The Department of History of Art is organising a public lecture on 'The European Sculptors of Monumental Sculpture in Britain c.1500 - c.1775' by Prof. Phillip Lindley (University of Leicester) on Friday 25 November at 18:30 at the Anglican Cathedral in Valletta. This lecture forms part of the V Annual Public Lecture on the Visual Culture of Death.
Phillip Lindley is Professor of Art History at the University of Leicester. He is the author of books such as ‘From Gothic to Renaissance’ and ‘Tomb Sculpture and Scholarship’ and has contributed to and edited another dozen books. Most recently, he has been writing about the Howard monuments (from the middle of the sixteenth century), in ‘The Howards and the Tudors: Studies in Science and Heritage’.
Abstract of lecture
Tomb-sculpture was, from the Reformation until the mid-eighteenth century, the dominant genre of sculpture in Britain. For more than two and a half centuries, the production of tomb-monuments in Protestant Britain was dominated by European sculptors. The Huguenots came as refugees from religious persecution, but most European immigrants came to Britain simply because their superior skills and knowledge were in demand from patrons. From the arrival of Italians such as Pietro Torrigiano and Benedetto da Rovezzano in the first half of the sixteenth century through to later arrivals such as Garret Johnson (Janssen) the Elder from Amsterdam, the Huguenot Maximilian Colt, or the Dutchmen William Cure the Elder and Garret Hollemans, seventeenth-century artists such as the Frenchman Hubert le Sueur or, by 1686, John Van Ost [Nost] from Mechelen, right through to eighteenth-century sculptors such as Peter Scheemakers and Michael Rysbrack from Antwerp, and Louis François Roubiliac from Lyon, the majority of the most eminent sculptors working in Britain were from continental Europe. It is as impossible to conceive sculpture in Britain without these immigrants as it is to imagine painting without Holbein, Hans Eworth, Van Dyck, Lely, Verrio, and Kneller.
British sculptors too, sometimes worked abroad, though much less commonly. Examples include Epiphanius Evesham, in Paris c. 1600-15; Nicholas Stone, who met the famous architect Hendrik de Keyser in London and accompanied him to Amsterdam, staying for several years; and the rather tragic figure John Bushnell who worked in France and the Netherlands and carved parts of the huge Baroque monument to Alvise Mocenigo in Venice.
European sculptors brought new skills, for example in sculpting portraits; new media and materials, such as stucco and terracotta, Carrara white ‘statuary’ marble and coloured marbles. They brought new techniques, for example of enlargement, reduction and reproduction; new genres such the small bronze, equestrian image, portrait bust and fountain figure; new formal devices for the disposition of figure-sculpture; innovations in figure-styles, and (increasingly important in the eighteenth century) a first-hand knowledge of classical imagery. J.T. Smith relates, for example, that when Scheemakers went to Rome in 1728, he made numerous small terracotta models from most of the celebrated statues and groups, which he brought back to England: for decades, they underwrote his reputation as an authoritative exponent of a classical idiom.
This lecture will use case studies from across the timespan to argue for the centrality of European sculptors in the history of monumental sculpture in Britain until, in the later eighteenth century, there developed a new, nationalist, emphasis on sculptors of British origin.