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A marble head of Admiral Lord Nelson from a bust by or after Thaller and Ranson
Height of head: 10 in (26cm) Overall height: 18 in (46cm)
The antique condition life-size head shown looking forward and mounted on a later bronzed wooden plinth. The nose restored. English, circa 1801 This head is by or after Franz Thaller’s and Matthias Ranson’s bust, Horatio Nelson, Viscount Nelson, 1801. The present fragment was discovered during renovation work in the grounds of Possingworth Park, East Sussex. In 1800 Nelson and the Hamiltons left Naples for England via Vienna where crowds flocked to see him having his portrait painted by Heinrich Füger. He gave a further sitting to the court sculptor Franz Christian Thaller from which the well-known National Maritime Museum’s bust in rear-admiral’s uniform was produced. At some time before 1805 Thaller’s bust reached Merton House where it stood in the drawing room. Copies were subsequently produced in marble by Turnerelli, Nollekens and Bertolini and others. The present bust is believed to be one of the latter acquired by the banker Louis Huth in the 1860s for his newly built Sussex mansion.
Louis Huth (1821-1905), of Hertford Street, Mayfair, was a significant patron of the arts and committee member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club. He was mentor to George Salting and patron of Gabriel Dante Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, George Frederick Watts, who created the Trafalgar Square Lions at the base of Nelson’s Column and sculptor Alexander Munro. He was a major buyer in the London auction rooms where his collecting tastes were wide ranging. He acquired works by some of the greatest British artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Gainsborough, Turner, Hogarth, Reynolds, Stubbs and Constable. In the mid1860s Huth purchased old Possingworth Manor in East Sussex in order to build ‘one of the grandest mansions in the South of England’. It was built to the designs of Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt in a Tudor-gothic style at a cost of ‘more than £60,000’. A garden of formal terraces, a sunken lawn, pinetum and the extensive lake was laid out from 1866 by Robert Marnock. Squire Huth died without issue in 1905.
