sculptor, and to the vital creative relationship between patron and artist.

RELATED LITERATURE 

D. Bilbey, British Sculpture 1470 to 2000: A Concise Catalogue of the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2002, pp. 185-8;
I. Blackburn, ‘Joseph Neeld and the Grittleton Estate’ in The Buttercross Bulletin, accessed 30^th May 2017: http://www.chippenhamcivicsociety.co.uk;
K. Eustace, ‘Baily, Edward Hodges (1788-1867), sculptor and designer and modeller of silver’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 30^th May 2017: http://www.oxforddnb.com/;
S. Farrell, ‘Neeld, Joseph (1789-1856), of Grittleton House, in D. Fisher ed., The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1820-1832, Cambridge, 2009, accessed 30^th May 2017: http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org;
C. Jordan, Edward Hodges Baily (1788-1867) and the notion of poetic sculpture, PhD thesis, Leeds University (unpublished);
N. Pevsner and J. Nairn, The Buildings of England: Wiltshire, London, 1976, pp. 261-2;
B. Read, Victorian Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1982, pp. 128 – 146

[1] Christies Sale Catalogue, The Grittleton Marbles, 22nd September 1966, p. 10

[2] B. Read, Victorian Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1982, p. 129

[3] B. Read, Victorian Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1982, p. 141

[4] J. Kenworthy-Browne, ‘Marbles from a Victorian Fantasy’ in Country Life, September 22, 1966, p. 710

[5] C. Jordan, Edward Hodges Baily (1788-1867) and the notion of poetic sculpture, PhD thesis, Leeds University, p.50

[6] J. Kenworthy-Browne, ‘Marbles from a Victorian Fantasy’ in Country Life, September 22, 1966, p. 712

[7] ‘The Graces: From the Group in Marble by E. H. Baily, R. A.’ The Art Journal, vol. XII, 1850, p.198

[8] Christies Sale Catalogue, The Grittleton Marbles, 22nd September 1966, lot 3, p. 6