NOTES:
[3] A favourite old ballad farce by Dogget, the comedian.
A SCULPTOR'S LIFE IN THE LAST CENTURY.
orace Walpole, in his Anecdotes of Painting, having deplored the low ebb to which the arts had sunk in Britain during the time of George the First, proceeds to consider the succeeding reign with greater complacency: accounting it, indeed, as a new and shining era. Under George the Second he found architecture revived 'in antique purity;' sculpture redeemed from reproach; the art of gardening, or, as he prefers to call it, 'the art of creating landscape,' pressed forward to perfection; engraving much elevated; and painting, if less perceptibly advanced, still (towards the close of the reign, at any rate) ransomed from insipidity by the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The king himself, it was conceded, had 'little propensity to refined pleasure;' but his consort, Queen Caroline, was credited with a lively anxiety to reward merit and to encourage the exertions of the ingenious.
This glowing picture of the period in its relation to the fine arts, contrasts somewhat violently with what we learn elsewhere concerning the poverty of Richard Wilson, the ill-requited labours of William Hogarth, the struggles and sufferings of James Barry, and generally, of the depressed condition of native professors of art during the eighteenth century. That the portrait-painter (the 'face-painter' as Hogarth delighted contemptuously to designate him) found sufficient occupation is likely enough; but, otherwise, the British artist had perforce to limit the aspirations of his genius to the decoration of ceilings and staircases, and to derive his chief emoluments from painting the sign-boards of the British tradesman: if not a very dignified still a remunerative employment; for in those days every London shop boasted its distinct emblem.
Nevertheless it is certain that in George the Second's reign Fashion began to take up with Taste. Dilettanteism became the vogue. Objects of virtù were now, for the first time, indispensable appendages of the houses of the aristocratic and the rich. A rage for 'collecting' possessed the town, and led to an expenditure as profuse as it was injudicious. Of the vast sums disbursed, however, but a small share came to the native artist. His works were passed over as beneath the notice of the cognoscenti. The 'quality' gave their verdict against modern art and in favour of the ancient masters. A race of old picture-brokers and jobbers in antiquities sprang into existence to supply the increasing demand for such chattels. The London Magazine for 1737, in an article attributed to William Hogarth, inveighs bitterly against these speculators and their endeavours to depreciate every English work in order to enhance the value of their imported shiploads of Dead Christs, Holy Families and Madonnas: the sweepings of the continental art-markets. Auction-rooms were opened in all parts of London for the exhibition and sale of choice objects of every kind, and became the resort and rendezvous of all pretending to wealth and fashion. Agents were to be found at the chief foreign cities eagerly exhuming antiquities for transmission to England: certain of immediate sale and enormous profit there. The prevailing appetite seemed to grow by what it fed on. And then, of course, unscrupulous people took to manufacturing antiquities; and, so doing, drove a brisk and remarkably remunerative trade.
The neglected British artist naturally made protests and wrote pamphlets more or less angry in tone, according to the state of his purse and his temper and the extent of his self-appreciation. The press of the period raised its voice: a less portentous and sonorous organ than it has since possessed. Even the players ventured to be satirical on the subject. It was early in 1752 that Mr. Foote's comedy of Taste was brought upon the stage of Drury Lane Theatre, David Garrick both writing and speaking the prologue. Probably the satire soared rather above the heads of the audience. Foote admits as much in his preface to the published play: 'I was always apprehensive that the subject of the following piece was too abstracted and singular for the comprehension of a mixed assembly. Juno, Lucina, Jupiter Tonans, Phidias, Praxiteles, with the other gentlemen and ladies of antiquity, were, I daresay, utterly unknown to my very good friends of the gallery; nor, to speak the truth, do I believe they had many acquaintances in the other parts of the house.' Accordingly Taste, on its first production, was only repeated some four nights, and, though revived once or twice afterwards, never took rank as a stock piece. Yet, as Mr. John Forster says of it, Foote's play is legitimate satire, and also excellent comedy.
