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DISCOVERY 



Eng-land, and one of the triumphs of English art. 

 On the rest of Pierce's work we cannot linger; it must 

 suffice to say that his most florid monumental work is 

 to be seen in the splendid monument to Sir William 

 Maynard in the little church of Little Easton, Essex, 

 and the drawing for a monument, never erected, to 

 the Second Duke of Buckingham, Dryden's Zimri, 

 of which the writer last year published a reproduction 

 {Architect, September 2, 192 1, p. 137). 



The work of Pierce is typical of the course of 

 English sculpture. Now it is decorative, now archi- 

 tectural; now he is employed on tombs, now on 

 portrait busts and statues like that of Sir William 

 Walworth at Fishmongers' Hall; but he must, like 

 many of his fellows, have fallen into poverty in his 

 old age, since all his pictures and models were sold 

 bv auction in 1695. He "lived and died," as Vertue 

 tells us, "at his hse lowr end of Surrey street in the 

 Strand, buried at St. Mary le Savoy." 



Caius Gabriel Gibber (1630-1700), a Dane born in 

 Flensborg, came to England in 1659, and is therefore 

 the first of the new generation of foreign sculptors 

 domesticated in England to whom the new conditions 

 of English social life offered such wide and lasting 

 opportunities. .''Lt once architect, decorator, sculptor, 

 and monumental mason, he also typifies the age of 

 Wren, and his work, as sculptor especially, ranks far 

 higher than it is the fashion to allow. His most 

 famous works, more familiar to an earlier generation 

 than to this, are the Michael Angelesque statues of 

 Raving and Melancholy Madness, figures typifying 

 two forms of insanity, once over Bedlam Gates and 

 now in the basement museum of the Guildhall, 

 which Roubiliac, the greatest sculptor of the 

 eighteenth century, would go out of his way to admire 

 whenever he went to the city, and which were to 

 furnish Pope with an admirable means of lashing his 

 favourite butt the sculptor's .son, Colley Gibber, 

 laureate and dramatist, when he described in the 

 Diinciad how 



" O'er the Gates, by his fam'd father's hand. 

 Great Gibber's brazen, brainless brothers stand." 



Gibber was, like Pierce, an assistant of Wren, 

 working for him on the Monument, on which he 

 executed the great bas-relief representing the restora- 

 tion of London, at Hampton Court, Trinity College, 

 Cambridge, and St. Paul's. He did most of the 

 statues for the Royal Exchange, and was the architect 



of Winckelmann, the pioneer of the modern study of CTreek 

 art, and the Neo-classic school of sculptors who broke with the 

 existing traditions and deliberately based their work on Greek 

 or rather Graeco-Roman art. What this meant may be seen 

 by contrasting the work of Flaxman and Canova with that of 

 Bernini, the recent acquisition of whose bust of " Mr. Baker " 

 by the Victoria and Albert Museum is an event of national 

 importance. A comparison of this work with Pierce's bust of 

 Wren here illustrated will show the source of the younger 

 sculptor's inspiration. 



of the old Danish Church in Wellclose Square, besides 

 executing much decorative work at Chatsworth, both 

 indoors and out. He produced an admirable genre 

 statue of the Blind Piper, and the statue of William 

 of \\Vkeham at \\'inchester, the latter a species of 

 bribe addressed to the authorities to procure the 

 election of his son Lewis to the foundation as 

 Founder's Kin. A portrait or two, some wooden 

 statues of Saints, a Berninesque fountain in Soho 

 Square, with statues of Charles II. and four river- 

 gods, fairly represent his output, though his best 

 work is to be seen in two monuments which rank 

 among the noblest of their day. These are the 

 glorious Sackville tomb at Withyham, Sussex, show- 

 ing the parents of Lord Richard Sackville kneeling 

 on either side of the recumbent figure of their son, 

 and the stately monument of Heneage Finch, Earl of 

 Nottingham, at Ravenstone, Bucks, this last not 

 hitherto included among his works, though Finch 

 tradition, confirmed by the style, declares it to be 

 his. The same tradition states that the sculptor was 

 so distressed by the squint he had given to the figure 

 that he committed suicide, but the legend, as in the 

 case of another monument in Winchester Cathedral, 

 is clearly a case of post hoc, propter hoc, since 

 Vertue, who knew much of him, never heard of it. 

 " He was a gentleman-like man and a man of good 

 sense, but died poor, left a son a player," is the 

 antiquary's brief epitaph on a sculptor who imitated 

 Bernini in his fountains, worked with and for Wren 

 and Bird, and impressed generation after generation 

 with his following of Michael Angelo in his Raving 

 and Melancholy Madness which may without 

 exaggeration be termed the strongest imaginative 

 work executed in England between the Restoration 

 and the rise of Roubiliac. 



The romantic story of John Bushnell (d. 1701), most 

 inadequatelv told bv Walpole, deserves to be more 

 widely know n. He left his master, Thomas Burman, 

 one of the last of the school of English alabaster 

 sculptors, for foreign travel, spent two years in 

 France and visited Italy, not Rome only, but Venice. 

 " He took pleasure," as Hogarth's father-in-law, 

 .Sir James Thornhill, told Vertue, " to travel as a 

 poor fellow and workt in several towns. .\t first, 

 with Masters, he would enter himself as a labourer 

 or poor fellow, and after some time, surprise them 

 by doing better and better." His unidentified monu- 

 ment at Venice, like his work at Hamburg, which he 

 visited on the way home ; his disappointment over 

 the Royal Statues on the Exchange, of which he did 

 only two instead of all; his figures on Temple Bar; 

 his glorious Mordaunt monument at Fulham, so long 

 unjustly attributed to Bird — for these things the 

 reader must be referred to The Architect (October 

 7th, igji). His life was a failure. Contemporaries 

 laughed at his figures, " great and spirituous " as 



