There were several lead foundries in London early in the eighteenth
century for the making of these garden ornaments. The foremost was that
of John Van Nost. Mr. Lethaby in his book on Leadwork tells us that this
Dutch sculptor came to England with King William III.; that his business
was taken in 1739 by Mr. John Cheere, who served his time with his
brother, Sir H. Cheere, who made several of the Abbey monuments. The
kneeling slave, bearing either a vase, as at Melbourne, or a sundial as
in the Temple Gardens in London, and in other pleasure grounds in
different parts of the country, was apparently a favourite subject. The
figure, not always from the same mould in the various examples, but
always showing good design, was evidently of Italian origin. Towards the
end of the century, designs for lead figures became much debased, and
such subjects as people sitting round a table, painted like life, could
not possibly have served any decorative purpose. The natural colour of
lead is so good that no painting can improve it. In Tudor days it was
often gilt, a much more permissible treatment.
In the old days there was probably a parterre at Melbourne, now no
longer existing. The figures of kneeling slaves were possibly the centre
ornaments of its two divisions, on what is now the upper lawn. This
portion of the garden is rather liberally, and perhaps somewhat
injudiciously, planted with a mixture of conifers, put in probably
thirty to forty years ago, when the remains of good old garden designs
were not so reverently treated, nor their value so well understood, as
now. Some of this planting has even strayed to the banks of the Great
Water. The pleasure ground of Melbourne is a precious relic of the past,
and, even though the ill effects of the modern planting of various
conifers may be less generally conspicuous there than it is in many
places, yet it is distinctly an intrusion. The tall trees inclosed by
massive yew hedges, the pools and fountains, the statues and other
sculptured ornaments, all recall, with their special character of garden
treatment, the times and incidents that Watteau loved to paint. Such a
picture as his _Bosquet de Bacchus_, so well known by the engraving,
with its gaily-dressed groups of young men and maidens seated in the
grassy shade and making the music of their lutes and voices accompany
that of the fountains’ waters, might have been painted at Melbourne.
For here are the same wide, green-walled alleys, the pools, the
fountains and the ornamental details of the great gardens of courtly
France of two hundred years ago acclimatised on English soil; not in the
dreary vastness of Versailles, but tamed to our climate’s needs and on a
scale attuned to the more moderate dimensions of a reasonable human
dwelling.