Sculptor of whom little is known. Between 1737 and 1744/1745 he was sculptor to the Society of Dilettanti and was commissioned to carve, to the design of the society’s official painter, George Knapton, ivory decoration representing the ‘Tomb of Bacchus’ on a balloting-box (illus. in L. Cust, History of the Society of Dilettanti, London, 1914, facing p. 32). He completed a number of funerary monuments, including those to Charles Sergison (1734), Holy Trinity, Cuckfield, West Sussex; Lane Harrison (d.1740), St Mary, Perivale, Middlesex; Humphrey Hall (d.1742), St Leonard, Bengeo, Hertfordshire; Bishop Stephen Weston (d.1742) and his wife (d.1741) and daughter (d.1762), Exeter Cathedral; William Mitchell (d.1745) and his wife, Elizabeth (d.1748), St Mary, Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire; and Sir James Hallett (d.1753), St Mary the Virgin, Little Dunmow, Essex. His monuments, with the exception of that to Bishop Weston, are generally adaptations of designs from James Gibbs’s A Book of Architecture, 1728, comprising various combinations of female personifications and putti, with a portrait bust of the deceased set within a medallion. Whinney noted that his figures and draperies derive stylistically from Michael Rysbrack. Only one signed portrait bust is known, that of John Fane, 7th Earl of Westmorland (1742), which, it is thought, was commissioned by Lord Cobham for the Temple of Friendship at Stowe (now Victoria and Albert Museum).
The spelling of his surname is inconsistent, even among his own signed works. He signs his Sergison and Hallett monuments ‘Adey’, and his Mitchell monument and John Fane bust, ‘Ady’. In the records of the Society of Dilettanti his name is spelt both ‘Adey’ and ‘Adye’.
Bibliography: D. Bilbey and M. Trusted, British Sculpture 1470 to 2000. A Concise Catalogue of the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2002, pp. 43–44; M. Craske, The Silent Rhetoric of the Body. A History of Monumental Sculpture and Commemorative Art in England, 1720–1770, New Haven and London, pp. 121, 122; L. Cust, History of the Society of Dilettanti, London, 1914, pp. 31–33; R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851, London, [1968], p. 15; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, p. 9; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 132–33; M. Whinney, English Sculpture 1720–1830, London, 1971, pp. 72–75; M. Whinney (rev. J. Physick), Sculpture in Britain 1530–1830, London, (1964), 2nd (integrated) edn 1988, pp. 247, 248.
Terry Cavanagh, March 2025
