by Ben Russell
The room that Watt chose to be his workshop was at first simply a place to stow away belongings; in 1801 he sent for a quantity of possessions from Glasgow, and these duly arrived.5 Then the room was transformed from being a storeroom into a fully equipped workplace. It was rather gloomy: the ceiling sloped down on three sides under the roof eaves, and it was lit by a single east-facing window that overlooked a kitchen yard and outbuildings. But the room’s solitariness was an advantage for Watt’s purposes: here he could pursue projects and experiments undisturbed.6
The garret workshop had a dual purpose. First, it was an active workplace where Watt could pursue the manufacture of sculptures on his copying machines, one of which was alluded to above, its frame partly padded with cotton waste and spitting plaster dust. Watt devoted considerable effort to the machines, and they are emblematic of a new world of mechanical sculpture, even a new world of mechanization as more broadly defined, that flourished in the early nineteenth century. Here we will explore the crossovers between copying sculpture, Watt’s last big project, and the second purpose for the workshop: it was a personal museum for Watt, containing objects from his entire working life, and after his death in 1819 it assumed a role as a place that memorialized and commemorated Watt for others, too. These aspects of the workshop are interlinked: Watt’s interest in sculpture was of long standing, and as he began to multiply his own image on the copying machines, he was carrying out a process multiplied on a much greater scale after his death, when he became the personal embodiment of a new mechanical age and his image was appropriated and reappropriated by successive interested parties. What the workshop was, and what it stood for, together ensured that Watt remained a commanding presence long after his death.
Watt’s sculpture project was not confined to his workshop but sprawled over several different parts of Heathfield. His will records that he had things stored in his study and ‘the two rooms in the South East corner of my house and . . . my laboratory or elsewhere’.7 The children of the Pemberton family, tenants living at Heathfield in the 1860s, recalled ‘wonderful discoveries of out-of-the-way things . . . discarded clay crucibles of all sorts and sizes; worn-out and queerly-shaped earthenware retorts; empty phials of all shapes and dimensions, with strange inscriptions on their labels . . . in an out-building we came across two huge blocks of roughly-hewn white marble’.8 The wide-ranging nature of these discoveries reflects, among other things, the complexity of Watt’s sculpture projects.
The two sculpture-copying machines embody Watt’s continuing fascination with precision manufacture. The first was designed to make reduced-size copies of an original, while the second was intended to make equal-size copies, a more difficult technical proposition. Both used the same basic principle: an item to be copied and material to make the copy from, usually a block of plaster of Paris, were positioned on the machines side-by-side. A feeler and a rotating cutting tool were also positioned side-by-side, and mounted so that as the feeler was carefully traced across the surface of the original, the cutter followed and repeated exactly the same movement. As the tool was rotated at high speed by a treadle, so plaster was removed and the copy formed. A portfolio in the workshop contains drawings of the reducing machine in an early form, dated 1804. Watt had visited Paris in 1802, seeing a machine called a tour à medaille for tracing and multiplying the dies for medal making, and this may have inspired him to undertake the project.9 Watt must quite quickly have realized the constraints of the reducing machine: it was most capable of making small objects like medallions in low relief, so in about 1809, he began on the second, equal-size machine, which was also more capable of producing three-dimensional objects with a greater degree of surface relief.10
Development of the machines presented Watt with several challenges. The workshop was a far from ideal workplace. He wrote in July 1811, ‘I am not able to work any with my machine at this season my Garret being too hot to be tenable.’11 Conversely winter also limited the progress achieved, with Watt complaining of ‘the place having been too cold for me’.12 Watt experimented working with marble, developing new cutting tools and a more robust frame for the equal-size machine to cope with the harder material, but the results seem to have been indifferent. Watt gave the steam engineer John Farey a small piece made on the machines in 1814, and Farey noted Watt was ‘striving to . . . carve marble and hard materials, and he showed me some first trials in stone, but they were not perfect’.13 Nonetheless, Watt made the equal-size machine capable of cutting more than one copy at a time, and by 1814 he was drafting drawings and a specification for a patent.14
The machines built on a broader interest in sculpture, and connections to the sculpture trade, that reached back into the 1790s. For example, Watt corresponded with the mouldmaker John Pierotti. Pierotti came from Lucca in northwest Italy and had arrived in England at Dover in 1770 before living in Birmingham and then Edinburgh, where he was entered on the Register of Aliens on 2 December 1803.15 Nothing is known about him beyond this, but we do know that considerable numbers of mould makers or formatori came from Lucca, itinerant makers and vendors of plaster casts.16 And we know about Pierotti’s work from a ‘Catalogue of Figures of Plaister of Paris’ which survives in Watt’s workshop.17 The catalogue includes the prices of the figures in different sizes, and the range of subjects is broad: antique figures like the Apollo Belvedere, Antinos and small copies of a renowned statue of Hercules from the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Other figures were evidently named for their moral connotations: Virginity, Innocence, Prudence and Fortitude. Pierotti also made anatomical figures after ‘Bugiardon’, ‘Mr Hudon’ and ‘Michel-Angelo’, and busts ‘large as life’ of Clytie, Atalanta, Sappho and the composer Handel. Other subjects included Shakespeare, Joseph Priestley and, in a nod to then-current fashions, ‘Three deferent [sic] Vases at 3s. each’.
