MUSEUMS
BRITISH MUSEUM
“O place! O people! Manners! framed to please
All nations, customs, kindreds, languages!”
HERRICK.
I am rather diffident about putting any name on this chapter, for no one
would ever think of calling the British Museum an unnoticed place. It
has what the newspapers call a world-wide reputation. Its very name
smacks of solid worth with nothing unexpected about it. It is an
institution looming large and august, its massive masonry dominating
Bloomsbury as its reputation does the universe, and absorbing an
unending queue of earnest-minded people intent on storing their minds
with knowledge.
And yet, every time my frivolous feet have strayed through that solemn
portico, I have longed to tell the thousands of people who never dream
of coming so far north as Great Russell Street, W.C. 1, of unexpected
things they could find there if they would. I remember as a small person
being made to recite the names of the seven wonders of the world, and I
used to repeat solemnly, “The Temple of Mausolaus at Halicarnassus--the
Pyramid of Cheops--the Lighthouse of Alexandria--the Colossus of
Rhodes--the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis--the Statue of Jupiter at
Olympus, and the Temple of Diana at Ephesus”--with a considerable amount
of annoyance that I could never hope to see these ancient splendours.
When I found the remains of two of them in the British Museum, I felt,
like the Queen of Sheba, that the half had not been told to me, and
since that first moment of delighted surprise how many unexpected things
I have found there which make me long to say to all the unwitting London
visitors, “Don’t be put off by the solemnity of its name and the
distance from Bond Street, but go, only go, and you will be rewarded.”
The proper way to make friends with a museum, as with people, is to get
to know it slowly, or its very excellences will give you a surfeited
memory. I once avoided the beautiful old Cluny Museum in Paris for many
years, because I had been oppressed by the fact that it contained 11,000
objects of interest. No one had shown me how to ignore their number and
get to love the very walls of Cardinal Jacques d’Amboise’s stately
house, by never crossing the sunny courtyard to see more than one sort
of exhibit at a time.
I think this plan is even more applicable to the British Museum, that
great collection, partly bequeathed by Sir Hans Sloane and opened to the
public in 1759. There are two things the hurried visitor can do so as to
carry away the possession of a definite memory of one phase of the
treasures contained in the vast building in Great Russell Street. He may
choose to go there at the hours of 12 or 3 P.M. and follow one of the
two expert lecturers who conduct people each day to see a different
group of exhibits and listen to their story. (Lists of these lectures
are given at the door.) Or he may choose for himself the sort of thing
he finds most interesting and sternly traverse the other rooms intent
only on the objects of his choice. In either case he is luckier than the
visitors in the early days of the museum’s existence, who were herded in
companies of only fifteen for a two hours’ visit.
To-day one is diffident about directing any choice; as the old guardian
said, “Most people ’as their fancies!” They may lie in the direction of
the mummy rooms, where the prehistoric man, so startlingly like a
modern, crouches in his grave, with his stone flints within reach, or in
the room of gold ornaments and gems, where lie the necklaces that rose
and fell on breasts dead these thousand years, necklaces that differ
nowise from the amethyst and jade trinkets to be seen in Bond Street
to-day.
Or you may like best to stroll in that pleasant place the King’s
Library--a long, gracious apartment where the sunlight gilds the warm
brown of the lovely tooled bindings of George III.’s books.
Into this spacious room come all sorts of people--small boys in
knickerbockers anxious to consult the postage stamp collections,
artists to pore over delicately illuminated pages of fifteenth-century
manuscripts, students to worship at the shrine of first editions of
Shakespeare and Spenser, and people who are touched with the human
interest of poignant letters like that of Mary Queen of Scots to “ma
bonne sœur et cousine Elizabeth.”
