§ XIV. OF LEAD STATUES.
The making of lead statues was frequent up to the end of the 18th century, and then more frequent than at any other time, to cease at once on the introduction of the Italian plaster model shops, which in the eyes of the connoisseurs of the time brought with them a time of purer taste, the taste whose god was the Apollo of the Belvidere.
These statues of lead were known to the ancients. There was one of Mamurius at Rome.[24]
In the middle ages there were not only small cast lead figures like those around the font at Ashover and a figure from a crucifix now in the library of Wells Cathedral which is about 12 inches high, of 15th century work, but figures full size and more were also made; this was especially the case in France; these, however, were generally repoussé.
In the garden of the Cluny Museum in Paris is a fine figure of St. John Evangelist, fully eight feet high; it is of early 14th century work, and looks as if it had stood at the central pier of a doorway.
At Moissac, in the south of France, is a most remarkable work of lead, a tomb, above which is a lead sarcophagus and several figures representing the entombment of Christ, who is being laid in the open coffin. It is 15th century work; the figures, six in all, are full of character and vigour like the wooden statuary of the time. It appears from a photograph to be cast in separate portions.
The figures formed by repoussé usually serve as finials on the roof, or stand in niches of the flèche. In the great flèche at Amiens there are six figures as large as life, with other smaller figures of angels which hold emblems of the Passion. M. Viollet-le-Duc says these figures were nearly always embouties that is to say hammered out on a wooden model in portions, and soldered together. The artist had to be careful that the model should be thin and “dry” so the thickness of the lead should not make it too coarse in the forms. Burges cites an account of 1514 of a payment to John Pothyn, sculptor, for having carved a prophet in walnut wood to serve as a mould and pattern to the lead-workers. Sometimes the lead casing was put on with lapping joints, the skeleton frame being iron.
There are not now in England lead statues of any size executed during the middle ages; but magnificent figures of bronze cast by the cire perdu method remain to us. The effigy of Queen Eleanor at Westminster cannot be matched in Europe.
The founder’s art was carried to much perfection in Germany in the 15th and 16th centuries. Mr. Seymour Haden has in Hampshire a statue of a city herald of lead which formerly belonged to the great clock at Nuremburg.
Many statues of lead were set up in English towns after the earlier Renaissance, they are our national version of the bronze of Italy, a material which we used but little; such bronze statues as were cast here since the middle ages seem to have been the work of foreigners. Le Sieur, for instance, did the statue of Charles II. at Charing Cross, and many others. The statue of Queen Anne that was to surmount Gibbs’ proposed column in the Strand was ordered in Rome.
At Bristol there is a large Neptune of lead roughly modelled; the limbs are contorted with too much life and yet it is a decorative feature in the centre of a wide street. On the pedestal has been engraved a little history of the statue, an example that might be followed—“Neptune, cast and given A.D. 1588 by a citizen of Temple parish to commemorate the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Re-erected on its fourth site in 1872.” This seems to be a tradition unsubstantiated by record, but the time is not so remote that it may not as well be true, especially as the style of the figure would seem to agree with the date named. The story says that it was the gift of a plumber in the town, the metal being that of the captured ships’ pumps.
At Bungay in Suffolk there used to be a large statue at the Market Cross known as “Astræa.”
One of the most interesting portrait statues in London, the Queen Anne at Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster, is of lead. The surface ornament on the robes is especially appropriate to the material. There is also in Golden Square a statue of George II. which seems to be nearly a repeat of the stone statue on Bloomsbury steeple; it suggested the statue in Fred Walker’s picture, “The Harbour of Refuge.”
There were also many full size equestrian statues founded in this metal, that of George I., until 1874 in Leicester Square, was one of these, and like the last it was brought from Canons, the celebrated house of the Duke of Chandos at Edgware, dismantled about 1747. The George I. resembled Le Sieur’s statue at Charing Cross and was known as the Golden Horse, for the whole was gilt, as many of the statues seem to have been at Canons, in that garden where, according to Pope, “The trees were clipped like statues—the statues thick as trees.”
