Provenance:
Formerly from the collection of Baroness Nancy Oakes von Hoyningen-Huene, daughter of Sir Harry Oakes, 1st Baronet, British gold mine owner, entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist.

‘Amelia Paton (1821-1904) was a largely self-taught sculptor of considerable ability. She could, probably should, have become our first woman member but sadly that was not to be. Amelia's husband, the Academy's long-serving Secretary David Octavius Hill RSA - whom she married in 1862 - did support the addition of women to our ranks but was unsuccessful in his attempts to change wider opinion at that time.’
Robin Rodger; ‘The Patons of Dunfermline’- Royal Scottish Academy, December 10, 2021.

‘Although she was a trailblazer for women artists and the artistic equal of her male contemporaries, there are very few visitors to Edinburgh, or I'm ashamed to say, her fellow townspeople, who will have heard of her.’
Ali Bacon; #womenshistorymonth: Scottish sculptor Amelia Robertson Hill.

Amelia Paton was born at Dunfermline Park, Fife into an artistic family. Her brothers, Joseph Noel Paton, and Walter Hugh Paton, became famous painters and illustrators, respected by contemporary collectors, elevated by royalty and with a legacy of work that's embraced and celebrated by collectors. Amelia, denied official recognition within her lifetime, has yet to be celebrated in quite the same way.

Her childhood was spent at the family home of Wooer's Alley, Dunfermline.  She seems to have been largely self-taught, creating small miniature portraits and starting to learn the rudiments of sculpting through modelling in clay. It seems that her first tools were an ivory crochet-needle and a knife but eventually she was able to borrow better tools - from a plasterer. In an interview with Sarah A. Tooley in 1895 Amelia recounted her early foray into sculpture:

‘The first thing which led me to model was Mrs. Shelley - (Mary Shelley, 1797-1851) - sending my brother Noel a bust of her husband - (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822) - which Mrs Leigh Hunt, -(Marianne Leigh Hunt, 1788-1857) - had done from memory, saying that she thought it bore a resemblance to Noel. I had been studying phrenology at the time, and when I saw the bust, I said, 'she has not given Shelley a poet's brain', and I told Noel I could make a better bust of him than that. 'I daresay you have audacity enough to try,' he said, and I determined that I would’.

This foray was short-lived as first she fell ill, then her brothers left home, and her mother fell ill. She remained at home nursing her mother through her final illness until her passing and her father's remarriage. At the age of 39, she moved from her childhood home to live with her two brothers in at 33 George Square, Edinburgh, At this time it seems she started working from her own studio and trained as a sculptor under William Brodie. The crossover of taste from her brothers'works would have been almost osmotic. In 1860 she exhibited publicly for the first time when two of her busts appeared at the Royal Scottish Academy. It may be that this lot is one of these two busts titled simply as ‘A Young Woman’ and recorded by 'Bedouin' as worthy of note in his review of the 1860 exhibition ‘the works(of sculpture) are few but of high merit’ (MacPhail's Edinburgh ecclesiastical journal and literary review, Volumes 29-30 1861, pp. 188-189). It's almost certainly the earliest work in marble she may have exhibited.

It has been suggested that a better possible title for this work might be ‘The Lover’- as inspired by her brother Joseph Noel Paton's illustration of 1857 ‘Hesperus the Evening Star, Sacred to Lovers’ (now held in The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Accession number 1033). This work does seem to strongly accord with their portrayals of women of legend and myth influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism. It has been also noted that the catalogue description of one of her exhibited works in the Royal Scottish Academy was titled ‘Elaine, The Lily Maid of Astolat’ and this was suggested as the possible subject matter of this piece. However, as the catalogue notes that the piece was ‘presented in terracotta-or-clay’ and ‘to be executed in marble’, it is unlikely to be this piece.

