Alfred Gilbert

Guilford Lewis, 1904;

Acquired by Isabel McAllister (Alfred Gilbert's assistant and biographer), c. 1935;

Bequeathed to Miss Ida Cruttwell Abbott;

Adrian Bury (Alfred Gilbert's nephew);

Presented to Air Chief Marshal Sir John Barraclough, KCB CBE DFC AFC;

His sale, Christie’s, London, 2 July 1971, lot 24 (unsold);

Thence by descent to the present owner

Gilbert’s mother, Charlotte (née Cole, 1824-1910), was a strong and abiding influence on Alfred throughout her long life. The daughter of a shoemaker and musician (her father James was the church organist at Tarrington in Herefordshire), Charlotte and her sister, Susannah, attended the Royal College of Music in the mid-1840s, where she met her husband, Alfred Gilbert snr; they married in 1853. Her artistic nature was a constant influence on her children. Gilbert’s nephew, Adrian Bury, remembered his grandmother as: ‘small of stature, with a somewhat gipsy-like cast of countenance, and piercing, dark eyes, expressive of great pride and courage … much admired, and held not a little in awe because of her imperious manner … She was completely devoted to her celebrated son and he to her’ (Dorment 1985, op. cit., p. 4).

The unusual title of Gilbert’s bust of his mother is related to his hope that he could win a commission for a memorial to Beethoven. The reason he believed his mother’s portrait was appropriate is because Gilbert himself is said to have had a striking resemblance to Beethoven. This extended to a family likeness and one reviewer of the Royal Academy exhibition observed that: ‘The work in the Sculpture Gallery attracts by its strangeness and genius … The face is that of Beethoven, but the strange overhanging draperies are feminine and the effect of the whole is enigmatical; but the power is extraordinary and the skill of modelling wonderful. The originality of the workmanship, as well as the conception, marks out the bust as the most striking thing in the room’ (Dorment, 1986, op. cit., p. 187). The 1904 Royal Academy catalogue gives the full title for this bust as: The mother of the 9th Symphony - Bust. study of a head for a contemplated monumental homage to Beethoven.

Charlotte Gilbert’s ‘imperious manner’ was also an inspiration for Gilbert’s famous Jubilee Memorial monument to Queen Victoria in Winchester Castle of 1887. Charlotte was only five years younger than Queen Victoria and Dorment has noted that Gilbert infused his mother’s indomitable personality into his portrait of the Queen.

Gilbert’s earliest known work is a seated portrait of his school Headmaster, the Reverend Alfred Leeman, made around 1870. During his career he sculpted fewer than 20 portraits, excluding those of Queen Victoria, and he brought his characteristic originality and inventiveness to this very traditional genre. Many of his portraits challenge the distinction between portraiture and thematic sculpture, such as his moving double portrait of his wife Alice and their first child, George (see lot 18, Master Sculpture from Four Millennia, Sotheby’s 5^th July 2022, https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2022/master-sculpture-from-four-millennia/mother-and-child), or his late imaginary portraits of Alice Mary Towneley, First Baroness O’Hagan, entitled The Chatelaine, and Edward Stocks-Massey, entitled The Virtuoso, (Dorment, 1986, cat. nos. 109 and 110), and indeed the present original plaster bust of Gilbert’s mother.