“Lt. Col. William Martin Leake (1777-1860),” by William Behnes

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Lt. Col William Martin Leake (1777-1860)

William Behnes (?1791 - 1864)

1840

Marble

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Lt. Col William Martin Leake (1777-1860), better known simply as Colonel Leake, was trained at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich and was dispatched on various military missions — to Anatolia, the Holy Land, Egypt, Greece and so on — facing various hazards. For example, he was sailing on the Mentor with a consignment of Lord Elgin's marbles when it sank in 1802: forty-four of Elgin's cases were salvaged but most of the materials that Leake himself had collected were lost (see Checkland 56, though Leake himself gets no mention here).

Photograph and text by Jacqueline Banerjee 2010

With thanks to the Fitzwilliam for permission to photograph outside the collection rooms

Having retired early, Leake became an important figure in the "unseen college of intellectuals, politicians, and wealthy individuals which flourished in early nineteenth-century London" (Wagstaff). He gives no impression of having been a genial bon viveur: indeed” byron thought him "taciturn" when he met him in Greece (qtd. in Wagstaff). However, he was a founder member of, amongst other exclusive gentlemen's clubs, the Athenaeum. He also helped to establish the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Geographical Society. His writings, particularly those on the topography of Ancient Greece, are still highly regarded. Colonel Leake's bust is appropriately placed here because he left his collections of coins and vases to the Fitzwilliam.

Benedict Read refers to two of Behnes's other works when discussing the type of bust "in which non-specific drapery is randomly disposed over a wider area that now included the shoulders, to give a general, vaguely classical appearance" (172). For this sitter, of course, the "vaguely classical" touch was quite aptly employed.

Bibliography

Checkland, Sydney. The Elgins, 1766-1917: A Tale of Aristocrates, Proconsuls and their Wives. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988.

Read, Benedict. Victorian Sculpture. New Haven & London: Yale, 1982.

Wagstaff, J. M. "Leake, William Martin [known as Colonel Leake](1777-1860)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Viewed 24 January 2010.

Last modified 24 January 2010