There is little or no plot. Foote did not care for continuous story; he could generally secure the favour of the audience by the wit of his dialogue and a quick succession of lively incidents. In the first act Lady Pentweazle sits for her portrait in a broadly humorous scene. Puff is an impudent trader in sham antiquities and objects of virtù; Carmine, an artist constrained by poverty to aid and abet him in his nefarious proceedings; Brush is another confederate. In the second act a sale by auction is represented. Carmine appears as Canto the auctioneer; Puff figures as the Baron de Groningen, who is travelling to purchase pictures for the Elector of Bavaria. Lord Dupe, Bubble, Squander, and Novice, are fashionable patrons and collectors of art. The pictures to be submitted for sale are inspected. One of them is particularly admired; but is ultimately discovered to be 'a modern performance, the master alive, and an Englishman.' 'Oh, then,' says Lord Dupe, changing his tone, 'I would not give it house-room!' The antiquities are then brought forward. 'The first lot,' announces the auctioneer, 'consists of a hand without an arm, the first joint of the forefinger gone, supposed to be a limb of the Apollo Delphos. The second, half a foot, with the toes entire, of the Juno Lucina. The third, the Caduceus of the Mercurius Infernalis. The fourth, the half of the leg of the Infant Hercules. All indisputable antiques, and of the Memphian marble.' One critic objects to a swelling on the foot of Juno as a defect in its proportion; but the auctioneer informs him that the swelling is intended to represent a corn, and the defect is thereupon pronounced an absolute master-stroke. Presently the auctioneer proceeds: 'Bring forward the head from Herculaneum.... Now, gentlemen, here is a jewel.... The very mutilations of this piece are worth all the most perfect performances of modern artists. Now, gentlemen, here is a touchstone for your taste!' He is asked whether the head is intended to represent a man or a woman. 'The connoisseurs differ,' he answers. 'Some will have it to be the Jupiter Tonans of Phidias, and others the Venus of Paphos from Praxiteles; but I don't think it fierce enough for the first, nor handsome enough for the last.... Therefore I am inclined to join with Signor Julio de Pampedillo, who, in a treatise dedicated to the King of the Two Sicilies, calls it the Serapis of the Egyptians, and supposes it to have been fabricated about eleven hundred and three years before the Mosaic account of the creation.' A bystander inquires what has become of the nose of the bust? 'The nose? What care I for the nose?' cries an enthusiastic amateur. 'Why, sir, if it had a nose I wouldn't give sixpence for it! How the devil should we distinguish the works of the ancients if they were perfect? Why, I don't suppose but, barring the nose, ROUBILIAC could cut as good a head every whit.... A man must know d——d little of statuary that dislikes a bust for want of a nose!'
It must be admitted that this is satire of a good trenchant sort. The reader will find plenty more of it if he will only turn to the comedy for himself. Our immediate purpose is with the sculptor for whose name Mr. Foote has found a place in his play.
The rage for collecting antiquities was only equalled by the passion for 'restoring' them when collected. To disinter a torso here, and a head there, and then to make a sort of forced marriage of the fragments; to graft new feet upon old legs; to dovetail stray hands upon odd arms; to reset broken limbs, and patch and piece mutilations and deficiencies, constituted the delights and the triumphs of the amateurs. In accomplishing these exploits the services of foreign workmen were extensively employed; for, by a curious piece of reasoning, the foreign sculptor, no matter how limited his capacity, was held to be far more competent to restore antiquities than the English artist of whatever reputation. It was, doubtless, in consequence of this demand for foreign labour, and the liberal manner in which its exertions were recognised and requited, that Louis Francis Roubiliac found his way to this country.