But when I am fancy-free, and come to the British Museum, perhaps with
only an hour to spare and no very definite idea about what I want to
see, I choose one of two courses. Either I spend the entire hour in
walking briskly through the galleries and taking a sort of bird’s-eye
view of the different kinds of treasures that the museum guards, without
making an attempt at intimacy with any one of them--or I turn to the
left of the big entrance hall, pass through the Roman and Greco-Roman
rooms and spend the whole time in the western wing, because there I can
see the art of three great nations of the ancient world and the greatest
of all the museum’s treasures--the Elgin Marbles. In the galleries
surrounding them are the stupendous sculptures of Egypt and Assyria;
statues of the Egyptian kings who lived 3000 years ago; colossal bulls,
human-headed, that once guarded the gate of the palace that belonged to
the father of one Sennacherib, King of Assyria, who “came up against all
the defenced cities of Judah and took them,” and fragments from his own
great palace of Nineveh.
Théophile Gautier’s words:
Tout passe.--L’art robuste
Seul a l’étérnité:
Le buste
Survit à la cité,
come into one’s mind, for the bas-reliefs show the effect of the fire of
the Babylonians and Medes when they destroyed “Nineveh that great city”
in 609 B.C., yet they survived and the city is as dust! What a people
they must have been, the folk who built the Lycian tombs, you can see
best when you are half-way down the steps into the Mausoleum room, where
lie the tremendous fragments of one of the seven wonders of the ancient
world--the tomb that his wife and sister built for Mausolos, Prince of
Caria, in a little town in Asia Minor some 2275 years ago.
Traces of another of the seven wonders are in the Ephesus room, where
remains of the vast Temple of Artemis, “Diana of the Ephesians,” are
gathered, and this room leads to the greatest wonder of them all, the
pediment groups of statues from the Parthenon at Athens, that most of us
call _tout court_ the Elgin Marbles.
I believe that a great many people have a vague idea that Thomas Bruce,
seventh Earl of Elgin, did a little “scrounging” when he was British
ambassador to the Porte in 1801, and that our possession of these
sculptures is due to a mixture of luck and audacity.
It is really due to the common sense, artistic perception and
generosity of a statesman who at great inconvenience and a cost to
himself of £70,000, only half of which sum he later received from the
English Government, removed the treasures that were daily being
destroyed by the Turkish bombardment and that, but for his action, would
have been irretrievably lost to the world.
One does not need to be an artist nor learned in artistic lore to feel
the peculiar charm of the Elgin Marbles. I have seen quite ignorant
people approach them with unseeing eyes and some flippancy about their
mutilation on the lips, but after a few minutes’ contemplation,
something of the calm beauty of the pose, the benignant sweep of the
drapery, damp with the sea-spray, the mystery of those nostalgic
figures, penetrates the onlooker and the work of Pheidias and his
craftsmen has wrought its spell.
Now and then the official lecturer tells the story of what they had in
their minds when they carved those noble statues, carved every inch of
them, even the parts they thought would never again be seen by any human
eye once they were placed on the pediment of the Great Temple, and you
come away feeling that your eyes have been opened to a great beauty and
the truth of it sinks into the soul.
It is not possible in these brief notes to mention more than a very few
of the unnoticed treasures in the British Museum. As the old porter
said, there is something to interest everyone.
If you search you may come across the manuscript of Rupert Brooke’s
immortal sonnet, the toys small children played with 2000 years ago,
Mrs. Delany’s curious paper flowers in the students’ room of the print
collection and many, many other things to draw you there.
FOUNDLING HOSPITAL
“O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town,
Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own!”
BLAKE.
Not far from the British Museum is the Foundling Hospital in Guilford
Street. One hears of it vaguely as an orphan asylum where the children
wear quaint costumes that may be seen at the service in the chapel on
Sunday mornings, when the singing attracts many visitors.
But there are more reasons than that to take you to this corner off the
beaten track of the West End. For one thing, it may not be there very
long. Already there are rumours that the Foundling Hospital may be moved
to the country and one more link with eighteenth-century London be
snapped.
