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Lot Essay
While wanting to capitalise on the contemporary fashion in the mid 1770's for library busts, Wedgwood & Bentley nevertheless did not employ sculptors for the purpose and therefore relied on external sources. In 1775 Hoskins & Grant, makers of plaster busts, supplied thirty-six new models to Wedgwood, of which this model was certainly one. While there does not appear to be an extant original on which this model was based, it is certain that both Wedgwood and Hoskins & Grant would have been concerned to base a production on a portrait reknowned as a good likeness and perhaps from a well-known monument. It may be that the model was the portrait bust of Newton, now lost, at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, sculpted by François Roubiliac around 1730, commissioned by a Fellow of the Royal Society, John Belchier. In his will of 1785 the donor wrote: 'This bust in terra cotta was made under the eyes of Mr. Conduit and several of Sir Isaac Newton's particular friends by Roubiliac, from many pictures and other busts and esteemed more like than anything extant of Sir Isaac' [Katharine A. Esdaile, The Life and Works of Louis François Roubilliac (1928), p. 20; and for an engraving of the lost original, see pl. IV, no. 2]. On delivery of the plaster busts to Wedgwood, moulds were taken in the factory workshops, from which basalt busts were produced. They were then finished by hand, initially by the modeller William Hackwood. This way of working ensured a quality of crispness and modelling far superior to that of any plaster bust, while the quality of the basalt material gave not only durability but an appearnce somewhat like bronze, at a fraction of the cost of that material. This type of factory production nonetheless saw that stamps to the reverse of the models retained a certain crudeness, and occasionally names were even misspelt. See Captain M. H. Grant, The Makers of Black Basaltes (1967), p. 169; see also pl. XI (ibid.) for an illustration of another, larger version of the subject, also illustrated by Robin Reilly, The Dictionary of Wedgwood (1989), Vol. I, p. 454, pl. 644.