In his account of the sculptor, Walpole is singularly brief; supplies very meagre information; yet when he was compiling his Anecdotes the fame of Roubiliac was at its highest; he was freshly remembered on all sides, and the facts of his early life could have been collected, one would imagine, without much difficulty. He was born, from all accounts, at Lyons, about the close of the seventeenth century; was a pupil of Balthazar of Dresden, sculptor to the Elector of Saxony, and came to England in 1720. That he was without repute in his native land is evidenced by the fact that no mention of him appears in D'Argenville's Lives of the most Eminent Sculptors of France, published in 1787. Of his parentage nothing is known. He had apparently received a fair education; was found to possess a considerable acquaintance with the literature of his native land; more especially was conversant with the works of the best French poets, and himself produced original verse of a respectable quality. Yet, notwithstanding his long residence in England, he never mastered the English language so as to be able to use it freely; and in all the anecdotes extant of him he is represented as employing the broken dialect common to foreigners.
For some years after his arrival in England his occupation would appear to have been little better than that of a journeyman sculptor, employed under various masters in botching antiquities. Mr. John Thomas Smith, in his Life of Nollekens, informs us that when Mr. Roubiliac had to mend an antique, he 'would mix Gloucester cheese with his plaster, adding the grounds of porter, and the yolk of an egg: which mixture when dry forms a very hard cement.' Walpole states that the artist had little business until Sir Edward Walpole (Sir Robert's second son: Horace was the third) recommended him to execute half the busts in Trinity College, Dublin; but the date of this act of patronage is not supplied. A story attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and set forth in his Life by Northcote, relates that Roubiliac first secured the patronage of Sir Edward Walpole by picking up and restoring a pocket-book he had dropped at Vauxhall, containing bank-notes and other papers of value. The artist declined to receive any reward for this service, although ultimately he was persuaded to accept the annual present of a fat buck, as a testimony of gratitude and regard; further, he became the object of Sir Edward's constant patronage. Horace Walpole says nothing of this story; but the brothers, it was well known, were not friends, seldom if ever met, and probably were not closely informed of each other's proceedings. In a letter written in 1745 to his friend George Montagu, Horace Walpole gives an amusing description of the patron of Roubiliac, and, incidentally, reveals the not very brotherly terms subsisting between himself and the knight: 'You propose making a visit to Englefield Green' [where Sir Edward lived], 'and ask me if I think it right? Extremely so. I have heard it is a very pretty place. You love a jaunt—have a pretty chaise, I believe, and I dare swear, very easy; in all probability you will have a fine evening; and added to all this, the gentleman' [Sir E.W.] 'you would go to see is very agreeable and good-humoured,... plays extremely well on the bass-viol, and has generally other people with him.... He is perfectly master of all the quarrels that have been fashionably on foot about Handel, and can give you a very perfect account of all the modern rival painters.... In short, I can think of no reason in the world against your going there but one: do you know his youngest brother?? If you happen to be so unlucky, I can't flatter you so far as to advise you to make him a visit: for there is nothing in the world the Baron of Englefield has such an aversion for as for his brother!'
It was probably some years before this that Roubiliac had obtained employment from Mr. Jonathan Tyers, who in 1732 had become the proprietor of Vauxhall Gardens. The 'New Spring Gardens at Fox Hall' had in the previous century been a resort of Mr. Samuel Pepys, who has left on record his approval of the place. 