Woolley & Wallis auctioneers are excited to offer the first maquette of the famous statue of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) that sits in Tavistock Square in London. Created by Polish sculptor, writer and actress Fredda Brilliant (1903–1999), the 27cm-high bronze marks the earliest fully realised vision of what would become one of London’s most visited and powerful public monuments. The statue has become a site of pilgrimage for Indian visitors to the UK, who go there to place flowers beneath it and give thanks for a safe journey.
Fredda’s idea of immortalising Gandhi as a memorial originated in 1949, but this maquette (small scale model for a larger sculpture), marks the moment when the sculpture finally took form. It depicts the spiritual and political leader who was instrumental in social reform and independence in India, sitting calmly cross-legged, with a certain intimacy that Fredda felt would emulate his character and be suited to its Tavistock Square location in London. The statue was commissioned by the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Committee and the India League to mark the upcoming centenary of his birth and the Tavistock square location was chosen as a nod to Gandhi’s time studying law at the nearby University College, London. It was unveiled in the square in 1968, by then Prime Minister Harold Wilson (1916-1995). Gandhi sitting in meditation has become a quiet, reflective presence that has become a point of connection for visitors and a lasting symbol of peace. The maquette on offer is the earliest version of the work that would define her most well-known sculpture.
“There has been a growing enthusiasm for Fredda’s work in recent years”, says Woolley and Wallis specialist Victor Fauvelle. This was demonstrated in 2019, when Woolley & Wallis offered her studio for auction on behalf of her family, 20 years after her death. The 44 lots constituted the largest ever offering of the artist’s work at auction and drew considerable interest, which was especially focused on her depictions of important Indian figures in the build up to India’s independence.
A standing figure of Vallabhbhai Patel, the first deputy Prime Minister of India, fetched £10,000, while two plaster busts of Rajendra Prasad (the first President of India) and Pandit Nehru (the first Prime Minister of India) totalled £9,375. Her second Gandhi maquette was included in the sale, having been valued at £20,000 on the BBC Antiques Roadshow programme (and previously £3,000). However, competition on auction day saw a bidding war, with it finally winning out to a private collector on the telephone for £65,000 far surpassing expectations and confirming her wide appeal.
Fredda Brilliant was a sculptor, actress, writer, singer and relentless traveller, whose creativity propelled her across continents and political divides. Born in Łódź in 1903 to a Jewish diamond-trading family, she emigrated to Melbourne in 1924, then explored theatre in Australia, opera in New York and ventured into the Soviet Union, when she won a sculpture competition to portray the Soviet politician and revolutionary Vyacheslav Molotov (1890-1986). When Molotov refused to sit for his portrait, she sculpted Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 -1930), the Russian poet, playwright and artist and a leading figure of the Russian Futurist movement, alongside Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), the Soviet film director, screenwriter and film theorist. These works were later acquired by Moscow museums, with her monumental Eisenstein bronze having also been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1963.
While Fredda was in Moscow she married British writer and filmmaker Herbert Marshall (1906 -1991) who she settled in London with in 1937. Here they immersed themselves in left-wing creative circles, co-writing the original script for The Proud Valley (1939). Fredda’s acting career progressed with her acting opposite Michael Redgrave in Robert Ardrey’s anti-fascist play Thunder Rock and later Albert Finney. Her life was peppered with encounters with major figures, who coloured her career (her refusal to work with Picasso after he pinched her bottom, became part of her legend!).
Fredda possessed an unyielding compulsion to portray the personalities shaping her age. From the 1940s onwards, this fascination frequently took her to India, where she sculpted many of the era’s pivotal political figures. Her oeuvre went on to span bronze portraits of other prominent figures, from global statesmen to artists, with the artist Duncan Grant (1885-1978) repaying her in kind, with his painting Baptism of Christ.
Fredda and her husband divided their time between the UK and Illinois in the US, where her husband taught at the University of Southern Illinois from 1960s onwards. As well as Fredda’s studio in Belsize Park in London, the couple also bought a home in Henfield, Sussex (a converted barn in Woodmancote). Fredda became a well-known local character in Sussex, sweeping through Henfield in black dresses, tasselled shawls and brilliant headscarves, she sang aloud in public, wept, laughed and argued with equal force. The memory of her wrestling an enormous copy of her Gandhi statue through a doorway remains an apt symbol of her lifelong battle between artistic vision and physical reality.
Fauvelle says: “Given Fredda’s growing reputation and the fierce bidding we’ve seen for her Gandhi works in the past, the emergence of this first maquette from a private London collection is significant.
It offers collectors an exceptional chance to secure the piece that set one of Fredda’s most internationally recognised monuments and sculpture in motion. To handle a work that laid the foundations of such an iconic public sculpture is an extraordinarily rare privilege.”
It will be offered in Woolley & Wallis’ Modern British & 20th Century Art sale on December 11, 2025 and has been given an estimate of £6,000–£8,000 (lot 558).
