Nollekens and His Times

"Nollekens and His Times" is an extraordinarily candid and detailed biography of the celebrated English sculptor Joseph Nollekens. Written by John Thomas Smith, who served as a long-time associate and observer of the artist, the work transcends the boundaries of a standard life story to provide a sprawling, anecdotal history of the London art world during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It offers an intimate, and often biting, portrait of Nollekens-a man known as much for his immense talent in creating busts of the era's most prominent figures as for his legendary eccentricity and extreme parsimony.

Beyond its focus on Nollekens himself, the narrative serves as a vibrant chronicle of the Georgian era, filled with sketches of contemporary artists, patrons, and public figures. Smith's writing captures the atmosphere of the Royal Academy and the daily lives of the artistic elite with a level of gossip and social detail rarely found in formal biographies of the period. This work remains a vital resource for understanding the development of British sculpture and the social dynamics of the Regency-era art scene, cementing its reputation as one of the most entertaining and informative memoirs in the English language.

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