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This touching posthumous memorial was commissioned from Joseph Nollekens by the grieving parents of a fifteen-year-old schoolboy who "died at an Academy on Wandsworth Common," presumably as the result of an accident. In these circumstances, by no means rare, sculptors were confronted with the problem of how to create a plausible likeness. Siblings were often recruited as substitute sitters, with modifications, but rarely if ever did an image of the dead child exist from which to extrapolate a three-dimensional portrait. For almost a century in England, from the 1730s until the 1820s, average life expectancy steadily improved, but poor life expectancy at birth still made infancy the most perilous time of life, and childhood mortality remained shockingly high.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2005