Watt’s reducing machine, re-erected in his workshop at the Science Museum, London.
Watt evidently purchased some items from Pierotti while the latter was based in Birmingham because, alongside his catalogue, there survives in Watt’s workshop a bill ‘for making moulds of Plaster of Paris’, marked ‘Birmingham October the 8th 1792’.18 It is a receipt for mouls [sic] of Plaisters of Paris for Mr Watt’, with details of the moulds: for a figure of Antinos, Venus, Atlas (misspelled as ‘Atals’), as well as ‘tow [two] bass relivos’. And among the items in Pierotti’s catalogue is an entry for ‘Small heads – Proserpina’. This traces back to an original, The Rape of Proserpina, dated 1621–2, by the Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the Galleria Borghese in Rome. In turn, this matches a plaster copy in Watt’s collection of sculpture figures.19
As well as finished casts, Watt was also an avid collector of moulds for antique figures. Indeed, Pierotti’s catalogue includes prices for these moulds alongside casts made with them, allowing purchasers to make their own reproductions. Watt’s workshop contains 23 plaster of Paris moulds. Some were used, and can be associated with particular figures. For instance, a small three-part mould for a vase matches a vase elsewhere in the workshop, and there also survives a figure of Atlas, complete with a globe to rest on his shoulders, which I suggest is a match for the figure of ‘Atals’ ordered from John Pierotti in October 1792.20 Others of the moulds appear to be unused. Many are highly complex, consisting of numerous parts locating tightly together using hemispherical projections (fitting into corresponding indentations), and with detailed internal parts to reproduce the complexities of the human form. Watt’s interest in casting his own sculpture is reflected in another document in his workshop, entitled ‘List of Pots’, detailing, for instance, ‘5 – Glover’s plaister burnt’ and ‘12 – very fine faceing [plaster] for moulds’, which appear to match some of the jars bearing those numbers on the workshop shelves.21 Elsewhere large boxes and jars contain plaster of Paris awaiting use.
The bust of Proserpina in James Watt’s sculpture collection, purchased by him from John Pierotti.
A three-part plaster mould of
an arm from Watt’s collection inside his workshop.
