Allan Cunningham

Allan Cunningham 1784-1842, Scottish author. His collection of The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern (4 vol., 1825) included his own "A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea," one of the best-known sea ballads. His six-volume Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects appeared from 1829 to 1833.

Cunningham, Allan (1784–1842), born in Dumfriesshire, profited from the vogue for primitivism by disguising his own poems as old Scottish songs, many of which Robert Hartley Cromek (1720–1812) then published as Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song (1810). He was a frequent contributor to the London Magazine and to Blackwood's. He published Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry (1822); The Songs of Scotland (1825); various romantic tales; Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1829–33); and an edition of Burns (1834). Several of his poems and ballads, such as ‘A wet sheet and a flowing sea’ and ‘Hame, hame, hame’, which were very popular in his lifetime, are still remembered.

Nollekens, Joseph (b London, 11 Aug. 1737; d London, 23 Apr. 1823). English sculptor, mainly in marble but also in terracotta. He was the son of a Flemish painter, Joseph Francis Nollekens (Old Nollekens) (1702–48), who settled in London in 1733. After training under Scheemakers, the younger Nollekens worked in Rome from 1762 to 1770, making a handsome living by copying, restoring, faking, and dealing in antique sculpture. He also produced a few portrait busts, including that of Laurence Sterne (1766, NPG, London), a splendid character study in the antique manner, and on his return to England it was chiefly as a portraitist that he built up his great reputation and fortune. His best portraits are among the finest of their age, but there are many inferior studio copies of his more popular works. He also made statues in a slightly erotic antique manner, and produced numerous funerary monuments. In addition to being very hard-working, he was an excellent businessman and something of a skinflint, with the result that at his death he left the huge sum of £200,000. A former pupil, J. T. Smith, who was one of his executors, received a legacy of £100, much less than he had been hoping for, and had his revenge by writing the venomous Nollekens and his Times (1828); this gives such a cruelly exaggerated picture of the miserliness and coarseness of Nollekens and his wife that it has been described as probably ‘the most candid, pitiless and uncomplimentary biography in the English language’ ( Rupert Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors: 1660–1851, 1953). Allan Cunningham's account of Nollekens (1830) is more charitable.