The statue of William of Orange at Dublin is another of these, and it is celebrated alike in political demonstrations and Catholic polemics. Cardinal Newman wrote of it, “The very flower and cream of Protestantism used to glory in the statue of King William on College Green, Dublin, and though I cannot make any reference in print I recollect well what a shriek they raised some years ago when the figure was unhorsed. Some profane person one night applied gunpowder and blew the king right out of his saddle, and he was found by those who took interest in him, like Dagon, on the ground.”
Yet another equestrian statue is that of Charles the Second at Edinburgh, set up by the magistrates of the city in Parliament Square, in honour of the restoration of the king. A writer in the Athenæum for April 13th, 1850, speaks of it as the “finest piece of statuary in Edinburgh,” and urges the suitability of lead for the purpose. “In Black’s Guide through Edinburgh it is spoken of as the best specimen of bronze statuary which Edinburgh possesses; it is, however, composed of lead. Now this leaden equestrian statue has already without sensible deterioration stood the test of 165 years’ (in 1850) exposure to the weather, and it still seems as fresh as if erected but yesterday.” Some years before this, one of the interior irons having given way, a part of the shoulder sank a little and it was taken down and repaired and sufficiently proved to be lead. Taking the figures above, it appears that the date of this work is 1685.
Mr. James Nasmyth also wrote to the Athenæum, June, 1850, “to confirm as a practical man the perfect fitness of lead” as a substitute for bronze, and to recommend the cire perdu method of casting, at that time discontinued in England; the process being to model the statue in wax on a solid core, to cast in plaster the finished wax model, and then to melt out the wax from this plaster mould, the space which it occupied being refilled with lead. Of course only one cast can be obtained in this way, whereas the old decorative statues spoken of later were cast in a piece mould and reproduced again and again.
“The addition (still quoting) of about five per cent. of antimony will give it not only greater hardness but enhance its capability to run into the most delicate details ... it is in every sense as durable as bronze when subject simply to atmospheric action.”
We shall see that an addition of block tin was made to the lead by the old figure founders. Type metal, which is so much harder than lead, is an alloy of lead and 1⁄4 to 1⁄3 of antimony, or of two parts of lead to one of tin and one of antimony.
In the courtyard of Houghton Tower, Lancashire, there is a statue of William III. brought from the dismantled Walton-le-Dale in 1834.
The statues decorating the parapets of the large “classic” country houses are at times of lead; there are five of these at Lyme in Cheshire. Over the portico of the Clarendon at Oxford there are four of these statues representing the sciences. Until recently there was a figure of King James high up in a niche at the Bodleian.
The figures of the good little boy and girl common at charity schools are also often of lead. The great Percy lion that surmounted old Northumberland House at Charing Cross (destroyed twenty years ago) is now on the river front of Syon House; it weighs about three tons, and it was placed in its original position in 1749. The lion on the bridge at Alnwick is also of lead, as the little boy found to his cost who climbed out on its tail.
There are a series of lead busts in oval panels on the front of Ham House, Petersham, Surrey, 1610 being the date of its erection.
Before passing into the garden a word on the practical details of casting as traditionally followed may be added. The casting of lead statues is much the same process as founding in bronze, but it is simpler from the much lower temperature at which lead flows, and the ease with which limbs can be cast separately and joined to the body. The technical details may be found in a text-book of modelling and casting—Mouler en Plâtre, Plomb, &c. (Lebrun, Paris, 1860). The course followed is to cut up the model in such parts as is determined, to mould these in loam, the cores are then cast in plaster after the thickness that will be occupied by the lead has been first applied to the moulds in sand (terre). The cores are then removed and dried and baked, for in this as in all founding everything depends on the absolute dryness of the mould. After the first mould had been added to, for the casting of the core, a second mould would be prepared from the original figure and the core supported in that by irons. The castings are then made, and the portions reunited and finished on the surface. Large works have to be sufficiently supported with internal irons. All the mysteries of vents, and false coring when necessary, can only be understood by practical familiarity with founding.
Modern figures for Dundee were cast from plaster; cast iron also makes good moulds.
