242 



DISCOVERY 



\\'alpole's sources, the \'ertue MSS.,' once his own 

 and now in the British Museum. \\'alpole himself 

 ■vvas handicapped when dealing- with these sculptors, 

 since the most interesting volume was closed to him 

 as a man of honour. " It is my wish," wrote \'ertue 

 on the title page of this book, " that this volume 

 markt A. f. be at my death immediately ty'd about 

 with string [and] seaFd up till the year 1772 or fiftv 

 years after my death." Unused, if not unopened, it 



l-iG. I.— BUST OF WREiN. By I.uward Pierce. 



Ashmolean Museutn, Oxford. Photographed by kind permission of C. F. Belt, 

 Esq., Departmen* of Fine Arts, AshnioUau Mtiseitm, 



has apparently remained, but its contents may be said 

 to revolutionise our knowledge of such men as 

 Rysbrack and Scheemaker ; and it is these contents, 



' To George Vertue, engraver and antiquary (1684 1756) 

 we owe almost all our biographical knowledge of seventeenth- 

 and eighteenth-centur^• artists, sculptors, and engravers. 

 Walpole avowedly " offers to the public the labours of another 

 person," and appends the life of Vertue to the Anecdotes ; 

 but in deaUng with the sculptors he was handicapped by Ver- 

 tue's wish of secrecy about much of his material ; he was an 

 old man when the later volumes appeared ; and, his own 

 chief interest being in painting, sculpture received less attention 

 than w-as its due. Vertue's information on the subject was 

 first systematically used by the present w-riter in a series of 

 articles on the British Sculptors from Pierce to Chantrev, 

 which have appeared in The Architect during 1921 and 1922, 

 and are still uncompleted. 



together with other matter in the unsealed \olumes, 

 here presented in inverted commas, which form the 

 basis of the present study. 



Fully to understand the sculpture of the period in 

 C|uestion, we must know something of the opportuni- 

 ties that lay before the sculptors. When the Restora- 

 tion came in 1660, the older generation of artists had 

 almost disappeared during the twenty vears of Civil 

 War and Commonwealth rule ; Le Sueur was dead ; 

 !• anelli had gone abroad ; Stone was dead ; though 

 his sons, the younger Nicholas and John, were still 

 :it work. There were cogent reasons for the employ- 

 ment of new men. The Court had been and long 

 remained in close touch with \'ersailles, where roval 

 patronage of art and artists was already a tradition, 

 and where the influence of Bernini and his followers 

 was supreme ; the nation overflowed with loyaltv, 

 and royal statues were an obvious method of demon- 

 strating it ; the Grand Tour was coming into vogue, 

 and with it the habit of connoisseurship and the desire 

 to bring the English mansion into line with the villas 

 of France and Italy. Royal and noble patrons were 

 ready to fill their palaces and gardens with sculpture 

 ancient and modern — the former often needing 

 restoration and therefore offering abundant employ- 

 ment to contemporary artists — and their parish 

 churches with monuments to their dead ancestors and 

 themselves. The middle classes, too, were getting: 

 richer, and had begun to live in a style which 

 demanded greater luxurv ; the fashion for ornate 

 tombs, moreover, had spread, and the results are 

 visible on the walls of a thousand churches. Hence 

 they, too, were ready to employ the sculptor's 

 services, as well as to demonstrate their loyalty by 

 putting up commemorative statues of the restored 

 sovereign. From London to Lichfield the saturnine 

 features were made familiar, and the Roval Exchange 

 alone contained four statues of Charles II. Above 

 all, the Great Fire offered an opportunity which no 

 other event since the burning of Rome under Xero 

 can parallel. St. Paul's, the Royal Exchange, and 

 fifty-two churches, besides thousands of houses, the 

 City Halls and the Monument itself, were built or 

 rebuilt, apart from the fifty new churches commis- 

 sioned in the reign of Anne ; and as the sculptors of 

 the day, like Stone in the last age, were often pre- 

 pared to act as architects and monumental masons, 

 the field thus opened was enormous. 



The Revolution brought vet another change. 

 William III., a delicate man, required country air; 

 hence the palaces of Kensington and Hampton Court 

 took the place of Whitehall in the reign of the earlier 

 Stuarts as centres of artistic activity, and Cibber, 

 Gibbons, and Pierce found fresh employment there 

 under the all-supervising Wren. In the next reign 

 came a great series of victories which led to the 

 erection of monuments, as yet by individuals only, as 