Watt’s copying machines were, then, the culmination of a sustained interest in the world of sculpture that extended to purchasing moulds and taking his own copies from them. That Watt might seek to mechanize that world suggests how the market for sculpture was changing quickly. Traditionally sculpture had been a fascination of the wealthy and educated. Thomas Howard attempted to ‘transplant old Greece into England’ through his extended pursuit of statuary. Likewise Charles I’s ‘liking of ancient statues’ had caused ‘a whole army of Old forraine Emperours, Captaines, and Senators all at once to land on his coasts, to come and do him homage, and attend him in his palaces of Saint James, and Sommerset house’.22 There emerged in the eighteenth century a trade in marble copies of originals in Rome, for example, which were hugely costly on account of the time they took to make: one Italian maker had spent fourteen months on a copy, with another five months expected to finish it off.23 There was also a trade in plaster copies, full-size and prestigious, for the homes of wealthy gentlemen and aristocrats. So, sculpture was appropriated by Britain’s upper classes using a range of materials, and specially commissioned as part of design schemes for both domestic and architectural spaces.24
Further demand for sculpture was driven by the Grand Tour, as the well-to-do and classically educated set out from Britain to see the antique sights of Italy, visiting Rome, Pompeii, Herculaneum and Venice, among other places. For the first time they confronted the reality of what they had so often learned so much about in the course of their education: As John Northall wrote in his Travels through Italy of 1766, seeing statues of
emperors, consuls, generals, orators, philosophers, poets and other great men . . . gives a man a cast of almost 2,000 years backwards, and mixes the past ages with the present . . . Besides the countenance, we see in the statues the habits of those times which give a complete idea of the whole person, and in that respect make every portrait a history piece.25
Returning from that experience, they sought small, portable pieces of sculpture that could be displayed in their homes as symbols of wealth, knowledge and connoisseurship. If the statuary could not be obtained, substitutes were available: many great English houses had ‘niches filled with famous antique statues . . . painted in grisaille’ – monochrome two-dimensional paintings imitating three-dimensional sculpture.26 Gilbert White took this one step further at his house in Selborne, Hampshire. Unable to afford a statue for his grounds, he mounted a carefully painted wooden outline of a sculptural figure on an appropriate plinth; from a distance it could not be distinguished from a three-dimensional statue.27
By the mid-eighteenth century, then, a professional trade had emerged in England, to satisfy the demand for sculpture. The more expensive traders were based around London’s Hyde Park, Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden and Marylebone.28 One historian has claimed that these shops became ‘well-known places of public resort, operating partly as forms of commercial galleries . . . every fashionable person in London came to know what the Cheere brothers’ lead and plaster cast shop on Hyde Park Corner looked like from within’.29 But another, unique trade in cheaper statuary and statuettes, most often made in plaster, evolved in early nineteenth-century England. Rather than pieces of ‘art’, the output of this trade was regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold.30 As Watt worked on his sculpture machines, so this trade also bridged the gap between the fine and manufacturing arts, supplying three-dimensional images for ‘architects, cabinet-makers, clock-makers, goldsmiths, cast iron and brass foundries, jewellers, toy-makers, potters and porcelain manufacturers’, and it is a possibility that Watt had first come into contact with plaster copy makers during his association with the Soho Manufactory in Birmingham.31 A range of workshops, itinerant tradesmen and even vendors trading plaster figures from trays balanced on their heads met a fervour of demand for statuettes in the nineteenth century.
How the plaster copy trade generated reproductions was a tortuous process. To make a cast, the statue was divided into layers, one above the other, and each surrounded by a hollow box. This process would be complicated by the presence of any ‘undercut’ detail, protuberances that the liquid plaster could get behind and then harden so that the mould could not be released without being broken. A wet plaster mixture was poured in to fill the space between the box and the original, with a suitable substance painted onto the original to ensure the plaster did not adhere as it dried. When the plaster had solidified, the mould for each layer was carefully removed, and then all were pieced back together so that, with plaster poured in, the replica was formed.32 The multiplication of copies of copies meant that slight imperfections were magnified. While some sculpture makers prided themselves on working from the best copies available, or even the originals, others sold copies from ‘broken casts so that bits of the god’s hair were missing and his neck was thick because of the expansion of the plaster each time a cast was made’.33 The precision obtained, then, was highly variable.
This background helps contextualize Watt’s copying machines: he had an interest in sculpture of some long standing, there was a widely held appetite for sculpture in materials ranging from marble to plaster, and low-quality copies offered the potential for improvement. Also there was a chance that the trade might prove lucrative: when Joseph Nollekens carved a statue of the statesman William Pitt in 1808, the original, with its associated pedestal, earned him £4,000. However, 74 marble copies of the bust each earned him 120 guineas, and he also sold 600 plaster casts for six guineas each – the entire project earned him £17,000 (or more than £500,000 at today’s prices), of which three-quarters came from manufacturing the copies.34 The technical challenge and financial rewards of making high-quality copies of sculpture was one that Watt, and others like him, could not resist. He was early in a wave of engineers and inventors motivated by the financial returns arising from an efficient way of mechanically copying sculpture.35 Five different machines were patented in France alone between 1835 and 1840. In England Angus Robertson of London patented ‘machinery for sculpturing and working marble, stone, alabaster, and other substances, and for taking copies’ in 1837, Thomas Jordan patented a machine in 1845 that was used to produce much of the carving in the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament, and Benjamin Cheverton perfected a capable and particularly well-regarded machine in the course of 1826 capable of making copies of busts by famous sculptors like Sir Francis Chantrey, Joseph Nollekens and L.-F. Roubiliac in ivory, incorporating highly intricate detail.
