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.

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

M44, object displayed on this