Nicholas Stone (1586/87Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 3rd ed. (Yale University Press) 1995, s.v. "Stone, Nicholas", gives 1587 as his birth year. – 24 August 1647) was an English sculptor and architect. In 1619 he was appointed master-mason to James I, and in 1626 to Charles I.
During his career he was the mason responsible for not only the building of Inigo Jones' Banqueting House, Whitehall,William Cure, the King's Master Mason having declined the demanding task (Colvin 1995). but the execution of elaborate funerary monuments for some of the most prominent of his era that were avant-garde by English standards. As an architect he worked in the Baroque style providing England with some of its earliest examples of the style that was not to find favour in the country for another sixty years, and then only fleetingly.
He worked in a context where most sculptors in stone were "mason-sculptors", in modern terms combining sculpture with architecture. The quality of his sculptural work is variable, probably because much of it was done by his workshop colleagues. Netherlandish influence was dominant in English sculpture, and in Stone's training, but the importation of classical antiquities by collectors influenced his later work. There continued to be few sculpture commissions other than tombs in England during his career, and he developed the English types of the previous century.Whinney, 67-80
Early life
Nicholas Stone was born in 1586, the son of a quarryman of Woodbury, near Exeter.Colvin 1995. He was first apprenticed to Isaac James, a Dutch-born London mason working in Southwark, London. When the sculptor Hendrik de Keyser (1567–1621), master mason to the City of Amsterdam, visited London in 1606, Stone was introduced to him and contracted to work for him in Holland, where he married de Keyser's daughter and worked with his son Pieter. Stone is thought to have made the portico to the Zuiderkerk in Amsterdam. In 1613 he returned to London with Bernard Janssens, a fellow pupil of de Keyser and settled in Long Acre, St Martin-in-the-Fields, where he established a large practice and workshops and soon became the leading English sculptor of funeral monuments.Howard Colvin, The History of the King's Works, 1485–1660, 3 part 1 (London: HMSO, 1963), pp. 132–133.
Works Stone owed his early success in London in part to Inigo Jones, the King's Surveyor. In 1616 Stone was contracted by the depute-treasurer of Scotland Gideon Murray to decorate the chapel at Holyrood Palace with a wooden screen, stalls, and organ case. The carving was done in London and Stone came to Scotland in July 1616 to oversee the installation.David Masson, Register of the Privy Council of Scotland: 1613-1616, vol. 10 (Edinburgh, 1891), pp. 593-4. He sub-contracted the painting and gilding work to Matthew Goodrick.Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, vol. 11 (Edinburgh, 1895), p. 65. John Chamberlain wrote that Inigo Jones was in charge of the project.John Imrie & John Dunbar, Accounts of the Masters of Works, vol. 2 (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. lxxxvi-lxxxvii, 441. This involvement with the royal works led to the spectacular contract for building Jones's Banqueting House, that placed him in the forefront of London builders.Newman 1971.
Throughout his life, Stone recorded his work in two journals; These are his autograph notebook (covering the years 1614–1641) and his accounts book (covering 1631–1642).W.L. Spiers, The Note-book and Account-book of Nicholas Stone (Walpole Society 7, 1919); noted in Oxford DNB; Colvin 1995. These journals record all his works and patrons, and provide in unequalled detail documentation of the career of an architect (then known as a surveyor) of the period.Oxford DNB A list of works by Stone's relative John Stoakes includes some work known not to have been designed by Stone, including Inigo Jones' Banqueting House, Whitehall, but permits some attributions, noted below. This amount of information available concerning Stone has led to his importance to English architecture often being overstated.This is the explicit view of the Oxford DNB. However, the documentation does clearly prove that by 1629 he was England's foremost sculptor and that by the end of his life he held comparable status in architecture. His first appointment in the royal Office of Works was as "master mason and architect" to Windsor Castle in April 1626;Foedera, vol. 18 (London, 1726), p. 869: Stone's work at Windsor has been demolished, according to Colvin 1995. in 1632 he succeeded William Cure as Master Mason to the Crown.
Sir William Paston at Oxnead A consistent private patron over a period of many years was Sir William Paston, who was modernizing his Elizabethan seat at Oxnead, Norfolk.R.W. Ketton-Cremer, "Sir William Paston" in Norfolk Assembly (London:Faber and Faber) 1957, pp. 17-40., instances Nicholas Stone's work for Sir William Paston at Oxnead and at Paston, Norfolk. Paston commissioned from Stone the monument to his mother (died 1629) in the church at Paston, the family's ancient seat; in Stone's note-book, the price came to £340, and Stone remarks that in setting it up he was "very extreordenerly entertayned thar" by the genial Paston.Ketton-Cremer 1957:20. The simpler monument by Stone of Sir Edmund Paston (died 1633), without the effigy and achievement of arms, stands beside his wife's.
