This finely modelled terracotta relief is a fascinating work of European neo-classicism. Signed and dated by William Tyler 1765, the relief is based on a design made in Rome by Anton Raphael Mengs, recorded in a finished drawing now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The drawing was one of several designs Mengs made in preparation for carved gems for British patrons in the early 1760s. Precisely how Tyler, who seems not to have travelled to Italy, became aware of Mengs’s design is unclear. Tyler, a pupil of Louis-François Roubiliac, was a remarkably fluent sculptor and inventive designer who produced a series of distinguished funerary monuments, he was a founder Royal Academician and heavily involved in the administration of the Academy throughout its first thirty years. Tyler exhibited a number of ‘models’ of bas-reliefs at the Society of Artists in the 1760s and the present work may be identifiable as ‘a monumental medallion, a model’ shown in 1765.

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