Explore Collections Explore The Collections
You are here: CollectionsOnline  /  Rectangular stand designed to display Thomas Banks' model for the monument to Penelope Boothby
  • image M44.A

Rectangular stand designed to display Thomas Banks' model for the monument to Penelope Boothby

Mahogany

Height: 51.5cm
Width: 115.5cm
Depth: 53.7cm

Museum number: M44.A

On display: Museum Corridor - outside the Picture 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

English, unknown maker, c. 1805-30, mahogany, the legs formed as balusters without bases and with brackets at the top of each leg; made for the sculptor Thomas Banks’ plaster for the monument to Penelope Boothby (M44) at Ashbourne, Derbyshire.

This stand matches SC32.A, which supports Sir Francis Chantrey’s plaster ‘Sleeping Child’ (SC32). Soane acquired both sculptures with their stands in April 1830 from Chantrey.1 The two stands must have been made after Thomas Banks’ death in 1805 when both sculptures were under the care of Chantrey and it seems possible that they are the only remnants of the fittings of Chantrey’s sculpture gallery, for which his friend Soane had designed an ‘Ante-Room’ in 1829-30.2 It was highly appropriate for the two to have matching stands as Banks’s monument, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1793, was the progenitor of Chantrey’s sculpture.

1 H. Dorey ‘Soane and Banks’ in exh. cat. Thomas Banks 1735-1805 Britain’s First Modern Sculptor, Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2005, p.18.
2 The Ante Room was between the drawing-room and the sculpture gallery where cats 75 and 165 would have been displayed. See P. Dean, Sir John Soane and London, 2006, at note 23 p.194.

Exhibition history

Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836, The Courtauld Gallery, London, 17 October 2001 - 20 January 2002

Associated items

M44, object displayed on this


Soane collections online is being continually updated. If you wish to find out more or if you have any further information about this object please contact us: worksofart@soane.org.uk