Joseph Nollekens

Joseph Nollekens (1737-1823), British sculptor of Flemish extraction. He had a highly successful career, earning an enormous fortune, but he is now remembered as much for his miserliness as for the quality of his work.

Nollekens was born in London, the son of a Flemish painter, also called Joseph Nollekens (“Old Nollekens”), who had settled there in 1733. The boy began an apprenticeship with Peter Scheemakers in 1750 and gained a reputation for industriousness that he sustained throughout his life. From 1762 to 1770 he lived in Rome, where he restored and dealt in antique sculpture as well as creating work of his own. By the time he returned to London he already had a considerable reputation and had made a good deal of money.

Nollekens produced various kinds of sculpture, including statues (particularly of classical goddesses) and funerary monuments, but he was renowned above all for his portrait busts in marble. He was the outstanding British sculptor of his time in the field, his work having vivacity as well as dignity. There are several examples in the National Portrait Gallery, London, for example a bust of the writer Laurence Sterne, made in Rome in 1766. His studio sometimes produced dozens of his most popular busts.

Nollekens continued working into old age. He was a highly efficient businessman and at his death he left a fortune of £200,000—an immense sum at this time. One of his former pupils, J. T. Smith, who was an executor of his will, had been hoping for a large slice of this fortune, but he was left only £100. He got his revenge by writing a spiteful biography, Nollekens and His Times (1828), in which he depicts Nollekens and his wife as grasping misers. Other contemporaries paint a somewhat more pleasant picture of Nollekens, but Smith’s colourful account—although it is obviously highly prejudiced—has largely determined his posthumous image.