Institutions as a rule are about as dull to see as to live in, but the
Foundling Hospital is an exception. Handel, Hogarth and Dickens all gave
tangible proof that they loved the place, and people from all over the
world come to see it, attracted either by the reputation of the choir,
the fame of the pictures in the museum, or the pathetic interest of the
children, who indeed look merry, healthy little creatures.
Its story is almost too well known to need repetition: A
seventeenth-century sea-captain, living during the latter half of his
life in Rotherhithe, was distressed by the sight of deserted children he
saw on his way to and from the city. It took good Captain Thomas Coram
seventeen years of hard work to turn his dream of a well-endowed
hospital for deserted children into a reality, but in 1739 he got a
royal charter and a house was opened for them in Hatton Garden. The
Foundling Hospital, as we know it, was begun in 1742.
Hogarth has painted a wonderful portrait of the founder, and looking at
the cheerful benevolent face one can understand why he wrote, “The
portrait I painted with the utmost pleasure and in which I particularly
wished to excel was that of Captain Coram for the Foundling Hospital.”
The kindly eyes that Hogarth drew were forever seeing something to be
done for his fellow men, for the Foundling Hospital was only one of the
old sea-captain’s philanthropies, to which he literally gave away all he
had. In his old age, when he was asked if he would mind accepting a
pension collected from his friends, he said quite simply, “I have not
wasted the little wealth of which I was formerly possessed in
self-indulgence or vain expenses, and am not ashamed to confess that in
this my old age I am poor.” He accepted a pension of a little more than
£100, and is buried in the vaults under the Foundling Hospital Chapel.
That is the story of Thomas Coram, whose statue is at the entrance gate
and whose name is remembered in Great Coram Street and Little Coram
Street.
The best time to see the hospital is at the Sunday morning service at
eleven o’clock, and the easiest way to reach it is by the tube to
Russell Square. Turn to the right on leaving the tube and walk down
Grenville Street and Guilford Street, and the Foundling Hospital will be
seen to the left.
Go up to the gallery if you want to see the children seated on each side
of the organ, dressed in the quaint costume that has never altered since
it was decreed by the founder.
Dickens, who loved the hospital and had a seat in the chapel during the
ten years he lived in Bloomsbury, makes Mrs. Meagles say in _Little
Dorrit_:
Oh, dear, dear, ... when I saw all those children ranged tier above
tier, and appealing from the father none of them has ever known on
earth, to the great Father of us all in Heaven, I thought, does any
wretched mother ever come here, and look among those young faces,
wondering which is the poor child she brought into this forlorn
world.
But the rules of the Foundling Hospital have changed since Thomas
Coram’s time. Only the children of known mothers are now received, and
[Illustration: FOUNDLING HOSPITAL]
if later in life the mother marries and can prove that she is able to
support her child, she can claim it again. The children are never
allowed to be adopted. They are sent to foster-mothers in the country
when first received, and only come to the hospital when they are six.
The girls with few exceptions are trained for domestic service and the
boys as regimental bandsmen, if they show talent, or they are
apprenticed to different trades when they are fourteen.
There is something infinitely touching in the sight of these rows of
small creatures, chanting with their trained treble voices, “Let me
never be confounded,” when life had confounded them at its very gates.
But seeing them later on, as every Sunday morning visitor is allowed to
do, happily eating their dinners in their pleasant rooms, it is obvious
that the life of the little brown-coated boy or white-capped girl in
Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital has many things in its favour. One may
compare their lot with that of more sophisticated children in the London
slums, for whom it is necessary to have a society for their protection
from the parents who have ill-treated over 100,000 in England in the
last year.
One does not ordinarily associate a foundling hospital with the fine
arts, but, as I said before, this is an exception. Hogarth not only
painted the founder’s portrait and one or two other pictures that he
gave to the hospital, but he persuaded his friends to do likewise. Sir
Joshua Reynolds gave a portrait of Lord Dartmouth, Gainsborough a view
of Charterhouse, Kneller a portrait of Handel, and the exhibition of
these gifts, including a beautiful cartoon of Raphael’s _Massacre of the
Innocents_, was a forerunner of the exhibitions of the Royal Academy.
