Talk:Grinling Gibbons

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[edit] Note of some carvings

Just a note to avoid confusion:

There also seems to be a number of other significant events that could do with mentioning (these need checking)

-- Solipsist 20:41, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Category for his work?

Is it worth having a category "Buildings bearing Grinling Gibbons carvings"? Pseudomonas(talk) 19:45, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Material from 1877

In case it's useful, most of the following is verbatim from the stated 1877 source. The Hampton Court article already mentions his work there. -- SEWilco (talk) 02:34, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

  • The most important feature of this era in furniture and decoration was the appearance of the carved work of Grinling Gibbons and his pupils, chiefly executed on the frames of mirrors, on panels and mantelpieces. There had been nothing exactly like it before, and there has been nothing comparable to it since. After its worth was recognized, it was used wherever it could be had, in church, palace, and cathedral It was carving of the naturalistic order, but with a symmetrical arrangement of the objects and a faultless finish. "The flowers and foliages of his groups or garlands sweep round in bold and harmonious curves, making an agreeable whole, though for architectural decorative carving no work was ever so free from conventional arrangements. His animals or his flowers appear to be so many separate creations, from nature, laid or tied together separately, though in reality formed out of a block, and remaining still portions of a group cut in the solid wood." This copying of natural forms, as executed with the marvelous technique of Gibbons — his grace, his dexterity, and his matchless truthfulness — has a value of its own entirely independent of its relation to other forms of art. "This day," writes Evelyn in his diary on January 18, 1671, "I first acquainted his Majesty with that incomparable young man Gibbons, whom I had lately met with in an obscure place by mere accident, as I was walking near a poor solitary thatched house in a field in our parish near Sayles Court. I found him shut in, but looking in at the window I perceived him copying that large cartoon or crucifix of Tintoretto, a copy of which I had myself brought from Venice, where the original painting remains. I asked if I might enter; he opened the door civilly to me, and I saw him about such a work as, from the curiosity of handling, drawing, and studious exactness, I had never before seen in all my travels. I question him why he worked in such an obscure and lonesome place; he told me it was that he might apply himself to his profession without interruption, and wondered not a little how I found him out. I asked if he was unwilling to be made known to some great man, for that I believed it might turn to his profit. He answered he was yet but a beginner, but would not be sorry to sell off that piece. On demanding the price, he said one hundred pounds. In good earnest, the very frame was worth the money, there being nothing in nature so tender and delicate as the flowers and festoons about it, and yet the work was very strong. In the piece was more than one hundred pieces of men." The carving of Gibbons that was first carried to the queen in order to secure her favor did not chance to please a certain old woman who had the royal ear, and it was not at once that the artist obtained the consideration which was his due; he has, however, enjoyed it ever since, and his work is still held among the treasures of English art. Some of the best and most interesting of it is at Hampton Court Palace and at Chatsworth House; and the school of carvers that followed him decorated all London with such masterly work that it is plain that if here had been any artist capable of designing, as there were carvers capable of executing, it would have been a mighty period of decorative art.
  • "Elizabethan and later English furniture" (1877-12). Harper's New Monthly Magazine 56 (331): 27-28.