Oliver Cromwell

This portraitback to top

Similar to NPG 3014, but the detailing even more blurred; the joins of the mould uncomfortably visible.
Woolner made another cast from the Ashmolean mask, now in the Museum of London (A18331); [1] another which he owned is in the Harvard University Library, [2] and a similar mask is in the Russell-Cotes Museum, Bournemouth.

Footnotesback to top

1) Twenty-five Years of the London Museum, 1937, pl.xlvii.
2) L. Hutton, Portraits in Plaster, 1894, p 212, as inscribed ‘a cast from the original mask taken after death, once owned by Thomas Woolner, Sculptor. It was given by him to Thomas Carlyle, who gave it, in 1873, to Charles Eliot Norton, from whom Harvard received it in 1881’.

Referenceback to top

Piper 1963
D. Piper, Catalogue of the Seventeenth Century Portraits in the National Portrait Gallery 1625-1714, 1963, p 95.

Provenanceback to top

[‘Presented by the Royal Society to Mr Shipley, afterwards Bishop of St Asaph, who married a sister of Dr James Miller’s great-grandfather, and at Dr Miller’s death Mr Garbanati of Glasshouse Street, London, bought it at the sale of his effects in June 1853’]¹ Thomas Woolner RA, 1859; his daughter Amy, from whom purchased 1912.

¹ Letter from Woolner to Thomas Carlyle 1870, annotated ‘Mr Woolner bought it of Mr Garbanati in 1859’ (typescript copies on file).


This extended catalogue entry is by John Ingamells, one of a limited number of entries drafted in 2010 for the incomplete catalogue, Early Stuart Portraits 1625-1685, and is as written then. For the most up-to-date details on individual Collection works, we recommend reading the information provided in the Search the Collection results on this website in parallel with this text.

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