The pictures alone are worth going to Guilford Street to see. Some of
them are in the picture gallery with the cases holding tokens that in
the old days before 1760 used to be left to identify the foundling. In
the board-room, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful rooms
in London, hangs Hogarth’s _March to Finchley_, of which I believe there
is a copy in the ugly “Adam and Eve” public-house, built on the site of
the “Adam and Eve” Inn of the picture, at the corner of the Tottenham
Court Road and Euston Road.
The tale of how the hospital came to get the picture is rather quaint.
Hogarth painted soldiers marching to Finchley in a state that their
French _confrères_ would call “_débraillés_.” He then asked George II.
to buy it, but that monarch--the last English king to go into
battle--was so enraged at this presentation of his soldiers, that he
indignantly refused, and Hogarth, not being able to dispose of the
picture elsewhere, issued lottery tickets for it. About sixty tickets
were left on his hands, so he gave them to his favourite hospital, which
won the picture, and there it is to-day.
The careful training of the child choir, and the choice of a musical
career for the boys whenever possible, is only carrying on one of the
earliest traditions, for Handel rivalled Hogarth in his interest and his
gifts to the Foundling Hospital. He used to conduct performances of the
_Messiah_ in the chapel to crowded audiences, and as he induced the
performers to give their services, the proceeds that he handed over
sometimes amounted to nearly £1,000. In a glass case is carefully
preserved the gift the great master bestowed on the hospital of the MS.
of his oratorio, and near by is the autograph copy of the number of
_Good Words_ containing the story Dickens wrote about the Foundling
Hospital.
In the secretary’s room is a fine old Jacobean oak table but lately
retrieved from the kitchen premises where it had been in use for
centuries.
SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM
“Were I a physician I would prescribe nothing but Recipe,
CCCLXV drachm. Londin.”--WALPOLE.
One of the nicest things about the South Kensington Museum is the lively
way it keeps in touch with what happens to be interesting Londoners at
the moment.
Is there a loan exhibition of Spanish pictures at Burlington House, at
once everything Spanish that the Museum possesses is gathered together
so that the different phases of Spanish art may be conveniently noted,
and there is nearly always some extra little exhibition of special
interest, either in celebration of the centenary of some great artist or
to introduce the work of some foreigner of outstanding merit like
Mestrovic.
The lectures given here daily by expert guides at 12 and 3 p.m. would
probably be crowded if they cost a guinea. With that curious apathy
towards what is not expensive that is one of our less pleasing
attributes, only a few people take advantage of these pleasant scholarly
talks. If they were known to be very exclusive and costly, the thousands
of excellent people with modest incomes and no occupation who live in
Bloomsbury and Earl’s Court boarding-houses, would sigh for the
privilege of sharing these hour-long strolls through the museum, when
the lecturer gives no disconnected account of individual objects but
deftly traces the development of the art of different countries and
ages, illustrating his teaching by the treasures under his care.
I think this apathy is largely due to lack of initiative and
imagination, as well as to the aforesaid deeply-rooted idea that what
costs nothing cannot be worth much. I have found so many people who have
never heard of these lectures that another cause of the small attendance
may be that the news of their existence is not sufficiently widely
spread.
There is, alas, no one at Claridge’s or the Ritz or the Savoy to tell
mothers who bring their girls over here to buy clothes and do the
theatres, that there is also a way open to them to gain something that
will still be theirs when the memory of the play has faded--in most
cases let us hope so--and the clothes have been cast aside--since no one
nowadays wears clothes long enough to wear them out.
The South Kensington Museum is the finest museum of applied art in the
world. That is why it is the Mecca of students who come here to study
and draw inspiration from the lovely things fashioned by our forefathers
in gold and silver and bronze and leather, in silk and lace and precious
stones, in the furnishings and decorations of the houses and persons of
other times and other nations. There are paintings and sculpture as
well: the Raphael cartoons are one of the glories of the place.
