Emma and Julia Campbell (plaster model)

In July 1816 The Times reported with disapproval that the waltz, which it called an indecent foreign dance, had been danced at the English court. That same year Lady Charlotte Campbell, a daughter of the Duke of Argyll and a well-known writer, moved to Florence with her children. Her two youngest girls, Emma and Julia, are the pair here, arms around each other, rising onto their toes. Bartolini himself described them as dancing a waltz. He dressed them in loose antique robes, so the fashionable new dance arrives in the clothes of ancient Greece, and the full-length pair in a close embrace recalls Canova's Three Graces. The commission probably came from their uncle, the sixth Duke of Argyll, and a friend of their mother, the writer Mary Berry, described the model in the sculptor's house in 1821. The marble was shipped from Livorno to Scotland and stood in the dining room of Inveraray Castle, the Argyll seat, with a dedication on its base to the English sculptor John Flaxman. In 2015 the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland bought it together, and it is shown in Edinburgh.