Oxford Inscriptions: Taylorian Building
There are four colossal female statues standing on detached ionic columns on the front (east) side of the Taylorian Building facing St Giles'. Each of them represents a European language, and on each plinth an inscription (no longer obviously visible) lists three influential writers in that language. From left to right they are as follows:
Italian (inscribed with the names of Dante, Guicciardini, and Tasso)
French (inscribed with the names of Molière and Montesquieu)
German (inscribed with the names of Goethe, Herder, and Schiller)
Spanish (inscribed with the names of Calderón, Cervantes, and Mariana)
The statues were sculpted by William Grinsell Nicholl in 1846. In his Reminiscences of Oxford (1900) William Tuckwell wrote, “The four colossal female statues surmounting its eastern side were declared by an imaginative undergraduate to be effigies of the four Miss Ogles, ladies who lived hard by; and the myth obtained a more than humorous acceptance.”
These were daughters of James Adey Ogle, physician (and Regius Professor of Medicine from 1851), who lived very near the Taylor Institution at 63 St Giles’ Street (later demolished to make way for Blackfriars). His five daughters were Janet Ogle (b.1821), twins Amelia & Caroline Ogle (b. 1822), Mary Ogle (b.1824), and Isabella Henrietta Ogle (born 1832), and the Misses Ogle of the joke of c.1846 would obviously have been the first four. All except the eldest daughter, Janet, later married.
This photograph shows these statues in 1920 (Historic England CC50/00337, wrongly describing the building as the Ashmolean):
See Bodleian Blog, Art at the Taylorian: Architecture