legacies, he left to Francis Russell Palmer, Francis Douce, and Thomas Kerrich [q. v.] Sir William Beechey and John Thomas Smith, afterwards keeper of the prints in the British Museum, a former pupil, who became his master's biographer, were appointed executors, each receiving a legacy of 100l. All the tools and marble on the premises were given to his carver, Alexander Goblet. His collection of antiques, busts, and models were, under his directions, sold by Christie in Mortimer Street on 3 July 1823, and at the auctioneer's own rooms in Pall Mall on the two days following (see Sale Catalogue in the British Museum with the prices realised on the first day). His prints and drawings were sold by Messrs. Evans of King Street.
In person Nollekens was grotesquely ill-proportioned. His small stature gained him the nickname of ‘Little Nolly’ among his intimates; but his head was of unusual size, his neck short, his shoulders narrow, and his body too large. His nose, we are told, ‘resembled the rudder of an Antwerp packet-boat,’ and his legs were very much bowed.
The record of Nollekens's artistic activity is long and honourable. From 1771 to 1816 he was a constant contributor to the Royal Academy. His last works shown there included busts of Mr. Coutts the banker, Lord Liverpool, and the Duke of Newcastle. He was a most industrious worker, rising always at dawn to water his clay and begin his day's labour. Even when infirmities had reduced him to dotage he was fond of amusing himself by modelling, and shortly before his death executed a little group from a design by Beechey. Among his sitters for busts were George III, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of York, the Duke of Cumberland, the Duchess of Argyll, Sir Joseph Banks, the Duke of Bedford, Dr. Burney, George Canning, Lord Castlereagh, Lord and Lady Charlemont, Charles James Fox, Lord Grenville, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, General Paoli, William Pitt, the Empress of Russia, and the Duke of Wellington. By his ‘stock pieces,’ the busts of Pitt and Fox, he made large sums. Pitt would never consent to sit to him, and the bust was modelled from a death-mask and from the well-known portrait by Hoppner. Nollekens is said to have sold seventy-four replicas in marble at 120 guineas each, and six hundred casts at six guineas. His statue of Pitt in the Senate House at Cambridge, for which he received altogether 4,000l., was carried out from the same materials.
His work as a sculptor of monuments was considerable, the best known being the monument to ‘the three captains’ in Westminster Abbey, and that to Mrs. Howard in Corby Church, Cumberland. The ‘Captains’ monument was left in his studio for fourteen years, waiting for the inscription. Nollekens lost patience at last, and forced a conclusion by a personal appeal to George III. Of his ideal statues the most popular were the nude female figures, technically known as ‘Venuses,’ the best of which were perhaps the ‘Venus chiding Cupid,’ executed for Lord Yarborough; the ‘Venus anointing her Hair,’ bought at the sale by Mrs. Palmer; the ‘Venus with the Sandal,’ and—his own favourite production—the Venus seated, with her arms round her legs, the model of which was bought by Lord Egremont, and carved in marble after its author's death by Rossi. It is now at Petworth. For Townley he restored the small Venus now in the British Museum by the addition of a pair of arms. A figure of Mercury, modelled from his pupil Smith, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1783, Walpole describes as ‘the best piece in the whole exhibition—arch—flesh most soft.’ An indifferent draughtsman, and possessing but the scantiest knowledge of anatomy, Nollekens combined taste with felicity in seizing upon the characteristic points of a sitter. His busts are never without vitality. In more ambitious things his treatment of the marble is excellent; his conventional draperies are well cast, and his management of the stock motives of his time is governed by a real sense of decorative coherence. Modern ideas find no presage in his work, but he treated those of his day with skill and intelligence.
Two portraits of Nollekens—one by Lemuel F. Abbott and the other by James Lonsdale—are in the National Portrait Gallery. A third picture, by Harlow, belonged to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts; and a fourth, by an anonymous artist, is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
[Nollekens and his Times, by John Thomas Smith, keeper of the prints in the British Museum (a candid and uncomplimentary biography, from which some deductions have to be made; for the author, although intimate with the sculptor, did not, as he probably expected to do, benefit under his will), 1829—a new edition edited by Mr. Edmund Gosse, 1894; Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. Hill; Leslie's Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds, continued by Tom Taylor; Redgrave's Dictionary of Artists of the British School; Catalogue of the Sale of Nollekens; Hints to Joseph Nollekens, esq., R.A., on his modelling a Bust of Lord Grenville; Princess Lichtenstein's Holland House; Walpole's Letters.]
