Richard Hayward (1728-1800).
Extracted from
Hayward was born in Warwickshire. In 1753 he spent a year in
Rome and was a friend of Thomas Jenkins who supplied Charles Townley with part
of his sculpture collection. It may have been through Jenkins that Charles
Townley employed Hayward. Hayward made chimney pieces for Woburn Abbey (1771),
Kedleston (1760), Ingres Abbey in Kent (1771) and a large number for Somerset
House in London beginning in 1778.
There is an entry in Charles Townley's personal account book
which reads -
"1780
To Richd. Hayward
sculptor remainder
in full for dining
room chimney pd
dft. on Wrights 25
July £50-18s."
This is probably for the marble neo-classical fireplace
which is now in the red drawing room. It is certainly very similar to a
fireplace in the State boudoir at Kedleston. This similarity includes the use
of the rather unusual inlaid marble columns.
Biog. Dict. Sculptors entry for Hayward
Best remembered by art historians as a chronicler of British
visitors to Rome and as a collector of sculptors’ sales catalogues, Hayward was
also a successful sculptor with a diverse practice. He was christened at
Bulkington,Warks, on 13 May 1725, the son of Richard and Mary Hayward from
nearby Weston-in-Arden. He seems to have been apprenticed first to Christopher
Horsnaile I, a relation by marriage, at whose house in St Andrew, Holborn, he
was living c1740 (Masons’ Co Assistants, f4, 7).
In June 1742 however he was
apprenticed to Sir Henry Cheere for a full seven year term at the customary
rate of £105.
Cheere’s workshop:
Hayward appears quickly to have become a pivotal figure in
Cheere’s workshop. Cheere’s accounts show payments of £1,901 made to Hayward
between February 1744 and June 1747, though there is no information on the
precise nature of Hayward’s work. Webb has suggested that he may have been
running the workshop, and that workshop products such as the monument to
William Pole, 1746, may confidently be attributed to Hayward rather than Cheere
(2). In February 1748, before he finished his apprenticeship, Hayward, who was
then still living in St Andrew, Holborn, made his will, which was witnessed by
three members of the Horsnaile family (FRC PROB 11/1347/p279). The document
reveals that he already owned estates in Weston-in-Arden and Bulkington, which
he intended to leave to his sisters, Mary and Anne.
Unlike Cheere and most members of his workshop, Hayward
played an active part in the affairs of the Masons’ Company after gaining his
freedom in 1749. In 1752 he was in a position of authority as renter warden. In
June 1753 he went to Rome, where he stayed until April 1754. Little is known of
Hayward’s Rome years but his list of visitors to Italy, beginning with his own
arrival and updated via contacts in Rome over the next 20 years, has become an
indispensable source for historians of 18th-century artistic tourism. The
connections Hayward made in Rome benefited his career: the English banker and
dealer, Thomas Jenkins, wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth from Rome on 30 March
1755: ‘It is said here that your Lordship is about building a house at
Westminster. If such a person as Mr. Hayward, a sculptor, should be recommended
to your Lordship, I believe I may venture to say that he is a deserving young
man; I knew him sometime here and he behaved well’ (HMC 1896, 170).
Like Cheere, he was involved in the Society of Arts,
becoming a member in November 1757 and replacing Louis François Roubiliac on
the committee after his death in 1762. He exhibited what appear to be relief
tablets for chimneypieces at the Society of Artists exhibitions in 1761, 1764
and 1766 (60, 61, 62), and he supplied chimneypieces at the same period for
Kedleston and to the Jacobite, William Burrell Massingberd at Ormesby (31, 32).
He was also negotiating with Massingberd for a monument: in 1762 three designs
were sent up to Ormesby with a scale of prices ranging from £28-£80, depending
on the material selected. The designs, which were not executed, have a
neo-classical simplicity which shows the influence of his Rome experience.
