67 Collections, Sculpture and the Changing Fortunes of an Eighteenth-Century Portrait Bust Malcolm Baker Abstract This paper dealing with the collecting history of British portrait sculpture explores the changing fortunes of a single portrait bust which has at various times enjoyed celebrity and been lost in obscurity while its identity and attribution have been asserted, doubted, challenged and reconsidered� Sold at the 1848 Stowe sale as a bust of Prior by Roubiliac and purchased by Robert Peel, the bust later disappeared and was eventually acquired by the V&A as a portrait of George Pitt by Henry Cheere� Doubts about its identity and Peel’s naivety as a collector were registered in a poem of around 1850 which is transcribed and discussed here� Keywords bust; Stowe; L� F� Roubiliac; Henry Cheere; George Pitt As any reader of Curiosity and Enlightenment (MacGregor, 2007) will know, the collecting and display of sculpture figure prominently within the history of collections, as this emergent field has been shaped over the past thirty years by Arthur MacGregor and the Journal of the History of Collections� The collecting of the Arundel marbles and their subsequent acquisition by the Ashmolean Museum were turning points in the history of collecting and museums in Britain� Likewise, the enthusiasm shown by successive Renaissance popes for works such as the Belvedere Torso and the subsequent display of these papal acquisitions within the newly established Museo Pio-Clementino form an important part of those developments which resulted in the Enlightenment museum� But the sculpture which plays such a significant role in this history has been primarily antique sculpture� Certainly, the collecting and display of small-scale Renaissance bronzes has attracted increasing attention (Penny and Schmidt, 2008)� Yet the collecting of later sculpture in other media has, as yet, been relatively little explored� Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of eighteenth-century British sculpture� Of course, many of the major achievements of sculptors working in Britain during this period, of course, took the form of monuments and so, as works which remain in situ in churches, are usually (and properly) uncollectable, unless we regard the array of monuments in Westminster Abbey or the clusters of monuments in the family chapels of numerous parish churches as collections� There is, however, one important eighteenth-century sculptural genre which has always been portable and eminently displayable in the context of either the private domestic space or the public museum – the portrait bust� This essay examines the history of one particular (and unusually well-documented) bust and its changing fortunes as it passed from its original owner, through various dealers and private collectors and finally entered a public collection� As well as having (like the dedicatee of this volume) spent some time in Edinburgh, this sculpture has at various times enjoyed celebrity and been lost in obscurity, just as its identity and attribution have been confidently asserted, doubted, challenged and reconsidered� Indeed its varied afterlife, both as a collected object and as a subject of art historical speculation, might illustrate the relationship between the history of collecting and the historiography of art, as this has operated within the field of British sculpture� The marble bust in question (Fig� 1) was given a prominent place in K� A� Esdaile’s pioneering monograph on Louis François Roubiliac – one of the earliest to have been devoted to an eighteenth-century British sculptor – in which it was described as a bust of the poet Matthew Prior by Roubiliac (Esdaile, 1928, 52) and praised in the following terms: For sheer power of characterization it may rank with the Hogarth itself, and the details of its execution, the bravura of the loose cap, the drapery arranged over a frogged coat, and the fluttering ribbons which tied the shirt in pre-stud days, are as realistic as they are decorative� Apart from referring to a formal (and still somewhat Edwardian) mode of men’s dress by way of comparison, Esdaile’s account is unusual for its period in showing such enthusiasm for such a British eighteenth-century portrait sculpture� Some busts of this date had already been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery but primarily on account of the sitters they represented� Of course, British painted portraits of this period had been attracting the attention of both British and American collectors in the 1890s and publications such as Country Life (established in 1897) were encouraging interest in English country houses during the first decade of the twentieth century� At the Victoria & Albert Museum a new interest was being shown in British art during the 1920s and the outcome of this was not only the development of the collections