This previously unknown sculpture is a version of Henry Rossi’s celebrated depiction of a cricketer now in the collection of the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey. A Bowler, along with its pair, A Cricketer, have long been regarded as the most significant early marmoreal depictions of the sport. This is only the second version of this iconic sculpture that seems to have survived and was possibly acquired by the great nineteenth-century cricketer – and saviour of Lord’s cricket ground – William Ward, who is recorded as having owned versions of Rossi’s statues.[1] Beyond their status as precocious records of Regency cricket, the sculptures point to a fascinating moment in European neo-classicism, when British sculptors in particular were casting modern sportsman as heroic classical athletes. Rossi’s statues are not portraits but idealised figures, and as such they point to a contemporary desire to find antique virtues in modernity.



[1] It was Robin Simon who first made the link between Ward’s sculpture and Rossi’s Cricketers. See Robin Simon and Alastair Smart, The Art of Cricket, London, 1983, pp.99-100.

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