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SM BR3. ©Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Photo: Lewis Bush
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John Flaxman RA (1755 - 1826), sculptor

Cast of a figure of ‘Victory’

Plaster cast

Museum number: BR3

On display: Breakfast Room
All spaces are in No. 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields unless identified as in No. 12, Soane's first house. For tours https://www.soane.org/your-visit

Curatorial note

This is a cast of a celebrated small Roman bronze statuette known as the Victoria von Fossombrone (c.150 AD) now in the Kassel Museum in Germany.

John Flaxman either acquired a cast made in Rome (perhaps by the famous Righetti brothers) or he bought this one when he passed through Kassel on his way back to England in 1794. The original bronze was well known to the Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova, whom Flaxman knew in Rome, and Canova placed his version of it in the hand of his gigantic naked statue of Napoleon, now at Apsley House in London. This cast was given to Soane by Maria Denman and fixed on the bookcase in front of a watercolour of Mrs Soane’s tomb 'under the immediate direction of Sir John Soane' on 10th January 1837, just 10 days before his own death in a carefully planned arrangement which symbolises victory over the grave. It is, touchingly, probably the last object that Soane placed in his Museum.

Literature

Helen Dorey ‘Soane and Flaxman’ in Flaxman: Master of the Purest Line, Exhibition Catalogue, Sir John Soane’s Museum 2003
Helen Dorey, 'Death and Memory: the Architecture of Legacy in Sir John Soane’s Museum’, Death and MemorySoane and the Architecture of Legacy, exhibition catalogue, Sir John Soane's Museum, 2015, p.13


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