'It is very pleasant and cheap going thither,' he writes in 1667, 'for a man may go to spend what he will or nothing, as all one. But to hear the nightingale and the birds, and here fiddles and there a harp, and here a Jew's-trump and here laughing, and there fine people walking, is mighty divertising.' Since the Pepys period, however, the gardens had fallen into disrepute; had indeed been closed during many seasons. Mr. Tyers took the place in hand, bent upon restoring its fame and fashion. He erected an orchestra, with an organ, engaged the best singers and musicians of the day, built alcoves for the company, and secured paintings by Messrs. Hayman and Hogarth for the further embellishment of the gardens. Then he discussed with his friend, Mr. Cheere, as to adding works of statuary. Mr. Cheere dealt largely in painted leaden figures, then much employed in 'the art of creating landscape.' He was 'the man at Hyde Park Corner' of whom Lord Ogleby in the comedy[4] makes mention when he says: 'Great improvements, indeed, Mr. Sterling! Wonderful improvements! The four Seasons in lead, the flying Mercury, and the basin with Neptune in the middle, are in the very extreme of fine taste. You have as many rich figures as the man at Hyde Park Corner!' Mr. Cheere advised Mr. Tyers to set up a statue of Handel. There was some difficulty about the expense. But Mr. Cheere introduced a clever artist, a Frenchman, content to work upon very moderate terms. This was, of course, Louis Francis Roubiliac; who accordingly produced his statue of Handel: greatly to the admiration of the habitués of Vauxhall. It stood, in 1744, on the south side of the gardens, under an enclosed lofty arch, surmounted by a figure playing on the violoncello, attended by two boys; it was then screened from the weather by a curtain, which was drawn up when the visitors arrived. Mr. Tyers's plans were crowned with success. Fashion was enthusiastic on the subject of Vauxhall. Royalty patronized; the nobility protected and promoted; and the general public crowded Mr. Tyers's handsome pleasure-grounds. The ladies promenaded in their hoops, sacques, and caps, as they appeared in their own drawing-rooms: the beaux of the period were in attendance, with swords and powdered bag-wigs, their three-cornered hats under their arms. Read Walpole's account (in another letter to George Montagu) of his visit in 1750. He accompanied Lady Caroline Petersham and little Miss Ashe—or 'the Pollard Ashe,' as it pleases him to describe her. The ladies had just put on their last layer of rouge, 'and looked as handsome as crimson could make them.' They proceed in a barge, a boat of French horns attending, and little Miss Ashe singing. Parading some time up the river they at last debark at Vauxhall, and there pick up Lord Granby, 'arrived very drunk from Jenny's Whim'—a tavern at Chelsea frequented by his lordship and other gentlemen of fashion. Assembled in their supper-box, Lady Caroline, 'looking gloriously jolly and handsome,' minces seven chickens in a china dish (Lord Orford, Horace's brother, assisting), and stews them over a lamp, with three pats of butter and a flagon of water, stirring, and rattling, and laughing: the company expecting the dish to fly about their ears every minute. Then Betty, the famous fruit-woman from St. James's Street, is in attendance with hampers of strawberries and cherries, waits upon the guests, and afterwards sits down to her own supper at a side table. The company become, by-and-by, a little boisterous in their merriment, and attract the attention of the other visitors; there is soon quite a concourse round Lady Caroline's box, till Harry Vane fills a bumper and toasts the bystanders, and is proceeding to treat them with still greater freedom. 'It was three o'clock before we got home,' concludes Walpole. Such was a fashionable frolic at Vauxhall under Mr. Tyers's management: when Roubiliac's statue of Handel stood in the midst.
Vauxhall vanished some ten or a dozen years since. Its latter days were dreary, down-at-heel, and disreputable enough. The statue had departed long previously. 'It was conveyed to the house of Mr. Barrett, at Stockwell,' records Mr. J.T. Smith in 1829, 'and thence to the entrance-hall of the residence of his son, the Rev. Jonathan Tyers Barrett, D.D., of No. 14 Duke Street, Westminster.' Mr. Henry Phillips, in his Musical and Personal Recollections (1864), regrets that when Roubiliac's Handel 'was brought to the hammer, and sold by Mr. Squibb on the 16th March 1832, for two hundred and five guineas, the Sacred Harmonic Society did not purchase it in place of its being bought by Mr. Brown, of University Street.' Nollekens used to value the statue at one thousand guineas. The plaster model became the property of Hudson, the preceptor of Reynolds, who possessed a collection of models at his house at Twickenham. Upon the death of Hudson and the sale of his collection, the model was bought for five pounds by the father of Mr. J.T. Smith, a pupil of Roubiliac's, and it then passed into the possession of Nollekens. When Nollekens's effects were sold, the plaster Handel was knocked down by Mr. Christie to Hamlet, the famous silversmith. Its further history has not been traced.
