Lots 124-127 are all attributed to the nineteenth-century British sculptor Joseph Gott. Apprenticed to the English sculptor John Flaxman in London at the turn of the eighteenth century, Gott travelled to Rome in 1822 on a pension from Sir Thomas Lawrence. While Gott spent the majority of his career in Italy, his patronage remained firmly based in the UK, his studio becoming a popular destination for many aristocrats visiting Italy. During his lifetime he became well-known for his vibrant small-scale depictions of animals and children which became recurring motifs in his practice and differentiates him from the more sombre neoclassical subjects of his British contemporaries working in Italy such as John Gibson. His first of many recorded animal groups was of a Greyhound and her Puppies (1823-4), commissioned by the 6th Duke of Devonshire.

Gott’s patronage was also particularly concentrated in his home county of Yorkshire among industrialist families including that of his second cousin the wool manufacturer Benjamin Gott and George and Elizabeth Banks for whom he executed the marble composition Hagar and Ishmael (see lot 126). Aside from biblical and mythological sources, Gott drew inspiration from literary texts including for his depiction of A kneeling girl placing a lamp on the Ganges, a direct reference to a passage from the 1817 work Lallah Rookh by Irish poet Thomas Moore. The terracotta Babes in the Wood is drawn from a traditional English children’s tale popularised in the nineteenth century (see lot 127). This model was likely conceived as a study for a later marble version exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1830 commissioned by William Gott and features his two children, Margaret and Jane, as the titular characters.