Hayward appears to have had a secondary business as a dealer, for he supplied
the antiquarian, Thomas Hollis, with a copy of Antichita di Roma, imported from
Rome in 1764. Hayward apparently also brought other Italian goods and
materialsl (46-8). Two figures by Hayward ‘after the antique’ were listed at
Charles Jennens’s house in Great Ormond Street in Dodsley’s guide to London
(26, 27).
Patrons:
Jennens, the non-juring writer and collector, was a
supportive patron. In 1764 Hayward carved a cenotaph to the scholar Edward
Holdsworth for Jennens’s park at Gopsall, Leics (3). This work, executed in
‘fine statuary marble of Luna’, was noted in two accounts published during
Hayward’s lifetime (Nichols 1795-1815, vol 4, 858; GM, 1791, pt 1, 305). It was
placed in a temple surmounted by Roubiliac’s emblematic figure of Fides
Christiana. Hayward would use a version of this figure of Religion more than a
decade later on his monument to Samuel Phillipps (11). When Jennens died in
1773 it was Hayward who provided his monument, drawing on Roubiliac’s
iconography for an ambitious composition in coloured marbles with a grieving
female figure before a crumbling pyramid (10). Jennens was one of several
patrons in the Midlands. Sir Roger Newdigate also commissioned extensively (37,
43, 56). A bill for £70 in the Newdigate archives relates to Hayward’s monument
(again with a figure of Religion) to Elizabeth and Sophia Newdigate (13), and
the sculptor also carved a remarkable gothic chimneypiece for the drawing room
at Arbury (33). Letters about both commissions survive and suggest that there
may have been two separate monuments to the Newdigate ladies.
In 1763 Hayward was listed in Mortimer’s Director as a
‘Statuary. Near Dover-Street, Piccadilly’ (Mortimer 1763, 13). His property was
rated at £12 and his workshop remained at that address for 35 years. His
neighbours included John Cheere and the Carters (Benjamin and Thomas II). It
was around this time that Thomas Banks was recorded by Joseph Nollekens as ‘at
Mr Hayward’s’ (Whitley 1930, 40), presumably as an assistant. Another workshop
member was Peter Seguiér, who served his apprenticeship with Hayward. Though
the rates on his property were modest, Hayward appears to have developed a good
business, for he provided a succession of small monuments in Westminster Abbey
(5, 6, 7, 12, 15, 17, 18). The most notable of these was to William Strode
(12): it has a relief of the Weeping Dacia set into a segmental pediment, above
an austere classical tablet and apron. The tablet is mounted on a slab of
unusual ‘bianco e nero’ marble. Hayward was a regular buyer of marbles and
other materials at sculptors’ auctions from the 1750s until the 1780s. To the
lasting benefit of sculpture historians he preserved the catalogues of sales,
which now form a valuable archive in the British Museum. His most notable
purchase was almost half of Henry Cheere’s stock, auctioned when Cheere retired
in 1770.
In 1772 John Norton, a London-based merchant from Virginia,
was assigned the task of finding a suitable sculptor for a statue of the late
Governor of the Province, Lord Botetourt, sponsored by the House of Burgesses
(28). Norton, with the assistance of Botetourt’s nephew, the 5th Duke of
Beaufort, fixed upon Hayward as the sculptor. Norton announced the decision to
a relative in Yorktown, adding ‘he’s to be finished in 12 months completely
with iron rails, packages &ca, and to be put on ship for £700’ (Mason 1937,
224). Hayward worked to schedule and the statue arrived in Virginia in May
1773. Apparently ‘very apprehensive’ about accidents befalling his work,
Hayward sent his own mason John Hirst to America to set it up. It is the oldest
surviving public statue in North America, and the figure, with
classically-derived reliefs of Britannia and America on the base, was
‘universally admired’, according to one of the burgesses (Mason 1937, 332).
Judging from Norton’s correspondence, its particular merit was its
verisimilitude, achieved by reference to a wax medallion by Isaac Gosset.