The statue of Handel, the first original work that can, with any certainty, be ascribed to Roubiliac, may be regarded as a fair specimen of the artist's manner. He was of the school of Bernini. He followed the sculptors who infinitely prefer unrest to repose in art. He dearly enjoyed a tour de force in stone. He liked to deal with marble as though it were the most plastic of materials: to twist it this way and that, and rumple and flutter it as though it were merely muslin. To have carved a wig in a gale of wind would have been a task particularly agreeable to this class of artists; they would have done their best to represent each particular hair standing on end. They adored minutiæ: a shoulder-knot of ribbons, the embroidery of a sword-belt, the stitches of a seam, the lace of a cravat, were achievements to be gloried in. And yet, with all this realism in detail, their works are unreal and artificial in general effect; as a glance at any statue by Roubiliac will sufficiently demonstrate.
This arises possibly from the artist's fondness for attitude. He seems to have regarded posture-making as a peculiar attribute of genius. His figures are always in a constrained and over-studied pose: twisting about in the throes of giving birth to a great idea: filled with the divine afflatus, even to the bursting of their buttonholes and the snapping of their braces. His Handel is in a state of exceeding perturbation: his clothes in staring disorder, his hair floating in the breeze. The intention was to represent the composer in the act of raptured meditation upon music; but, as Allan Cunningham remarks, he looks much more like a man alarmed at an apparition. But then this exaggeration of demeanour was very much the artist's own manner in actual life. The Frenchman has always a sort of innate histrionic faculty: he is for ever, perhaps unconsciously, playing a part. So Roubiliac was himself incessantly acting and attitudinizing, much after the fashion of his statues. He seemed to hold that it was expedient, for the better preventing of mistakes about the matter, that genius should always in such way advertise itself; there was danger lest it should not be believed in if it left off making grimaces and striking attitudes. Perhaps from his own point of view, and in his own time, the artist was right. It was necessary then to do something to arrest the attention of a public apathetic on the subject of art-talent, unless, as Peter Pindar sang, the artist 'had been dead a hundred years.' Possibly, the only way for a man in those days to gain credit as a genius was by affecting eccentricity and unconventionality: taking heed that all his proceedings were as unlike other people's as possible. Thereupon the world argued: geniuses are not as we are; this person is not as we are; therefore he must be a genius. Q.E.D.
Consequently, we find Roubiliac—a thin, olive-skinned Frenchman, with strongly-marked, arching eyebrows, mobile features, and small, sharp, dark eyes—liable at all times to fits of abstraction, attacks of inspiration. He will drop his knife and fork while at dinner, sink back in his chair, assume an ecstatic expression: the fit is on him; he must abandon his meal and hurry away at once to lock himself in his studio, and place upon record the superb idea which has so inconveniently visited him. His companions make allowances for him: men of genius are often thus. At other times he is absorbed in meditation upon his art: address him, and he makes no reply, fails to hear. While engaged upon his statue of Handel, he decides that the great musician must have possessed an ear of exceeding symmetry, and searches everywhere for a model. He scrutinizes the ears of all his acquaintances. Suddenly he pounces upon Miss Rich, the daughter of the Covent Garden manager. 'Miss Rich,' he cries, 'I must have your ear for my Handel!' In Westminster Abbey he permits himself to be 'discovered'—to use an appropriate theatrical term—lost in contemplation of the kneeling figure at the north-west corner of Sir Francis Vere's monument. His servant, having thrice delivered a message, without receiving a word in reply, finds his arm suddenly seized, and his master whispering mysteriously in his ear, while he points to the statue: 'Hush! hush! he vill speak presently!' At another time he invites a friend to occupy a spare bed at his house, gives him his candle, and bids him good-night. Presently the friend is heard crying aloud in great excitement and alarm; the bed is already occupied: the dead body of a negress is laid out upon it. 'I beg your pardon,' says the artist, 'I quite forgot poor Mary vas dere. Poor Mary! she die yesterday vid de small-pox. She was my housemaid for five, six years. Come along; I vill find you a bed somevhere else.' All this was but acting up to the idea Mr. Roubiliac had formed of the abstractedness and eccentricity of genius.
