Sculptor. Belt worked as an ornamentalist in the studio of the sculptor John Henry Foley. From 1871, he was an assistant to Charles Lawes, a pupil of Foley. In 1875 Belt became independent, and in 1879 won the competition for the Byron Monument for Park Lane, London, a project promoted by Benjamin Disraeli. Following the statue’s unveiling in 1880, an article appeared in the magazine Vanity Fair, claiming that all the work produced by Belt between 1876 and 1880, including the Byron statue, had been executed by foreign assistants. The article led to the famous Belt v. Lawes libel case of 1882–84. This case hinged on the question of artistic authenticity. Belt won the case and was commissioned in 1885 by the Corporation of the City of London, to create a replica of Francis Bird’s statue of Queen Anne in front of St Paul’s. The following year, Belt was jailed for the fraudulent sale of jewellery. He had exhibited busts at the Royal Academy since 1873, but ceased to exhibit in 1885. Other works by him are the memorial to Izaak Walton in St Mary’s Church, Stoke-on-Trent (1878), and an undated female nude, entitled Hypatia (marble, Drapers’ Company Hall, London). Until it was destroyed in World War II, Belt’s bust of Disraeli (1882) stood in the City of London Guildhall.
Bibliography (updated 2024): Mapping Sculpture; B. Read, Victorian Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1982, pp. 66–67, 69, 173; J. Sankey, ‘The sculptor’s ghost – the case of Belt v. Lawes’, Sculpture Journal, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2007, pp. 84–89; The Times, Law Reports from 1882, 1883 and 1884 (listed in Read 1982, p. 389n5); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. xxiv, 374–81, 449–50; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 181–85, 202, 360, 436.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011
Richard Claude Belt, by London Stereoscopic & Photographic Company, albumen carte-de-visite, 1882, NPG x46492 (photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London)