What is notable about all these machines is the length of time after Watt’s that they were made. But there is, in Cheverton’s machine, a link back to Watt. Cheverton developed his machine in partnership with an inventor named John Isaac Hawkins. Hawkins (1772–1855) was a multifaceted man, a civil engineer, inventor and sometime composer, poet, preacher and phrenologist whose father had been a clockmaker.36 He had emigrated to the United States in 1800 and while there had produced two machines, a ‘physiognotrace’ and a ‘polygraph’. The former allowed a sitter to draw a silhouette profile of themselves and the latter, rather than being the lie detector the word denotes today, used an ingenious mechanism so that a writer could draft a letter and the machine simultaneously wrote a copy. Thomas Jefferson purchased two to keep up his voluminous correspondence and declared it ‘one of the greatest inventions of this age’.37
Benjamin Cheverton’s machine for reproducing sculpture, 1826. The mechanism was driven by an ingenious flexible drive and could pivot around a ball joint, creating a larger range of movement compared to Watt’s machines.
With his experience of turning either a three-dimensional shape or a two-dimensional letter into a two-dimensional image (as with his physiognotrace and polygraph respectively), it was a logical next step for Hawkins to experiment with turning a three-dimensional original into a three-dimensional copy – as in sculpture copying – and that is exactly what he did. Hawkins returned to Britain in 1803, and what happened next
was explained in the North British Review of 1855:
We had an opportunity when at Heathfield in 1818, of seeing some specimens of the work which Mr Watt had executed [with his sculpture machines], and then he told us that a neighbour of his who could have had no knowledge of his invention, had made considerable progress in the construction of a similar machine. This gentleman offered to take out a joint patent with Mr Watt; but he had suffered so much from former patents, that he was unwilling to embark in any new concern.38
That neighbour was Hawkins. There are no letters between Hawkins and Watt in the latter’s correspondence, and the details of any meeting are lost. We can only arrive at any idea of how the machine he developed worked at one step removed, by considering a description of how it was later developed for Cheverton: to avoid giving the latter’s secrets away, it was only ever described in very general terms, as ‘a lever turning on a fulcrum at one end . . . furnished with a tracing point at the other end, and between the tracing point and the fulcrum there is a drill in rapid motion; as the tracing point is carried over the model, the drill travels over and carves the ivory’.39 This description fits exactly Watt’s reducing machine, too. This is to be expected to some extent: the geometrical principles of the machine were widely known. Less well known was how to apply them, not just to semi-relief pieces like medallions, but to ‘round figures’ as well – which Hawkins could, but Watt could not – or not immediately.40 Watt, getting old, and confronted by the young, energetic Hawkins, may have felt discouraged. He left off pursuing the machine as a commercially viable project and contented himself with the technical curiosity that it offered.
Whatever happened, Watt’s sculpture-copying machines were the first of a new generation of machines constructed to the same end. A reviewer for L’Artiste in 1839 noted how that built by Achille Collas in 1837 could reproduce with ease ‘individual bas-reliefs of the Parthenon, twelve inches in height . . . with scrupulous exactitude to the minutest details of the plaster’ and ‘a cut ivory cup of Benvenuto Cellini, the size of a coin’. Some months later Jules Janin wrote that this type of work ‘was made in six hours by a man turning a foot crank, while reading a new novel’, and its implications were that ‘the Louvre Museum is no longer in the Louvre . . . the masterpieces of statuary are reproduced everywhere.’41 The Cheverton/Hawkins machine used some cutters ‘as small as a pin’s head’, and in many parts of the machinery ‘an error of 1000th part of an inch would be destructive’.42 As may be surmised, the great advantage of the sculpture-copying machines was their tremendous accuracy. Providing this accuracy was part of the machines’ appeal to Watt.