Serene, sedate Flaxman, who adored the antique, who held that sculpture should be nothing if not calm and classical, was little likely to sympathize with Roubiliac, or to comprehend his close following of Bernini, or indeed to care at all for his productions. 'His thoughts are conceits; his compositions epigrams,' says Flaxman. And then he is astounded that Roubiliac, who, at the ripe age of fifty, accompanied by Hudson the painter, also arrived at a period of life somewhat advanced for study, visited Italy, should presume to return unmoved and unenlightened by what he had seen. 'He was absent from home three months, going and returning,' relates Flaxman, with an air of indignation; 'stayed three days in Rome, and laughed at the sublime remains of ancient sculpture!' Positively laughed! To Flaxman, who was certainly a bigot in regard to the beauties of the antique, if Roubiliac was something of a scoffer in that respect, this seemed flat blasphemy. Yet it was hardly to be expected that Roubiliac, at the height of a successful career, would admit his whole system of art to have been founded on error—would consent humbly to recommence his profession, and forthwith prostrate himself at the feet of ancient sculpture. His admiration for Bernini—whom of course Flaxman cordially detested—was genuine enough. The Italian's florid manner chimed in with his own French, gesticulating, mercurial notions of art. If excess of self-satisfaction prevented him from rendering due homage to the relics of the past—and possibly his early toils as a 'restorer' further tended to blind him to their value—he was careful to pay tribute to the merits of the artist he had selected for his prototype. Hazlitt mentions, on the authority of Northcote, that when Roubiliac, returned from Rome, went to look at his own works in Westminster Abbey, he cried out in his usual vehement way, 'By God! they look like tobacco-pipes compared to Bernini!' And he was not without honest admiration for the production of other artists more nearly of his own time. Whenever he visited the city he was careful to go round by the gates of Bethlehem Hospital, in Moorfields, over which stood Caius Gabriel Cibber's figures of Raving and Melancholy Madness: Colley Cibber's 'brazen, brainless brothers,' as Pope called them, ignorant, possibly from their having become so begrimed with London smoke, that they were really carved in stone. Roubiliac highly esteemed these statues. Though in idea evidently borrowed from Michael Angelo, they were yet strictly realistic in treatment, and were reputed to be modelled from Oliver Cromwell's giant porter, at one time a patient in the Hospital. When Bethlehem was removed to St. George's Fields the surface of these figures was renovated by Bacon, the sculptor. They are now deposited in the South Kensington Museum.
Indeed, what Flaxman intended as a reproach, may sound in modern ears much more like approval. 'He copied vulgar nature with zeal, and some of his figures seem alive.' Roubiliac constantly had recourse to the living forms about him; Flaxman preferred instead to turn to the antique. We hear of Roubiliac's fondness for modelling the arms of Thames watermen and the legs of chair-porters: in each case the particular employment inducing great muscular development of the limbs to be moulded. And this desire for independent study was really creditable to the artist. He sought to arrive at the correctness of the ancients by a pathway of his own: to check, by a distinct reckoning, an individual reference to nature, and, if need was, fearlessly to depart from, what they had registered as the result of their investigations. A more legitimate charge against him was that he was negligent in his choice of forms for imitation; undervalued refinement of idea; took altogether a somewhat mean view of nature, or adulterated it with too large an infusion of the dancing-master. Certainly he was fonder of fritter than of breadth; and his draperies are often meagre in effect from the multiplicity of their folds, and his attempt at rendering texture in marble. This may be noticed in his statue of Sir Isaac Newton, at Cambridge, where an excess of labour, seems expended on the silk mantle of the figure—all the small creases and plaitings of the light material being represented, and the surface highly polished, still further to increase the resemblance.
This statue, however, was highly admired by Chantrey,[5] and to it, in his Prelude, Wordsworth has dedicated laudatory lines.