In 1862, Amelia became the second wife of the celebrated artist and early photographer David Octavius Hill and went onto to exhibit over 60 sculptures at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Academy, Glasgow Institute, the Royal Hibernian Academy and at the International Exhibition in Dublin in 1865. Her work tended to be studies of Arthurian and Shakesperean heroes, family friends, and notable figures such as the historian Thomas Carlyle, artist Sir George Harvey and physicist Sir David Brewster. Her skill and talent shone through, and she was commissioned to carry out several public statues, rare for a female artist of this period. Buoyed by the confidence shown in her by her husband and her brother Joseph Noel in 1868/1869 she sculpted a full length statue of the explorer David Livingstone, who sat for Amelia during the modelling, just prior to leaving the country for his final journey to Africa. Exhibited to great acclaim in London in the New Rooms of the Royal Academy in 1869 the figure now stands in Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh and was described by William Sharp in 1902 as the ‘the first work of sculpture done by a woman which has been erected in any public place in Britain’. Subsequent public commissions included the statue of Robert Burns commissioned by Dumfries town council in 1877, and three of the statues which adorn the Scott Monument in Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh.

‘Mrs. D. O. Hill the sculptor... a woman of distinctive genius, has never had full scope for her abilities, and it is all the more surprising that she has been able to attain such great success as is symbolised by her statue of Dr. Livingstone in Prince's Gardens, and of Robert Burns at Dumfries.’
The Scottish Review (1885) ‘Scottish Art and Artists’.

The work of a woman artist is 'like a man's, only weaker and poorer'.
Sir William Fettes Douglas, sixth President of the Royal Scottish Academy, 1885.

Despite the patronage of two eminent brothers and her husband, Amelia still faced the constraints of Victorian attitudes at the time towards gender equality and was excluded from membership of the Royal Scottish Academy. In response she took matters into her own hands and in 1877 helped establish the Albert Institute of Fine Arts at Edinburgh's Shandwick Place, an artistic institution that did not discriminate on grounds of gender. Above the ornate doorway to the building, Amelia's relief portrait bust of Prince Albert and the figures of 'Sculpture and Painting' can still be seen.

The 1891 census described Hill as ‘sculptor, retired’ but she continued to exhibit at the Royal Scottish Academy until 1902, aged 82. She died at her house, Newington Lodge, 38 Mayfield Terrace on 5 July 1904 aged 83. She was buried next to her husband in Dean Cemetery, beneath her own bronze bust of him that she had sculpted 34 years earlier. Patricia de Montford notes that the obituary for Amelia in 1904 while acknowledging ‘she achieved 'not a little fame as a sculptor', concentrates mainly on her marriage to Hill and the fame of her brothers. While it is common to come across such laudatory statements, their generalised nature make it difficult to form an accurate assessment of her achievements.’

At the time of cataloguing there is no catalogue raisonné of her work. Only a handful of work by her has appeared at public auction- with half of them miniature portraits, another of her passions. Her work is little known to the wider general public but in the last twenty years her work has started to be reappraised, lauded and celebrated with several books featuring her life and work. In 2021, the bicentenary of her birth, a walking tour of her Edinburgh works was instigated as 'The Amelia Tour' by a descendant Cat Berry. Hopefully the appearance at auction of this very early, elegant and sensual bust by this neglected Victorian female artist, with its leanings to the Pre-Raphaelite movement, may help redress some of the lack of awareness of her life and work.

LITERATURE:
The Royal Scottish Academy Exhibitors 1826-1990. A Dictionary of Artists and their Work in the Annual Exhibitions of the Royal Scottish Academy.

de Laperriere, Charles Baile (editor)
Ali Bacon / Books and Other Things; #womenshistorymonth: Scottish sculptor Amelia Robertson Hill, 17^th March 2022
Patricia de Montfort, Hill [née Paton], Amelia Robertson (1820-1904), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (online ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press
Patricia de Montford, The Patons, An Artistic Family, Crawford Arts Centre St Andrews, 1993
Robin Rodger, The Patons of Dunfermline, Bi-Centenary of Sir Joseph Noël Paton RSA (1821-1901), 10^th December 2021, Public Statues and Sculpture Association
R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 2, pp. 11, 220-26; 401-02, 508, 509, 515
Sarah A. Tooley, 'A Famous Lady Sculptor. An interview with Mrs D. O. Hill', The Young Woman Journal: a monthly journal and review, no. 35, August 1895, pp. 361-67.
George Robertson, FSA Scot, Amelia Robertson Paton-Dunfermline's ‘Famous Lady of Sculpture.’, Dunfermline Historical Society, June 2022.
William Sharp, Progress of Art in the Century, London 1900/1902, p.139
https://www.theameliatrail.com/

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Auction Details

Tuesday 26 & Wednesday 27 March, 10.30am GMT
Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE

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