Lorenzo Bartolini’s British patrons and sitters: some new discoveries

Abstract

This article discusses portrait busts by the important Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Bartolini (1777–1850), and why so few of his sitters (many of them British or Irish) have thus far been identified. The sitter in a portrait by Bartolini, until now not considered as his work, and archival documents concerning that portrait, published here for the first time, disclose in Bartolini’s own hand his charges for contemporary portraits, marble replicas of canonical antique statues and marble copies of portraits modelled earlier by the celebrated British sculptor Joseph Nollekens. The article then discusses the artistic influences that conditioned the format of Bartolini’s important portrait of a young lady in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and reveals her identity (hitherto unknown) while also identifying the sitter in another (related) marble portrait by Bartolini, whose name until now also has been unknown. The dates and production of both busts, pre-1820, are also discussed.