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Granny

Sculptor: Dick, William Reid, Sir, HRSA · 1878-1961

Granny

The present cast was purchased from the artist via the Royal Academy Annual Summer Exhibition in 1960 where it had been exhibited under the title of…

The present cast was purchased from the artist via the Royal Academy Annual Summer Exhibition in 1960 where it had been exhibited under the title of "Granny". In related correspondence between the purchaser and the artist, Reid Dick references the sitter as being his own grandmother.

Plate 2.5 in Wardleworth's biography of the sculptor reproduces a marble carving of the same sitter, tentatively identified as "Grandmother" and dated to around 1908.

The sitter can therefore be identified as his maternal grandmother, Ann Robertson who married William Reid a coal merchant in Glasgow's Gorbals district on 1849-10-19.

Ann Robertson or Reid registered the birth of her sculptor grandson in Glasgow in 1878 and by 1896 was widowed.

She died at her home, 75 Abbotsford Place, Gorbals, Glasgow on 1908-10-04 aged 82 years.

Reid Dick only began attending modelling classes in Glasgow in 1905 and moved to London at the end of 1908, possibly around the time of his grandmother's death.

So although the only confirmed exhibition of the bust was in 1960, the year before the sculptor's own death, it is probably a much earlier work executed or at least originally conceived in the latter part of the first decade of the 20th Century.

Reid Dick exhibited a work titled "Old Woman's Head" at the RGI Annual Exhibition in 1913 (cat 6) with a catalogue price of £50, which may be a cast of the present work.

Even without its title, there is a sensitivity to the modelling of the bust which suggests a degree of intimacy and familiarity between sculptor and sitter and which is seen in Reid Dick's busts of his own children. This concept of sculpting close family members was not new, but was, even by the 1920s, not common practise amongst British sculptors according to contemporary press coverage.

© The Artist's Estate