Joseph Nollekens is known mainly for his many neoclassical portrait busts. One of his more unusual works is of Maria Stella Chiappini. The daughter of a police constable from a small village near Forlì in Emilia Romagna, she married an English aristocrat. The model’s hair is tied up in a scarf, in the French revolutionary manner, and bares a breast. Nollekens studied in Rome between 1760 and 1770, where he met the sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel.