Beschreibung:

Garden Statuary: A rare late Coade stone figure of the Diana de Gabies, circa 1830-1840, on Coade stone pedestal, the base of the statue stamped Coade’s terracotta, Lambeth the figure 165cm high, the pedestal 70cm high, overall height 235cm. Eleanor Coade (d.1821) opened her Lambeth Manufactory for ceramic artificial stone in 1769, and appointed the sculptor John Bacon as its manager two years later. She was employed by all the leading late 18th century architects. From about 1777 she began her engraved designs, which were published in 1784 in a catalogue of over 700 items entitled A Descriptive Catalogue of Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory. Then in 1799, the year she entered into partnership with her cousin John Sealy she issued a handbook of her Pedlar’s Lane exhibition Gallery. The firm became Coade and Sealy from this date and following Sealy’s death in 1813, it reverted to Coade and in 1821 with the death of the younger Eleanor Coade control of the firm passed to William Croggan, who died in 1835, following bankruptcy. Coade’s manufactures resembling a finegrained natural stone, have always been famed for their durability. The original of this statue was excavated by Gavin Hamilton in 1792 on Prince Borghese’s property at Gabii outside Rome. In September 1807 it was purchased together with the bulk of the Borghese antiquities by Napoleon Bonaparte, brother-in-law of Prince Camillo Borghese. It was sent from Rome between 1808 and 1811 and by 1820 it was displayed in the Louvre where it still stands. On the advice of Sir Thomas Lawrence a plaster cast was placed in the entrance hall of the Athenaeum in London. Many smaller commercial copies were also manufactured, in bronze, in basalt stoneware by Copeland and in terracotta by Blashfield. This model appears in Blashfield’s 1851 catalogue as No 202 and it is almost certain that he purchased some of the Coade moulds including this model. Although the pedestal is not stamped, the consistency of the clay, which is identical to the statue would suggest that it is also Coade stone. Included with this lot are a couple of letters to the owner of the statue written by Alison Kelly, the recognised authority on Coade stone and author of Mrs Coade’s Stone, published by SPA 1990 Literature: See Taste and the Antique by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Yale University press, 1981.