EW visitors to our national collection of pictures can fail to be interested with a well-executed portrait by Sir William Beechey of an artist, modelling-tool in hand, who looks forth at the spectator, with a somewhat melancholy face, and an eye worn with labour: the structure of the face is not English, but there is an expression about it which would cause inquiry as to the career of the person thus represented.

It

is the portrait of Joseph Nollekens, a sculptor of great repute in his day, who, successfully practising the most profitable part of his art, bust-making, made much money, but only a temporary fame.

That no characters are so good or so bad as biographers make them, is a trite remark frequently enforced by experience. History as well as biography takes much of its tone from the mind of the writer. Had Nollekens left his biographer and pupil, J. T. Smith, the legacy he so confidently expected, the two volumes of smallminded narrative he gave the world as a history of "Nollekens and his Times" might have been laudatory of the genius of the sculptor, instead of wearisome with petty details of his household arrangements, with which the public have nothing to do, and would never have known but from one who was trustfully admitted into his household, and who should have reflected how far his conduct, and that of others like him, made and confirmed the parsimony of Nollekens,-by submitting to and encouraging meanness for the sake of reaping the ultimate gain of a great legacy. There is certainly poetic justice done when Volpone disappoints his parasites.

Smith commences his volumes with the bold announcement in his preface, "I am convinced that England has not produced such a character since the death of Elwes;" yet he cannot help relating his charitable liberality to Richardson, and many traits that show Nollekens only wanted the bias of his mind directed towards good, instead of fostered towards evil, by persons who would submit to anything for future gain, though listening to and recording the Q

scandal of the lowest servants of his house, and when the man was laid in his grave printing trashy conversations not worth the reading. The best amongst us could scarcely stand so severe a test as being Boswellized by a disappointed legacy-hunter.

Joseph Nollekens was descended from foreign parents: his father was born at Antwerp; his mother was a Frenchwoman. Their son, the sculptor, was born on the 11th of August, 1737, at 28, Dean Street, Soho, in the house shown in our engraving, and in which his father died. At that period Soho Square and the neighbourhood was still a fashionable quarter with the gentry, and in the outskirts of London. Nollekens used to speak of his early reminiscences of that neighbourhood, when four ambassadors lived in the square, and when a windmill and a pond of water occupied the ground where Percy Chapel, in Charlotte Street, near Rathbone Place, now stands, and it was a country walk to Marylebone Gardens. When Nollekens was thirteen years of age, he was apprenticed to Scheemakers, at that time in the height of fame, and some of whose best works are amongst the monuments of Westminster Abbey. He was a successful student, and was awarded several useful money prizes by the Society of Arts. With these and other savings he went to Rome in 1760, where he worked for some years, and made money, returning to Mortimer Street, Cavendish Square, and marrying the daughter of Mr. Welch, the magistrate, a lady who appears to have been more parsimonious than her husband. It was probably this concatenation of circumstances that confirmed his character; but he never appears to have been other than a cheerful, kind-hearted man,

and in advanced age, after the death of his wife, relaxed greatly in his narrow habits.

To understand Nollekens's character properly, it is necessary to take a more philosophical review of his peculiar position in early life. He came of a family of artists, persecuted people of another faith, necessitated to live poorly, to struggle hard for what they might obtain, and live among strangers without much sympathy; and in some instances to incur the dangers of strong religious prejudice. Left fatherless in early life, his mother married again and retired to Wales, leaving Nollekens without the aid of money, advice, or education. It was a hard life for an orphan boy, to be left thus friendless in the great world of London; all the harder from the knowledge that a mother's love-the richest of prizes to a boy-he could never enjoy, not from any fault of his own, but from the desertion of her who should have given it. In his poverty he never did a dishonourable act; he clung to society as best he could by little acts of polite service, and received some friendship in return. Was he to blame if the world taught him it respected not talent, or gave it a free stage to labour on, unbacked by some independence of pocket? Consequently, when he was in Rome, he found he could more readily put some few pounds into his badly stocked purse by dealing in antiquities than by sculpture. He purchased from the labourers who had discovered them, the terra-cottas they obtained in the Via Latina, and he sold them to Mr. Townley; they are now in our British Museum, with many other ancient relics, some of which have the work of Nollekens upon them, in the way of additions and restorations. The young

man, by his prudence, made himself a respectable position; it was the misfortune of his early poverty, and the inherited parsimony of two generations, as well as a wife still more niggardly, that ended in making Nollekens what he was. But the worst that can be honestly said of him is, that he was closehanded for what he considered unnecessary extravagances; but he was unusually liberal to cases of real want or to charity; and to all about him he gave good wages, and occasional gratuities. It is quite as easy to prove him a justly liberal man, as it is to prove him a miser. Allan Cunningham has dealt most honourably by him in the memoir he constructed out of most unpleasant material; his strong common sense and love of justice led him to this.

He relates how cheerfully Nollekens helped Chantrey, then young and unfriended, to a proper position in the Royal Academy Exhibition, when he sent his bust of Horne Tooke there; "having satisfied himself of its excellence, he turned round to those who were arranging the works for exhibition, and said, 'There's a fine, a very fine work; let the man who made it be known; remove one of my busts, and put this one in its place, for well it deserves it.'”

An unvarying success in his profession leaves no incident to narrate in the calm course of the sculptor's career. His busts were popular, and he had the advantage of the best sitters. Life with with him was the prosecution of art, and the equally quiet accumulation of money. Aided by his still more frugal spouse, he amassed a large fortune. He died in 1823, and was buried in Paddington Church, but it was not until fifteen years afterwards that any record of the fact appeared within its walls. At that