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Lot description
JOSEPH GOTT (1785-1860) A WHITE MARBLE GROUP OF A BOY WITH A BASKET PLAYING WITH A GREYHOUND ROME, BEFORE 1841 Signed J. GOTT Ft approximately 86cm high, 68cm wide Provenance: Possibly in the collection of the artist's relative John Gott and his wife, where A boy with a basket playing with a greyhound is recorded by 1841. Another version, dated 1853, was in the collection of J E Duboys from where it entered the Musée des Beaux Arts in Angers in 1882. The Yorkshire born artist Joseph Gott had trained under John Flaxman between 1798 and 1802 before entering the Royal Academy in 1805 aged just 20. A gifted artist who combined a skill for working in the Classical manner with an undoubted joy in portraying dogs and children, in 1822 he was awarded a pension from the Academy's then president Sir Thomas Lawrence, for travel abroad specifically to Italy as well as a personal letter of introduction to Europe's greatest living sculptor, Antonio Canova (1757 - 1822). Despite hardship, family tragedy and depression, in Rome he thrived. He forged a career ranging from monuments to public figures, portrait busts and, as with these two examples, more playful animals and children in natural harmony.Every visitor to Rome, this half century past, has looked in at the studio of M. Gott... The Athenaeum, 28 January 1860, p.139, in T. Friedman and T. Stevens, Joseph Gott, 1786-1860, Sculptor, exh. cat., Leeds and Liverpool, 1972, p. 56.He is a man of first-rate genius. His works have been distinguished by the most fertile invention; powerful conception of expression; a high feeling of the beauty of female form; a fine taste and correct judgement - and the whole mingled together by that quality peculiar to genius, which I think Lord Verulam calls 'Felicity' - everything he does seems a creation of his own mind. The painter Thomas Unwins writing to Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1825