There is no necessity for running through a list of Roubiliac's works. But his statue of Shakespeare is deserving of a passing notice. It of course fails to satisfy the students of the bard, who delight to pay equal homage to his philosophy as to his poetry. There is nothing of the sage about the work: it is wholly of the stage indeed. It is replete with Roubiliac's established ecstatic super-elegant manner; with a strong tinge of theatricalism, possibly added by Garrick, for whose temple at Hampton the statue was undertaken; who attitudinized in aid, as he imagined, of the sculptor's labours, with a cry of 'Behold the swan of Avon!' and who, it must be said, at all times entertained a very 'footlight' view of the poet. The price paid for the work was three hundred guineas only. Roubiliac was to supply the best marble he could for the money. Unfortunately the block turned out to be much spotted and streaked; the head was especially disfigured with blue stains. 'What!' cried Garrick, 'was Shakespeare marked with mulberries?' It became necessary to sever the head from the shoulders and replace it with one of purer marble. The statue was completed in 1758. Under the terms of Garrick's will, it became, on the death of his widow, the property of the nation, and it now stands in the entrance-hall of the British Museum. After the purists and the exacting have said their worst against the statue, it will yet be found—from the spirit of its execution, its cleverness, and 'go,' to resort to a vulgarism—charming a very large class of uncritical examiners.
As Lord Chesterfield said of Roubiliac, 'he was the only statuary of his day; all other artists were mere stone-cutters.' It is very desirable, in estimating his merits, to bear in mind that he stood alone; his rivals, Rysbrach and Scheemakers, he had completely outstripped; and, apart from his following of Bernini, he was clearly an artist of an original and creative kind. What is hard to forgive in him, however, and what indeed has much detracted from his reputation, is the fact that a long list of allegorical monstrosities was in some sort the result of his example. Charmed with certain of his works, and possessed just then by particular memories it deemed deserving of monumental celebration, the nation rushed recklessly to its stone-cutters. The terrible works which blemish and blister the walls of our cathedrals and churches were the consequences. Verrio and Laguerre had long set the fashion of disfiguring ceilings and staircases with their incomprehensible compositions. Roubiliac carved similar parabolic productions in marble and set them up in Westminster Abbey and elsewhere. In these, heathen divinities jostle Christian emblems; Paganism is seen abreast of true religion. In the aisle of a Gothic abbey, John, Duke of Argyle and Greenwich, warrior and orator, expires at the foot of a pyramid, on which History, weeping, writes his deeds, while Minerva (or Britannia) mourns at the side, and Eloquence above, tossing white arms in the air, deplores the loss she has sustained. Here we find Hercules placing the bust of Sir Peter Warren upon a pedestal, while Navigation prepares to crown it with a laurel wreath; a British flag forming the background and a horn of plenty emptying its contents beside an anchor and a cannon. In the monument to Marshal Wade, Time is endeavouring to destroy a pillar adorned with military trophies, which fame as zealously protects. The famous Nightingale memorial represents a husband shielding a dying wife from the attack of Death: a grinning skeleton levelling a javelin as he issues from the opening iron door of a tomb. The admirable execution of these works cannot blind the critic to the utter unfitness and folly of their conception.
But Roubiliac's successors far outbid him in absurdity. To a number of people a precedent is always a point of departure—an example to be imitated with violent exaggeration. After our sculptor came a deluge of imbecility. We are then among stone-cutters who shrink from nothing; we are treated then to clouds that look like muffins—to waves that resemble pancakes. Apotheosis becomes preposterous; allegory goes fairly mad. Glancing at certain post-Roubiliac achievements, we long for an earthquake. Nicholas Read, the least competent of his pupils, upon the sculptor's death occupied his studio, advertised himself as successor to Mr. Roubiliac, and, strange to say, was largely employed: the execution of the monuments to Admiral Tyrrell and the Duchess of Northumberland, in Westminster Abbey, being intrusted to him. During his master's life the apprentice had boasted of the great deeds he would do when he had served his time. Roubiliac cried scornfully, in his broken English: 'Ven you do de monument, den de vorld vill see vot von d——d ting you vill make of it!' His words were justified by Read's monument to Admiral Tyrrell: possibly the most execrable work in stone in existence; which is saying a good deal. As Nollekens would often remark of it: 'Read's admiral going to heaven looks for all the world as though he were hanging from a gallows with a rope round his neck.'