Hayward worked with the architects James Paine, Henry Keene,
Robert Adam and Sir William Chambers as a purveyor of chimneypieces and
architectural sculpture. Under Chambers’s direction he supplied work in the
1770s and 1780s for Woburn Abbey, Ingress Abbey and Blenheim (39, 49, 53). In
January 1774 the Duke of Marlborough wrote to Chambers that he wanted ‘much to
have this fountain settled… you must let Hayward or one of his foremen meet you
here and I’ll have the parts of the fountain put out ready for him to see’.
This allusion is almost certainly to the famous Bernini fountain (53), which
was set up by the 4th Duke in the park at Blenheim and later repaired and
re-located by the 9th Duke in a place of honour on the terrace below the west
front of the palace (Chambers’s Letters-Book, 41136, fol 1). Hayward does not
appear to have been much involved with the setting up of the Royal Academy but
Chambers employed him extensively on chimneypieces at Somerset House, paying
him a total of £835 0s 3d for his work on the building (40-42). Among the
effects itemised in Hayward's posthumous sale was a ‘large portfolio’ of
designs by Chambers.
Hayward’s workshop appears to have expanded in the 1780s.
His rates more than doubled to £33 in 1784, and after a few fluctuations,
remained at £26 from 1787 until his death. He had attracted the patronage of
the Carter-Thelwall family of Redbourne Hall, Lincs (14, 16, 50, 55) for whom
he executed some innovative work including a relief of an oriental harbour on
the monument to Roger Carter (16). Another innovative work was the large
triptych monument to William Wyldbore (22). But on the whole, Hayward’s
monuments of the 1780s, though always delicately carved and detailed, were
relatively unambitious and repetitive. The memorials to Mary Milles and George
Ogden (20, 24) have almost identical reliefs of a woman grieving over a
sarcophagus above a tablet, set into a coloured marble surround with bowed sides.
Numerous other works which follow this pattern, occasionally with a putto
extinguishing a very long torch (as on the Holdsworth monument), can be seen
all over the country and may well come from Hayward’s workshop. He reserved
what are probably his finest works for his family church in Bulkington,
advertising his skill both as a sculptor and as a marble merchant with a font,
which carries the inscription, a ‘fragment of ancient numidian marble ...
imported from Rome by Richard Hayward’. The bowl has reliefs of religious
subjects, which are lightly handled and have been compared by Whinney to the
pretty genre scenes of Francis Wheatley (57). Hayward’s retable relief of The
Last Supper (58) is a more condensed composition with animated figures. In 1781
Hayward erected a monument in the church to his parents, with another Weeping
Dacia crying over a ruined landscape, together with an inscription recording
Hayward’s role as a benefactor, and the material, Carrara marble (21).
Death.
He died in London on 11 August 1800, and his will was proved
that September. His sister Mary had died in 1788, leaving Anne Hayward (now
Debary) as his sole heir. She erected a monument to her brother and sister in
Bulkington, with an epitaph identifying the donor, ‘the surviving sister of
Richard and Mary Hayward (who) placed this marble as a memorial of the taste
and genius of one, of the virtue and affection of both’. Since this is
virtually identical to the Milles and Ogden monuments, it seems probable that
it too came from the workshop.
Anne authorised a sale of her brother’s ‘marble
chimneypieces, alto and basso-relievos, ornaments, paintings, books on
architecture, and valuable stock of marble’ which took place in November at his
premises ‘opposite the Old White Horse Cellar’ in Piccadilly. There were
numerous lots of antique alabaster and marble as well as recently quarried
specimens from Italy, Spain, Germany and Ireland. The catalogue also suggests
that Hayward was a notable collector, for he owned paintings identified by the
auctioneer as being by Wilson, Poussin, Heemskirk, Ruysdael, Correggio and
Elsheimer. Hayward’s obituary described him as ‘a kind, intelligent, and warm
friend, to many who will long deplore his loss’, and added of his work that his
‘performances in the line of his profession, dispersed throughout the kingdom,
shew him to have been an admirable master of the old school’ (GM, pt 2, 1800,
909). Modern scholarship has tended to concur with this judgement, seeing
Hayward as a relic of the mason-sculptor tradition in an age when sculpture was
increasingly seeking recognition as a polite art. Lord has also pointed out
that in his enthusiasm for Rome, his utilisation of objects and motifs from
antiquity, and his possible influence on Thomas Banks, he can also be seen as a
progenitor of the neoclassical taste.
