Bust Mystery Solved

When he first walked by the bust, Matthew Hargraves stopped in his tracks. Why did Thomas Dawson have his mouth open as if to speak from the marble?

Eight years later he found out: Love. Death, Plus, the man had also had disinterred his entire family.

Those facts emerged in a non-ghoulish lecture called ​“Love and Death” that Hargraves, curator for collections research, delivered at the Yale Center for British Art Tuesday afternoon.

It was part of an​“Art in Context” series at the gallery — 30 minutes of intense talk open to the public every Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. in front of a single art work.

Hargraves said he did not time his talk, about sculptor Joseph Wilton’s bust of Thomas Dawson, for Halloween.

In fact the disinterment of Dawson’s entire family, whom he adored and who had died before him, was the furthest thing from ghoulish.

Dawson was an Anglo-Irish landowner of vast estates. As the angry Irish farmers rebelled towards the end of the 18th Century, Dawson was afraid his tenants would destroy the family graves in Ireland, said Hargraves.

So he shipped all the remains to the safe Stoke Poges cemetery near London.

Hargraves said he had long wanted to know why Dawson’s image was so full of life and yearning, with a furrowed brow and eyes that seem to reach out and to connect to a narrative instead of staring out stoically.

This kind of image was contrary to the restrained style of sculpture that preceded it among English aristocratic sitters.

So what gives? What was he looking at?

“It needed [a narrative] outside itself to make sense,” he told an audience of some 25 people who gathered about him and his sculpted friend in the YCBA’s fourth-floor gallery.

Over the years Hargraves discovered that Dawson had commissioned a funerary statue of himself in a pose of mourning before a monument dedicated to the memory of his wife, who died a lingering and perhaps even terrible death due to tuberculosis.

That statue, along with a Greek-style temple that Dawson also built on his estates, are long gone. Hargraves surmised that the bust is based on the gone statue. He surmised as well that during his next marriage and the children that followed, Dawson kept the bust, as a votive symbol of his mourning for his first wife.

“The bust might have been staring at a portrait of his wife, a perpetual mourning figure,” Hargraves speculated.

Dawson represented a kinder, gentler aristocrat, so such feelings, beyond mourning, were also appropriate in the commissioned image, he added.

Influenced by the be-in-touch-with-your feelings romanticism imported from France through the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Dawson was apparently such a good guy in touch with his emotions he had become a trusted pal of George the Third.

When news of the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown reached the king, he and Dawson were apparently playing cards, and Dawson, overwhelmed by feeling, fainted away, recounted Hargraves.

Many questions about Dawson remain unanswered; this good guy left few records of scandal. Still, Hargraves said he felt that he’d done right by him and the expression on his face that had caught his attention eight years ago.

“I feel like I’ve answered the question,” he said.