There is something, indeed, to appeal to everyone’s taste in this most
marvellous museum. For the little schoolgirls who seem to throng the
place in cohorts, in the charge of apathetic teachers, there are the
dolls and dolls’ houses that their great-grandmothers played with--the
former as delicately waxen and elegantly dressed as any to be found
to-day. Furniture lovers may study here the finest specimens of every
period, from the handsome Jacobean chairs and settles that harmonise so
well with the background of panelled walls and decorated ceilings taken
from old English houses, to the marvellous ornate escritoires, toilet
tables and gilt couches of French royal palaces. There is less
formality about the English furniture, but it was not more comfortable;
and the heavy projecting carvings even on the back of the little
children’s chairs may well have been the reason for the erect bearings
used for odious comparisons in one’s youth. They say that the beds of
our forefathers were comfortable. That may be true, but they were
certainly depressing, and the state bed from Boughton House,
Northampton, in which William III. slept, with its dingy hangings and
horrible hearse-like plumes, reaching into the lofty roof, makes you
thankful for the airier ideas of to-day.
For book-lovers there are upstairs the old, old missals and books of
hours, illuminated with such skill and patience by monks in mediæval
monasteries--some with colours almost as perfect, the ink as black, the
paper as white as when they were first executed in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. As marvellous, and perhaps even more exquisite as
works of art, are the slender Persian volumes, love-poems and prayers,
inscribed in delicate characters of the East, with pictures of shahs and
houris, and leather covers, so wonderfully embossed and inlaid and
beautifully coloured that no description could give the faintest idea of
their perfection.
Even people who are not musicians love the gallery where musical
instruments of the past stand silent in their cases: guitars that
troubadours in parti-coloured hose twanged dolorously to their
lady-loves; virginals belonging to Queen Elizabeth and that other
Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, who was a daughter of James I.; the
harpsichord that Handel bequeathed to George II.; the great harp of the
famous blind Welsh harper. Zithers are there, and other instruments of
cunning workmanship, lovely to see and with names as melodious as the
sounds they once gave forth: dulcimers and clavicords, lutes and
ceteras, pandores and clavecins. Here are the spinets of our
grandmothers, and what must be the veritable father of the hurdy-gurdy,
and a little pianino made by Chappell more than one hundred years ago,
so small that you could carry it about from place to place.
Then there is the jewellery--bracelets, girdles, necklaces, earrings,
rings chosen and worn by “Flora la Belle Rommaine” and her sisters of
other ages and countries, but so like, both in design and execution, the
work of the modern goldsmith.
There is an interesting and beautiful collection of the peasant
jewellery of continental countries--wonderful gilt crowns of Russian and
Norwegian brides and curious rings of gigantic size and significant
names, charm rings, motto rings, incantation rings, iconigraphic rings,
Gnostic rings and rings with all sorts of devices.
These are only a tithe of the treasures in the Victoria and Albert
Museum that can easily be reached by District Railway and Inner Circle
to South Kensington Station or by the Piccadilly Tube and the Brompton
Road.
WALLACE COLLECTION
“Ce qui nous a tous profondément touchés, c’est moins la grandeur
de vos largesses, qui ont été immenses, que la bonne grâce
spirituelle avec laquelle vous les avez faites.”
SARCEY.
People say vaguely, “The Wallace Collection? Oh, yes, I really must go
some day; I’ve heard of it so many times,” and the “some day” recedes
and London is left behind and that most delightful place remains unseen.
And yet this treasure-house is so easy to reach. The shopper at Debenham
and Freebody’s need only turn up Duke Street at the corner where Wigmore
Street embraces Lower Seymour Street, and there is Manchester House at
the far side of Manchester Square.
