Sculptor born in Stockport, Cheshire. Nothing is known of his training, but at some point he moved to London and in 1774 married Sarah, the daughter of Thomas Vardy, a furniture carver, in St George’s Church, Hanover Square. The union produced at least thirteen children, three of whom became sculptors: (Sir) Richard Westmacott (1775–1856), George Westmacott (1782–1868) and Henry Westmacott (1784–1861). Westmacott was, in addition, father to Charles Molloy Westmacott (1782–1868) – his illegitimate son with Susannah Molloy – who trained as a sculptor at the Royal Academy but in 1827 became editor of the scandal-mongering journal, The Age. Westmacott’s first workshop was in Ranelagh Street, Pimlico, but in 1783, with his business growing, he moved to larger premises at 25 Mount Street, off Grosvenor Square. Although church monuments form the greater part of his output, his earliest datable works are carved marble chimneypieces, and in 1777 he published a set of 20 engraved designs, all in a classicizing style derived from Robert Adam. One of his finest chimneypieces, still in situ in the music room at Cobham Hall, Kent (1778), features life-size figures of a shepherd boy playing a flute and a dancing girl with a tambourine flanking a central relief of Aurora after Guido Reni, demonstrating, as Margaret Whinney noted, Westmacott’s ‘innate sympathy with the Baroque’. Of his church monuments, many are non-figural and some are carved to designs by the architect James Wyatt (1746–1813), a personal friend; examples include an inscription tablet to Katherine A’Court (d.1776) in St Mary’s, Cheltenham, and portrait busts of Samuel Johnson and David Garrick in Lichfield Cathedral (1793). Westmacott also supplied five marble relief panels of Scenes from the life of Christ for a reredos, part of Wyatt’s restoration of New College, Oxford (1793). He was, nevertheless, capable of producing work, to his own design, and on a much more ambitious level, as is demonstrated by what is generally considered to be his masterpiece, the monument to James and Jane Lenox Dutton (1791) in the church of St Mary Magdalene, Sherborne, Gloucestershire, with its very female angel lifting the veil over a medallion portrait of the deceased while trampling a skeleton representing Death. Westmacott’s business took a downturn in about 1800 and in 1803 he was declared bankrupt. Although he managed to keep his workshop going, he died after a long illness on 27 February 1808. His eldest son, Richard, having by this date set up on his own, the family business, in accordance with the terms of his will, was placed for an initial period of seven years under the joint ownership of his widow and his son Henry, and thenceforth under Henry’s exclusive ownership.
Bibliography: M. Busco, Sir Richard Westmacott, Sculptor, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 6, 7, 10; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 72, 74; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. xviii, 270–71; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. 232–33; N. Penny, Church Monuments in Romantic England, New Haven and London, 1977, pp. 8, 11, 12–13, 206; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 1354–56; M. Whinney (rev. J. Physick), Sculpture in Britain 1530–1830, London, (1964), 2nd integrated edn 1988, pp. 316, 384.
Terry Cavanagh, May 2025