A Copeland parian figural group of Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman
circa 1873, after the painting by C.R. Leslie in the Tate Gallery, London,
impressed marks, 22cm high

C.R. Leslie's painting depicts a scene from Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760); 'Uncle Toby ... knew not so much as the right end of a woman from the wrong, and therefore was never altogether at his ease near any one of them - unless in sorrow and distress: then infinite was his pity; nor would the most courteous knight of romance have gone further, at least upon one leg, to have wiped away a tear from a woman's eye; and yet excepting once that he was once beguiled into it by Mrs Wadman, he had never looked steadfastly into one.'