| Activity | Domenico Brucciani (c.1815-1880) is said to have been born in Lucca in 1815. He married Mary Ann Richardson in 1841 at St Martin-in-the-Fields, apparently remarrying, as Domenico Giovanni Brucciani, in 1846 at Richmond. He traded from Little Russell St from 1829. He also traded from 1 Leather Lane in partnership with Giovanni Graziani as plaster figure makers, a business which he continued following the dissolution of the partnership in 1857 (London Gazette 20 March 1857). When Brucciani’s new premises, the Galleria delle Belle Arti, opened at 40 Russell St in 1864, the size of his new gallery of casts was given as 100 by 25 feet (Art Journal, vol.3, 1864, p.330). He worked as a modeller for the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) and the British Museum, taking casts of items in their collections and supplying other casts. He described himself as ‘Formatore [i.e., maker] & Modeller to the Science and Art Department’, as well as to the British Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts, on his handsome blue invoice paper (examples from 1870s, National Portrait Gallery records, Duplicates of Accounts, vol.1, pp.71-3, 104).
Following Brucciani’s death at the age of 65 in 1880, his business and stock-in-trade were advertised for sale (The Times 26 May 1880). By 1891, an individual by the name of Caproni was trading as D. Brucciani & Co (The Times 10 December 1891). He would appear to be Joseph L. Caproni (1846-1900), who was recorded in the 1881 census at 148 Grays Inn Road as a plaster moulder (arts), age 34, born in Italy but living in London since at least 1868, when his eldest son was born. There were subsequent close connections between the Caproni and Brucciani families, as is apparent from the record of the birth in 1926 of Enrico Brucciani to a mother by the maiden name of Caproni
By the time of the First World War, as the demand for plaster casts declined, the Brucciani business was finding it increasingly difficult to carry on, as was reported in 1916 (The Times 26 December 1916). In response to the threat that their unique collection of plaster moulds and casts might be dispersed, a petition led by Sir Edward Poynter PRA, that the Government should purchase the collection, was addressed to the Prime Minister but without success. The shipowner, Sir William Petersen, then supplied the means for the business to carry on during the war. The business went into liquidation in 1921, when a meeting of the company was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London Gazette 15 July 1921). The company was taken over by the Board of Education and run by the Victoria and Albert as a museum service, renamed the Department for the Sale of Casts, until financial losses forced its closure in 1951.
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