Sculptor, christened at Eltham, Kent (now south London), on 30 June 1738. He was the father of J.T. Smith, the biographer of the sculptor Joseph Nollekens. Although Nathaniel Smith’s handful of surviving works demonstrate considerable skill, he usually worked as an assistant to more successful sculptors. He was a childhood friend of Nollekens and learnt drawing alongside him at Shipley’s school in the Strand. On 7 August 1755 he was apprenticed to Louis François Roubiliac and, according to J.T. Smith’s obituarist in the Gentleman’s Magazine, worked on a number of his master’s monuments in Westminster Abbey. Smith’s monument to Sir Merrick Burrell (d. 1787) in St George’s Church, West Grinstead, West Sussex, closely derives from Roubiliac’s monument to William and Elizabeth Harvey (dated 1758) in St Andrew’s Church, Hempstead, Essex. Between 1758 and 1762, while he was still with Roubiliac, Smith was awarded six premiums by the Society of Arts, two for drawings and four for models in clay; three of the clay models remain untraced but that from 1760, simply referred to in the Gentleman’s Magazine as ‘model of animals’, is thought to be Bringing Down the Stag (terracotta, dated 1760), now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. As Ingrid Roscoe notes, this relief is ‘an astoundingly graphic and naturalistic work … which well endorses the decision of the Society of Arts to award him a premium’. After Roubiliac’s death in 1762, Smith became an assistant to Joseph Wilton. J.T. Smith claims that his father carved Wilton’s bust of Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1757; British Museum) and spent three years carving the figures on Wilton’s monument to General Wolfe (1760–1772) in Westminster Abbey; also, that he and another of Wilton’s assistants, John Atkins (fl. 1761–1777), executed a great deal of their master’s sculpture for the exterior of Somerset House. In 1770, Smith was one of the unsuccessful entrants in the competition (won by John Francis Moore) for the statue of Alderman William Beckford for the Guildhall, London; Smith’s terracotta model is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. By 1779, Smith was Nollekens’ principal assistant and, presumably because of his failure to succeed as a sculptor in his own right, later became, according to the Gentleman’s Magazine, a well-known printseller’.
Smith may also have been a painter of miniatures. Algernon Graves, in his dictionary of contributors to the exhibitions of the Society of Artists and the Free Society of Artists, presumes the present sculptor, who exhibited three sculptures with the Free Society of Artists from an address in St Martin’s Lane in 1761 and 1763 to be one and the same person as the Nathaniel Smith, by then of Portland Street, who exhibited six painted miniatures with the Society of Artists between 1767 and 1773.
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. 152–53; A. Dawson, Portrait Sculpture. A Catalogue of the British Museum collection, c.1675–1975, London, 1999, pp. 10, 68; K.A. Esdaile, English Monumental Sculpture since the Renaissance, London, 1927, pp. 21, 22; The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. CIII, pt 1 (1833), p. 641 (obituary of J.T. Smith); A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts. A complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, (8 vols, 1905–06), Vol. VII (Sacco–Tofano), 1906, p. 188; A. Graves, The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760-1791; the Free Society of Artists, 1761-1783; a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from the foundation of the societies to 1791, 1907, p. 241; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 1152–53; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 169–70; J.T. Smith, Nollekens and His Times, London, (1828), 1986, pp. 4, 5, 24, 41, 76–77, 117, 124; M. Whinney (rev. J. Physick), Sculpture in Britain 1530–1830, London, (1964), 2nd integrated edn 1988, pp. 198, 267.
Terry Cavanagh, April 2025