Oxnead was emptied of its treasures, sold off and all but demolished, but in 1809 its long-term tenant, John Adey Repton,J.C. Loudon, The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphrey Repton, Esq., new ed. 1840, "Biographical Notice" p. 4. made a conjectural drawing of it, based on the foundations and recollections of local inhabitants, which was illustrated in W.H. Bartlett and John Britten's Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain 1809, following p. 98.In The Gentleman's Magazine January 1844, Repton gave a further account of Oxnead and some of its former treasures, mentioning the drawing. his view is centered on the terraced parterres, in the lowest of which, he says, stood the fountain of two tiers of bold opposed scrolls supporting a shallow basin,An engraving of it, after Repton, is published in The Gentleman's Magazine, January 1844 article p. 21. re-erected after the Oxnead sale at the rival Norfolk house, Blickling Hall. Repton's drawing showed the banqueting house constructed as a wing; its style was so advanced for its date in the 1630s that the younger Repton concluded that it had been "erected by the first Earl of Yarmouth, to receive King Charles II. and his attendants, who visited Oxnead in 1676; it was a lofty building, with sash-windows, called the Banquetting-room. Underneath this was a vaulted apartment, which was called the Frisketting room, probably from the Italian 'frescati', a cool grotto." Repton's drawing shows a building of three bays articulated by a giant order, with large rectangular windows over the basement windows and oval windows, recalled by local people, in a mezzanine above.The result may be compared to Stone's front in Foster Lane of Goldsmiths' Hall.
Stone provided a magnificent chimneypiece that cost £80Chimneypieces of the 1630s were not like the more familiar modestly scaled chimneypieces of the 18th century, but included elaborately rendered architectural overmantels that reached to the cornice of the room. and another for the banqueting house, a balcony with two door surrounds and an architrave in Portland stone, a "copper branch"— probably a cast bronze candelabrum— weighing 166 pounds, and an achievement of the Paston arms. There were many miscellaneous carved furnishings, picture frames and stands for tables, balustrades and paving-stones, and busts of Marcus Aurelius and Faustina. For the gardens he provided figures of Venus and Cupid, Jupiter, Flora, and, to guard the garden front door, a large figure of Cerberus on a pedestal, all long gone, but Stone's Hercules— and perhaps others— are preserved in the gardens at Blickling. In the garden Stone erected a large iron pergola painted green, surmounted by eight gilded balls. In 1638, he sent his son, Nicholas Stone the younger, to Italy, whence there returned an elevation of a new garden house just built in the Villa Ludovisi, Rome, "for Mr Paston",The younger Stone's Italian notebook is conserved in Sir John Soane's Museum. London (Platt 1994, p. 88 and fig. 34, p. 89 ). and marbles, architectural books (Vignola, Vitruvius, and Maggi's Le fontane di Roma), and plaster casts sent home from Livorno.Platt 1988, p. 88. With the onset of the Civil War, commissions from Sir William abruptly ceased in 1642; five years later, his outstanding account was settled, for £24.Ketton-Cremer 1975:22.
Christopher Hatton at Kirby Hall Christopher Hatton was rebuilding Kirby Hall in the same decade. For him Stone provided "6 Emperors heads, with their pedestals cast in Plaster, moulded from the Antiques" (£7 10s), a "head of Apollo, fairly carved in Portland stone, almost twice as big as life" and "one head carved in stone of Marcus Aurelius" still preserved set in the north front above the loggia (each £4).Colin Platt, The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England (London:Routledge) 1994, p 87f.
Sculpture
While Stone's London workshop received commissions for garden statuary, perhaps including the sculptures in Isaac de Caus' grotto at Woburn Abbey, recently attributed to Nicholas Stone,Dianne Duggan, "Isaac de Caus, Nicholas Stone and the Woburn Abbey grotto," Apollo (August 2003). and for domestic items such as door-cases and chimneypieces, the vast majority of Stone's surviving sculptures are funerary monuments, and it is by these that the quality of his sculpture is today judged. Stone was greatly influenced by the new classicizing fashion for art derived from the Italian Renaissance and the Roman Arundel marbles, and this is reflected in two of his works, both in Westminster Abbey, the memorial to Sir John Holles and his brother Francis both dressed Roman armour reflecting classical influence, something new to England. It has been said that until this time English sculpture resembled that described by the Duchess of Malfi: "the figure cut in alabaster kneels at my husband's tomb."Halliday, p. 154.
A taste for realism, in part the product of his training in the Netherlands, informs the floor tomb of Sir William Curle (died 1617) in the church at Hatfield, Hertfordshire; Sir William is sculpted lying in his grave coat, his knees drawn up in his last agonies: "in its sad and poignant realism," observes Colin Platt, "it was as much a culture shock as the Whitehall Banqueting House".Platt 1994:87; illus fig. 433, p. 88.
Two prominent funeral monuments, Stone's box tombs in Westminster Abbey served as influential models far into the 18th century for many monuments in the metropolis and in the country: they were for Sir George Villiers and his wife, the Countess of Buckingham (c 1631), and for Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, and his wife (after 1638).A. D. Harvey, "Baluster-Cornered Box Tombs" Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999), pp. 287-295, p. 287.
Stone's 1631 monument to Dr John Donne, at St Paul's Cathedral is considered to be among his most remarkable. It depicts the poet, standing upon an urn, dressed in a winding cloth, rising for the moment of judgement. This depiction, Donne's own idea, was sculpted from a painting for which the Poet posed.