Fig. 54.—Syon House.
In 1744 the then member for Southampton presented two lions for the Bar Gate in that town. These not very beautiful creatures still remain.
Syon House, on the Thames, has besides the great lion, a lesser lion set over Adam’s “lace gateway,” weighing a ton and half, it is unfortunately newly painted and sanded to look like stone, and as the tail sticks out in a way utterly impossible for anything but metal it makes it entirely absurd. There is a plague of paint over old leadwork, which should be gilt or let alone.
Fig. 55.—Syon House.
On the park wall facing the road there are [fine] [sphinxes], about five feet long, in every way different to the lion, well designed exercises in the “classic taste.” Well modelled, with impressive heads, in the dark and dinted metal, they are pleasant both in colour and texture. They are quite “Adam’s” in character but not at all petty like some of his work and very different to a pair of sphinxes also of lead, on the gates of Chiswick House.
§ XVII. OF FINIALS AND CRESTINGS.
The lead finial is typically a French feature; there cannot be said to be a single instance of a large ornamental finial of lead remaining in England of the kind once so universal in France and of which so many still remain there. These French finials from the 12th to the 18th centuries have been sufficiently described, especially by M. De la Queriere, who devotes a volume to them and the cresting of ridges; by Viollet-le-Duc; and in De Caumont’s Abcdaire.
Many of these early French Gothic finials of the 12th and 13th centuries were lead statues formed out of repoussé sheet metal and they surmounted the culminating point of the church, at the apex of the chevet; here was often placed an immense angel with great wings turning as vanes in the wind. At Rouen it is the Virgin with the infant Christ which stands over the Lady Chapel; there was formerly on the main apse a giant St. George horsed and spearing the dragon, melted at the Revolution “they say” into bullets. At Clermont Ferrand is the most remarkable composition, a tall pillar on which stands a colossal Virgin facing the sunrise; round the stem spring out great branches of foliage on which sit four figures—King David with the harp and three others with musical instruments—the ridge is ornamented with open work, and a length of similar foliage reaches down the slope of the roof for some feet on either side of the finial where are two other figures, these are full life size, and the whole must be 20 or more feet high.