If you have only a short time to spend there, give it all to the French
pictures. They are the _pièce de résistance_ of the Wallace Collection,
gathered by two men who loved France and spent most of their lives
there. The story of the Hertfords who made the Wallace Collection is
almost as interesting as anything in their house. The first Marquess of
Hertford had thirteen children, and the portraits he asked Reynolds to
paint of two of his daughters (Nos. 31 and 33) were the nucleus of the
collection. The second marquess only added Reynolds’ “Nelly O’Brien” and
the Romney “Perdita.”
His son was the celebrated Marquess of Hertford whose meteoric career
enlivened the first half of the last century--the original of both
Thackeray’s Marquis of Steyne and Lord Beaconsfield’s Coningsby, whose
wealth, wit and reckless egoism provided food for gossip for many a
year. It was for him that Decimus Burton built St. Dunstan’s in Regent’s
Park, and he filled it with _objets d’art_ of all kinds, and a number of
pictures, chiefly of the Dutch school.
His son, Richard Seymour-Conway, fourth Marquess of Hertford, spent his
life in amassing, with the help of Sir Richard Wallace, the collection
that is now the property of the British nation. M. Yriarte, a French art
expert who knew this eccentric nobleman well, published an account of
his curious life in the _Pall Mall Magazine_ for September 1900, but it
is not possible to give the details now.
Sir Richard Wallace inherited his wealth and his pictures. His name is
legendary here in England, but in Paris it is a household word, for
every thirsty street urchin calls the graceful bronze drinking fountains
he put all over the city “un Vallace.”
M. Francisque Sarcey, who never met Sir Richard Wallace, has expressed
in the dedication of his _Le Siège de Paris_ something of the feeling
Parisians had for this Englishman who stayed in the city, sharing their
perils and discomforts and proving his sympathy by immense gifts.
Luckily for us, his friendship did not induce him to leave the Hertford
Collection to France. He had always shared his father’s passion for
collecting, and began to buy pictures as a young man. The Corot,
Rousseau’s lovely _Forest Glade_, and the enchanting fresco on plaster
of a _Boy Reading_ by the Milanese artist Foppa, are among the works he
bought.
To come back to the French pictures: there is no example of Chardin’s
work (to see “Le Bénédicité” you must go to the Louvre), but there are
eight pictures by his pupil Fragonard, and if the Louvre has “The Music
Lesson,” Hertford House has the “Gardens of the Villa d’Este.”
I think the Fragonards must be seen if there is time for nothing else;
not because Fragonard is a greater artist than the others, but because
his work may be better studied here than in his own country.
There is a lovely interior of Fragonard’s in the National Gallery, and a
“Lady with a Dog” in the Tennant Collection, 34 Queen Anne’s Gate, but I
am informed that the present occupiers of the Glenconner mansion do not
follow the generous custom of the owners in admitting the public on
Wednesdays and Saturdays from two to six.
The eccentric Marquess’s statement, “I only like pleasing pictures,”
perhaps accounts for the number of Greuze canvases--over a score; but
the collection is particularly rich in eighteenth-century French
painters--Largillière, Watteau, Nattier, Lancret, Vernet, Van Loo,
Boucher, etc.
If you have time for two visits, spend the second with the Dutch
pictures, where the Rembrandt portraits almost console me for the
absence of Vermeer’s. One must go to the National Gallery to see the
“Lady at the Virginal.”
Among the fifty-seven artists represented, there are many old friends,
Frans Hals, Brouwer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dou, Terborch, Wouverman with
his inevitable white horse, six of the excellent Ruysdaels--that somehow
never give me as much pleasure as Metsu’s charming pictures--Hobbema,
the Flemish Teniers, and eight Rubens (he is more likeable here than in
the Louvre).
Of course there are numberless other treasures. A very complete
catalogue will tell you all about them, but I hope I have made you want
to go and buy that catalogue.
GEFFRYE MUSEUM
“So I set out on my walk to see the wonders of the big city, and,
as chance would have it, I directed my course to the East.”--G.