If the roof is the place for those earlier figures formed by repoussé, the garden is rightly inhabited by cast lead statues. It is a material in which the designer might well permit himself slightness, caprice, or even triteness. A statue that would be tame in stone, or contemptible in marble, may well be a charming decoration if only in lead, set in the vista of a green walk against a dark yew hedge or broad-leaved fig, or where the lilac waves its plumes above them and the syringa thrusts its flowers under their arms and shakes its petals on the pedestal. “How charming it must be to walk in one’s own garden, and sit on a bench in the open air with a fountain and a leaden statue and a rolling-stone and an arbour. Have a care though of sore throat and the agoe.[25]”
Fig. 42.—Mercury.
When sculptors learn again that their art is to shape many materials in various ways for diverse uses, and that a statue is not necessarily of whitest marble or to be exhibited on the 1st of May, then we may get back the delight of sculpture in the garden.
Sculptured marble, unless the art is of a high order, does not please us out of doors by a pond or on a terrace, if it is not weathered down to a ruin, but lead is homely and ordinary and not too good to receive the graffiti of lovers’ knots, red letter dates and initials. Here is a [sketch] of a Mercury not at all too fine for further decoration of this sort; it came from a London sale room, the surface was quite white and exfoliated like old stone. The jaunty messenger has a garden thought too, for it is honeycomb in his hand.
One of the best known of these garden statues was a group of Cain and Abel that so recently gave an interest to the great grass quad of Brasenose College, Oxford. It was given by Dr. Clarke, of All Souls, “who bought it of some London statuary.” Hearne speaks of it as “some silly statue”—superiority has always been the greatest enemy to beauty. Forty or fifty years ago there was a Mercury in Tom Quad which has also been improved away.
Fig. 43.—Sun-dial, Temple Gardens.
Our next [example] fulfils a purpose. It is the sun-dial formerly in Clement’s Inn, which was known locally as the “Blackamoor.” It is strongly, if simply modelled, a piece of art full of character, and we may be glad that it has been restored to us although now placed in the gardens of the Inner Temple, instead of before the “Garden House” in Clement’s Inn.
The negro is the full size of life and bears the stone disc of the dial on his head with one hand, the other being free. The dial is beautifully engraved and is signed on the edge of the gnomon Ben Scott in the Strand Londini Fecit. The sides have the initials of the donor, P. I. P., and the date, 1731. Mr. Hare in his Walks in London states that it was brought from Italy late in the seventeenth century by Holles Lord Clare, whose name is preserved in the neighbouring Clare market. This statement is also found in Thornbury’s Old and New London, and the statue is said to be bronze, which it is not, nor do the initials and date above agree with Mr. Hare’s statement, who goes on to remark that “there are similar figures at Knowsley, and at Arley in Cheshire,” but he does not say if these also were brought from Italy by Lord Clare.
No authority is given by Mr. Hare, but his statement is in the main a transcript from John Thomas Smith, who also gives the verses quoted by Mr. Hare, said to have been attached to the statue on one occasion with a pitying reference to the legal atmosphere the African had to breathe. That it was brought from Italy is seemingly local gossip added to the account of Mr. Smith who knew well enough the English workshop, as we shall see, where these figures were made.
Similar figures are mentioned by this writer in his gossiping Antiquarian Rambles in London in which he wrote the memories of his own travels in the streets in the beginning of the present century, and gives quite a history of this “despicable manufactory.” The founding of these lead garden statues seems specially to have been an industry of the eighteenth century; with the dreary opening of the nineteenth “a purer taste,” so we are assured, banished these and most other charms of an old-fashioned garden. “In Piccadilly, on the site of the houses east of the Poulteney Hotel including that, now No. 102, stood the original leaden figure yard, founded by John Van Nost, a Dutch sculptor, who came to England with King William III. His effects were sold March, 1711.” As late as 1763 a John Van Nost (supposed descendant of the former) was following the profession of a statuary in St. Martin’s Lane, on the left, a little farther up than where the old brick houses now stand in 1893. The original business was taken in 1739 by Mr. John Cheere, who served his time with his brother, Sir H. Cheere, the statuary who did several of the Abbey monuments.
