Name William Bally | Died November 8, 1858 | |
William Bally (c. 1799 – c. 1856) was a Swiss sculptor active in Manchester, United Kingdom.
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Life
Born in Switzerland, in 1831 he was making small phrenological busts supervised by Johann Caspar Spurzheim; he had been associated with Spurzheim and this project at least from 1829. He came to England and employed George Holyoake in Birmingham during the 1830s. At this time he was an associate of George Combe. The relationship with Holyoake ended badly, on Holyoake's account, Bally moving to Manchester and not making a promised cast of his head.
In 1841 Bally made casts of inscriptions on Manx crosses, and later sold them to the antiquarian Henry Dryden. He ran a phrenological gallery in the 1840s in Manchester, and contributed phrenological busts to the Great Exhibition of 1851. He took part in a demonstration of hypnosis by James Braid in 1844.
Works
His purely sculptural works included a wax portrait of John Scott, 1st Earl of Eldon, and a bust of the calico printer Salis Schwabe. At the Liverpool Academy of Arts he exhibited busts of Samuel Hope (1832) and Thomas Henry Illidge (1837).