BORROW.
I have never met anyone who knew of this Benjamin among museums--it was
only opened the year the war came upon us--except the man of learning
who told me that, tucked away in the heart of the manufacturing district
of Shoreditch, there was a wonderful collection of period furniture
arranged in an old almshouse. So one day I climbed into a 22 bus at
Piccadilly Circus and asked the conductor to discard me at the Geffrye
Museum in the Kingsland Road. We travelled for miles along streets where
every second shop seemed to be a cabinet-maker’s, and then stopped
conveniently at the very gate of the quiet, spacious courtyard where
elderly people were taking the air on the old oak benches. It was past
six of the clock on a warm evening in June, but a misguided guide-book
had said the museum was open till eight in summer.
That halcyon arrangement disappeared with the fashion of the eight-hour
day, and the museum now closes at six o’clock like its older
_confrères_. It is also closed on Sunday morning and all Monday.
The people who used to live in the fourteen quaint little brick
almshouses have been transferred to a building in the country, and the
London County Council has bought this property for their museum from the
Ironmongers’ Company, from whose seventeenth-century “Master,” Sir
Robert Geffrye, it takes its name. It is a fascinating place; like a
rather badly arranged old curiosity shop. There are old staircases--one
from Boswell’s house in Queen Street is the most beautiful--and lovely
panelled rooms and all sorts of things that demonstrate how beautiful
interior decoration was before the age of machine-made furniture.
There is a charming room from New Court, Lincoln’s Inn, and many other
interesting exhibits including a beautiful lacquered Chinese palanquin,
but what I liked best were the fragile, unbelievable wood carvings of
Grinling Gibbons.
If there were nothing else to see in the Geffrye Museum, it would be
worth while to go to look at what a master hand can do with a block of
wood. Evelyn thought Grinling Gibbons “the greatest master both of
invention and rarenesse of work that the world ever had in any age.”
I had cherished the mistaken belief that Gibbons was an Englishman for
so long that it was with regret I found that this great artist was born
in Rotterdam and only came to England in 1667 when he was twenty-four
years old.
It is many long years since I was first shown some of Grinling Gibbons’
marvellous work--so many that only the effect it had on me remains,
while the date and place have gone from me. I never willingly miss
seeing what his hand has carved, and if any reader of these pages is in
the habit of coming to London often and making friends on each trip with
another of the men of genius who have given the city its proud record, I
can tell them where they may study the wizardlike work of this master
craftsman and great artist.
The most magnificent piece of work he carved is in the choir of St.
Paul’s, but there are long festoons of flowers in St. Mary Abchurch, in
Abchurch Yard, off Abchurch Lane, a turning out of Cannon Street. In
old St. Mary Abchurch you will also find a wonderful painted dome by Sir
James Thornhill, Hogarth’s father-in-law, whose house in Dean Street,
Soho, has only lately been pulled down. St. James’s, Piccadilly, that
suave building that breathes mid-Victorian portliness, broadcloth and
self-satisfaction, has a lovely marble font carved by Grinling Gibbons,
but the cover was stolen. Later research has destroyed the widely-spread
belief that Grinling Gibbons carved the pedestal for King Charles I.’s
statue in Trafalgar Square, but over the mantelpiece in the vestry of
St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East, between Great Tower Street and Lower Thames
Street, you will find another carving.
The rest I will leave you to hunt out for yourself. Some of it is in
unlikely places, one of them not a hundred miles from Clifford’s Inn. I
do not know if there is any trace of the pot of flowers Grinling Gibbons
carved when he lived in Belle Sauvage Court on Ludgate Hill, and which
Walpole said “shook surprisingly with the motion of the coaches that
passed by.”
He lived for forty-three years in Bow Street, Covent Garden. The house
fell down, says an old record, in 1701, “but by a genial providence none
of the family were killed,” and they seem to have propped up their
house, for they went on living there till Grinling Gibbons died in
1721.