_____________________
The Chimneypiece below attributed to Hayward.
With Messrs Jamb of Pimlico Road, London in 2018.
The quality of the relief is superlative and illustrates the story of the Three Foxes from Aesop's Fables
The thin Sienna marble surround to the centre tablet is unusual.
Jamb say in their blog "after an original model by Henry Cheere".
"This magnificent mantel was made in the 1770's after Henry
Cheere closed his workshop, possibly by one of his ex-employees. After closing
his yard Henry Cheere sold all his original terra cotta models in auction in
1770, many of which were bought by his ex-foreman Richard Hayward (1728-1800)
who had started his own business making fireplaces. The original model was
exhibited in1766 at the Society of Arts by William Collins (1721-1793) who was
Cheere’s top modeller".
___________________________
The monument to Sir William Pole (1741) Master of the Household of Queen
Anne. Described as made 1746 by Richard Hayward in the studio of Henry Cheere, at Shute St Michael, Devon. in the Church Monuments Gazetteer
http://www.churchmonumentsgazetteer.co.uk/Devon-5.html
._____________________________
The Bateman Mercury
Height 1770 mm.
Photographs from National Trust Website
http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/109012
The Bateman Mercury is rather an anomaly in the Kedleston
cast collection as it was the only cast to have been supplied by the
sculptor-mason Richard Hayward (1728-1800), the others having been supplied by
Joseph Wilton and Matthew Brettingham, and it was the only cast to have been
made from an antiquity in a British private collection, the others having been
cast from celebrated marbles in Florence and Rome.
It is one of two known plaster casts by Hayward of a
2nd-century Roman marble statue of Mercury, a copy of a lost Greek figure,
acquired by William Bateman, first Viscount Bateman (1695-1744) of Shobdon
Court (Vermeule and Bothmer 1956, p. 342). Praised by the antiquary Charles
Townley, Bateman's Mercury was purchased by the newspaper magnate William
Randolph Hearst and bequeathed to the Los Angeles County Museum in 1948 (LACMA
inv.no. 48.24.15). A second plaster cast was recorded in the Duke of Richmond's
Gallery and later lead versions came from the workshop of John Cheere, Sir
Henry's brother (Kenworthy-Browne 1993, p. 252).
Richard Hayward was for many years the apprentice and
employee of Britain's great monumental sculptor Sir Henry Cheere (1703-81). He
is perhaps best known for compiling a list of British visitors and Grand
Tourists to Rome, which he began on his arrival to the city in June 1753 and
which he continued to update via his network of contacts over the next twenty
years. Returning to London in April 1754, Hayward ran a successful workshop of
his own from premises in Piccadilly, producing sculptures, chimneypieces and
reliefs. His workshop neighboured that of sculptor John Cheere, brother of Sir
Henry and supplier of the lead statuary at Kedleston (see NT 108726.1-NT
108726.4, NT 108712.1, NT 108712.2). An exhibiting member of the Society of Artists,
Hayward also produced architectural sculpture for Robert Adam (architect of
Kedleston Hall), Sir William Chambers and James Paine. He was a regular buyer
at sculptors' auctions and preserved for posterity the sales catalogues he
consulted, today held at the British Museum.
A receipted bill in the Kedleston Archive shows that on 23
January 1758 Nathaniel Curzon (1726-1804) paid Hayward £8 for a 'Statue of
Mercury in Plaster of Paris’. It was displayed in the Marble Hall where it has
remained ever since (see list of 'Hall Statues' including 'Mercury' in 'List of
Statues I have', c. 1760, MS, Kedleston Archive).
__________________________
Bateman type Mercury
Lead Statue Attrib. Cheere
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