Classical-style head-and-shoulders marble bust of Charles James Fox, signed on the back of the round socle ' Fco NICOLI FECIT / 19 MOUNT ST. F.H.' The fact that Fox is shown with cropped hair and in Roman dress in this case alludes to his qualities as the leading radical Whig MP and Parliamentary orator of his age.

He was third son of Henry Fox, first Baron Holland, and after being educated at Eton and Hertford College, Oxford, became an MP in 1768. He only had very brief periods of office: in the 1770s and 1780s, when he earned the undying dislike of George III, and as foreign secretary under Lord Grenville just before his death. In this role he moved the abolition of the slave trade in Parliament but did not live to see it achieved. Though of high libertarian principles, personal charm and great popular influence, Fox was an unhandsome man of often slovenly appearance, and with a notoriously dissipated lifestyle.

His unmistakeable features figure in many satirical prints from the 1780s to his death ( see for example PAF3949), often as the traitorous leader of opposition to Pitt the Younger, whom he only briefly survived.

Little is known of the artist, Nicoli, other than that he worked in London from about 1817 to 1820 in a studio next door to Sir Richard Westmacott's in Mount Street, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818-19.

This bust is presumably a copy, possibly after a much-copied one by Nollekens of 1802, of which the prime version is recorded as in the collection of the Earl of Ilchester.