“This despicable manufactory must still be within memory, as the attention of nine persons in ten were arrested by these garden ornaments. The figures were cast in lead as large as life and frequently painted with an intention to resemble nature. They consisted of Punch, Harlequin, Columbine and other pantomimical characters; mowers whetting their scythes; haymakers resting on their rakes; gamekeepers shooting; and Roman soldiers with firelocks; but above all an African kneeling with a sundial upon his head found the most extensive sale.
“For these imaginations in lead there were other workshops in Piccadilly, viz., Dickenson’s, which stood on the site of the Duke of Gloucester’s house, Manning’s at the corner of White Horse Street, and Carpenter’s, that stood where Egmont house afterwards stood.
“All the above four figure yards were in high vogue about the year 1740. They certainly had casts from some of the finest works of art, the Apollo Belvidere, the Venus de Medici, &c., but these leaden productions, although they found numerous admirers and purchasers, were never countenanced by men of taste; for it is well known that when application was made to the Earl of Burlington for his sanction he always spoke of them with sovereign contempt, observing that the uplifted arms of leaden figures, in consequence of the pliability and weight of the material, would in course of time appear little better than crooked billets.... There has not been a leaden figure manufactory in London since the year 1787, when Mr. Cheere died.”
Walpole knew little of these lead-working sculptors, his only notice occurring under “Carpentier or Charpentiere”—our Carpenter above—“a statuary much employed by the Duke of Chandos at Canons, was for some years principal assistant to Van Ost (our Van Nost) an artist of whom I have found no memorials, and afterwards set up for himself. Towards the end of his life he kept a manufactory of leaden statues in Piccadilly and died in 1737, aged above sixty.” The original Van Nost came from Mechlin, and married in England the widow of another Dutch sculptor.
In the account books of the building of Somerset House the following entry, which occurs under 1778, is interesting as showing John Cheere working on particular works, and for giving us the composition of the metal and the price. “John Cheere, figure maker; to moulding, casting, and finishing four large sphinxes in a strong substantial manner, lead and block tin, at each £31.”
It is curious if Lord Burlington gave the critical dictum attributed to him, that there were so many lead garden statues at his villa at Chiswick, in 1892 dismantled by the Duke of Devonshire. Doubtless they belonged to that garden described by Walpole as in the Italian taste, where “the lavish quantity of urns and sculpture behind the garden front should be retrenched,” a wish that time accomplishes. There was a Bacchus, a Venus, an Achilles, a Samson, and Cain and Abel.
In the first quadrangle at Knole there are two good reproductions of the antique, one being a crouching Venus. In the courtyard of Burton Agnes in Yorkshire stands a Fighting Gladiator.
Studley Royal, near Ripon, is a fine example of the best effort of park-gardening, if the phrase be allowed, for the term “landscape gardening” is degraded to mean productions in the cemetery style, an affair of wriggling paths, little humps, and nursery specimens, which might best be described as cemetery gardening, and between which and the manner of Kent there is no parallel. Here lakes in ordered circles and crescents occupy the grassy flat between hanging woods, and several groups of lead statuary stand above the water.
In the beautiful old gardens at Melbourne in Derbyshire are a large number of lead figures, two of which are drawn in The Formal Garden.[26] There are two heroic sized figures of Perseus and Andromeda beside the great water; a Flying Mercury after Giovanni Bologna; two slaves, which are painted black, with white drapery, carrying vases on salvers; and several Cupids in pairs or single. Of these “the single figures” Mr. Blomfield says “are about two feet high. One has fallen off his tree, another is flying upward, another shooting, another shaping his bow with a spoke shave. All of these are painted and some covered with stone dust to imitate stone, a gratuitous insult to lead which will turn to a delicate silver grey if left to its own devices.”
Fig. 44.—Cymbal Player.
In the old gardens at Rousham described by Pope are still some Cupids riding on swans; at Holmerook Hall are statues and other objects in lead, and at Newton Ferrars in Cornwall are two statues of Mars and Perseus. At the Mote House, Hersham, are some garden figures.
