This figure of Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774) - a London-based Irish poet, playwright, essayist and close friend of Dr Samuel Johnson - is a reduced copy of the statue of Goldsmith by John Henry Foley, erected in 1864 at Trinity College, Dublin. Foley's plaster model was given to the Royal Dublin Society, and was used for the reproduction of bronze statuettes by Elkington & Co. A bronze replica, also cast by Elkington, is in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle in England. A further plaster version, formerly in the vestibule of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, was damaged sometime during the Second World War of 1939-1945 and had to be destroyed. A bronze version was acquired by the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, in 1997. There is a discrepancy in the spelling of the surname of the artist who made this reduced plaster copy. In a number of scholarly catalogues and dictionaries of artists he is listed as 'Hodson', but in the V&A's records and in its Review of Principal Acquisitions for 1930 he is 'Hudson'. What is certain is that Sir George Frederick Hodson or Hudson was an Irish painter who exhibited landscapes and figures at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, from 1827. The figure is signed 'G.F.H.'