As Roubiliac's first work was a statue of Handel for Vauxhall Gardens, so his last was a statue of the same great composer for Westminster Abbey. He died on the 11th January 1762, and was buried in St. Martin's Churchyard, 'under the window of the Bell Bagnio.' His funeral was attended by the leading members of the Society of Artists, then meeting at the Academy in Peter's Court, St. Martin's Lane: the room they occupied, it may be noted, having been Roubiliac's first workshop. The artists following the funeral were:—Mr. (afterwards Sir Joshua) Reynolds, Moser, Hogarth, Tyler, Sandby, Hayman, Wilton, Bartolozzi, Cipriani, Payne, Chambers (afterwards Sir William), Serres, Ravenet, the elder Grignon, Meyer, and Hudson; and the dead master's three pupils, John Adkins, Nicholas Read, and Nathaniel Smith.
Roubiliac died poor; indeed, seriously in debt. Yet he had married well, it would seem. An old newspaper, under date January 1752, records: 'Married Mr. Roubiliac, the statuary in St. Martin's Lane, to Miss Crossley of Deptford, worth £10,000.' No particulars of his married life have come down to us, however. It is probable that his wife predeceased him. The money was spent in any case. Perhaps she never possessed so much as the world gave her credit for. The sale of his effects, after payment of his funeral expenses, left only about one-and-sixpence in the pound to his creditors. Though constantly employed, the prices he received were small; and a thoroughly conscientious artist, he never spared time or labour upon the commissions he had undertaken. He was not, it is stated, extravagant in his habits; did not waste his means in the support of a pretentious establishment. On the contrary, his method of life was very modest: his tastes were simple enough. Society was not yet prepared to admit the professions to her salons; her somewhat costly caresses were reserved for the ingenious of a succeeding generation. Roubiliac was content to live that easy pleasant tavern life favoured by the men of letters and artists of the eighteenth century, and with which Johnson and Boswell have made us so intimately acquainted. A bottle of claret and a game of whist solaced his leisure hours; and these were not numerous: he was constantly to be found in his studio, late at night, hard at work long after his assistants had retired: a vivacious, honest, warm-hearted man, much and justly esteemed by his friends and contemporaries.
He was a familiar acquaintance of Goldsmith, who in his Chinese letters speaks of him kindly as 'the little sculptor.' He was fond of music, and Goldsmith would play the flute to him. As Sir John Hawkins records, the sculptor once tricked the poet by pretending to set down the notes on paper as Goldsmith played them. Goldsmith looked over the paper afterwards with seeming great attention, said it was quite correct, and that if he had not seen him do it he never could have believed his friend capable of writing music after him. Roubiliac had jotted down notes at random. Neither had any real knowledge of music, and Goldsmith played entirely by ear.
His intimate and fellow-sculptor—a painter also—Adrien Charpentier, executed a characteristic portrait of Roubiliac. He is represented at work upon a small-size model of his Shakespeare. He is touching the eye of the figure with his modelling tool, and the task, one of some delicacy and difficulty, adds to the animation of the operator. His head, where it is not covered by the fanciful loose head-dress affected by poets and artists of the period, is bald: possibly shaven, for the convenience of wig-wearing, after the custom of the time. His dress is disordered, his bosom bare, his wristbands loose. Had Roubiliac carved his own statue in stone, it would probably, in treatment, have closely followed Charpentier's picture.
A portrait of Roubiliac, painted by himself, was sold for three-and-sixpence only at the sale of his effects. The prices, indeed, at this sale seem to have been desperately low. There were no antiquities or objects of virtù brought to the hammer: and Mr. Canto was not the auctioneer! A copy by Reynolds of the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, with seven other pictures, was knocked down for ten shillings only, the father of John Flaxman being the purchaser. Reynolds had painted the picture as a present to his friend, Mr. Roubiliac. It afterwards became the property of Mr. Edmond Malone.