There are also some figures of lead in the gardens of Castle Hill, Lord Fortescue’s house in Devonshire. In the two niches of a garden temple there is a [Cymbal Player] from the antique and a Venus in the manner of William and Mary. Amongst the foliage of a wood-path is a terminal figure of [Pan], the pillar being stone and the head and shoulders only of lead. In the gardens here are also two large couchant lions, four sphinxes, and some greyhounds. At Nun Moncton in Yorkshire, on a terrace by the river Ouse are several lead figures on each side of the walk, these have gilded trappings. At Glemham in Suffolk are figures of the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugène at the entrance. In the garden are two black slaves with sun-dials, and the Seasons: also hounds at the gateway.
Fig. 45.—Terminal at Castle Hill.
In the garden at Canons Ashby is a figure of a shepherd playing a flute. In a garden at Exeter are four or five figures, amongst which is a Skater and a Flower Girl, and at Whitchurch is a Quoit Thrower.
Fig. 46.—Time.
In the niches of a large circular yew hedge at Hardwick are four figures, three are playing on musical instruments; pipe, trumpet, and violin, and the fourth represents Painting. There are also two other figures in the gardens. At Temple Dinsley near Hitchin is a figure of Time, hour-glass in hand, of which a [sketch] is given. The left hand formerly held a scythe, now lost. At Shrewsbury is a Hercules.
The statues in the grounds at Blarney celebrated in the “Groves of Blarney” were of lead:—
“There’s statues gracing this noble place in
All heathen Goddesses so fair,
Bold Neptune, Plutarch and Nicodemus
All standing naked in the open air.”
These statues were sold by auction to Sir Thomas Dene who bought the castle, and pictures:—
“And took off in a cart
(’Twas enough to break my heart)
All the statues made of lead and pictures O!”[27]
The eighteenth century must have been busy in the “manufacture” of these garden figures and ornaments, some of the gardens mentioned have as many as twenty to thirty pieces still. A great number was doubtless absorbed in the London public gardens and the villas up the Thames. In old Vauxhall was a statue of Milton by Roubilliac, but it is difficult to attribute many specimens to individuals. The negro we saw was sold by Mr. John Cheere in St. Martin’s Lane, but likely enough the model was a part of the stock of Van Nost, as also the fine vases at Hampton Court. Many of these statues were destroyed to suit the “purer taste” of this century, and a great number were exported during the American War to become bullets, because at that time as “works of art” the lead escaped the Customs. A large number have been accidentally crushed by the fall of a tree or otherwise destroyed, and many not adequately supported have flattened down out of shape.
There was a large display à la Louis Quatorze, of lead casting in the gorgeous gardens of Versailles; where in the fountains, groups of statues, and vases, the greatest sculptors of the time worked indifferently in marble, bronze, or plomb doré. François Girardon was one of these. Born in 1628, at Troyes, he lived to the year 1715, achieving a reputation that placed him amongst the foremost of French artists of that time.
The immense structure entirely of lead known as the Fountain of the Pyramid is his work. From a basin in which sport three man-sized tritons rises a pedestal, with a circular basin much enriched by gadroons, set on three classic zoomorphous legs; and above it three other like basins of diminishing size, each supported from the one below around the rim; by baby tritons for the lowest, the next with dolphins, and the last with lobsters. In the last basin is a vase. The whole is a composition showing great refinement of scholarship, recalling in general form the great pine cone of bronze in the Vatican gardens, once the fountain in the atrium of old St. Peter’s. It is exquisitely drawn and engraved by Rouyer et Darcel[28] together with two vases also of lead from the Basin of Neptune.
Other groups, some of colossal proportions—“France Victorious,” “The Four Seasons,” and so on—were the work of Thomas Renaudin of Moulins, J. B. Tubi from Rome, Pierre Mazaline and Gaspard de Marcu; their individual works, with illustrations, may be distinguished in the volume of engraved statues of the Versailles gardens by S. Thomassin published in Paris 1694.
Versailles certainly set the fashion, which we followed and which influenced the gardens of the most of Europe. In Russia a Swiss gardener arranged a labyrinth at the summer palace of Peter the Great with animal groups from Æsop in gilt lead forming fountains. Beckford, writing from Lisbon in 1789, describes a garden at Bemfica “which eclipses our Clapham and Islington villas in all the attractions of leaden statues, Chinese temples, serpentine rivers, and dusty hermitages.”