The bust of Thomas Baker is a 1638 marble portrait sculpture created by the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini, with much of the bust undertaken by a pupil of Bernini, probably Andrea Bolgi.Rudolf Wittkower, Bernini, the Sculptor of the Roman Baroque, 1997 (4th ed.), p.259 It is currently held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, who purchased the bust in 1921 for 1480 English guineas.Berkeley Daily Gazette, August 1921The Glasgow Herald, 2 August 1921 – This article also suggests that the bust once belonged to the English seventeenth-century painted Peter Lely, who sold it for GB £150
Subject Baker (1606–58) was High Sheriff of Suffolk in 1657 and connected to the court of Charles I. He may have been indirectly involved in another Bernini bust, carrying the triple portrait of Charles I by van Dyck to Rome; it was from this portrait that Bernini carved the now-destroyed bust of King Charles.
See also List of works by Gian Lorenzo Bernini
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