Grinling gibbons

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Oil painting by Godfrey Kneller , circa 1690
Detail of a baroque garland that Gibbons created for Hampton Court
The stoning of St. Stephen , approx. 1680. The last known relief carving by Gibbons with a religious theme.
One of the typical fragile wood carvings Gibbons. Wren Library , Cambridge
Interior of the Wren Library. The ends of the bookshelves each have decorative carvings by gibbons.

Grinling Gibbons ( April 4, 1648 in Rotterdam , † August 3, 1721 in London ) was an English sculptor , born and trained in Holland .

Gibbons spent his childhood and youth in Holland, where his parents from England lived. Returning to England around 1667, he was called to the court of Charles II in London in the mid-1670s and dedicated to him and his successors Jacob II , Wilhelm III. and Georg I. his activity as a wood carver and sculptor. His wood carvings, mostly made of limewood, can be found in Windsor , St Paul's Cathedral , Chatsworth , Petworth , Burleigh and Trinity College in Oxford. He later worked with the sculptor Artus Quellinus III. and with the Brussels sculptor Peter van Dievoet also with marble and bronze , as with the marble statue of Charles II in Charing Cross, the bronze statue of Jacob II at the back of Whitehall Chapel , the monument of Viscount Baptist Noel Camden in the church in Exton , several statues in the courtyard of the London Stock Exchange and Isaac Newton's Monument in Westminster Abbey .

Gibbons is widely considered to be the most outstanding woodcarver to ever work in Great Britain and the only one known by name to a wider audience in Great Britain. He is known for his baroque garlands in which he depicted life-size fruits and leaves and which typically framed mirrors and lintels. It is said that his carvings are so fragile that the blossoms he carved trembled when a carriage drove by nearby. After Gibbons had managed to establish himself as an artist, he ran a large workshop. Subsequent work is therefore also carried out to a different degree by employees in his workshop.

Life

Youth and education

Very little is known about gibbon's early life. His unusual first name is composed of two surnames.

Gibbons was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His father was a cloth merchant, his mother the daughter of a tobacco dealer. He completed his training on the European mainland and acquired skills in drawing and carving techniques which, in the opinion of Gibbons specialist David Esterly , gave him a clear advantage over his English colleagues. Gibbons had also acquired better and finer tools in mainland Europe than were available in England at the time. While his English colleagues were still working in oak and pine, he had learned to concentrate mainly with limewood. As is customary on the European mainland, he worked very detailed. One of his earliest surviving works is a small relief carved in boxwood showing King David playing the harp . A second work, which has only been handed down according to the description and was only about 15 centimeters high, showed Elijah under the juniper tree. It is possible that he worked both carvings on the European mainland and brought them to England as evidence of his skills. The American sculptor David Esterly writes about this work that it is so different from the typical English carvings that it could have come from Mars.

Discovery by Evelyn Jones

The talent Gibbons was discovered by chance in 1671 by the author and architect John Evelyn . Gibbons was then working as a carver for shipbuilders in Deptford. In his spare time, however, he worked to rework a crucifixion painting by Tintoretto as a wooden relief. Evelyn saw him and his work when he happened to pass the window of his workshop. Evelyn was so impressed by the young talented man that within a month he introduced two other well-known men to Gibbons: the architect Christopher Wren and Samuel Pepys , State Secretary in the British Naval Office and Member of Parliament. Pepys did not keep a diary at this time, so that the encounter between him and Gibbons has not been recorded. Evelyn, who like Pepys regularly wrote diaries, is silent about the encounter. The fact that Gibbons did not work for Christopher Wren until ten years later is an indication that Wren was also reluctant at first.

A short time later, Evelyn and his relief were presented to King Charles II . However, this first encounter with Charles II did not result in Gibbons receiving commissions from the royal court. The subject of his wooden relief was considered inappropriately Catholic. David Esterly argues, however, that it wasn't just the issue that prevented Gibbons from immediately succeeding at the English royal court. John Evelyn had traveled widely on the European continent and dealt extensively with the local art scene. He was therefore able to assess Gibbon's unusual artistry and correctly assess it. In England, unlike in mainland Europe, there was no art market for such works. It is significant that after meeting Charles II, Gibbons only carried out similar relief work once. Approx. In 1680 he made a large wooden relief depicting the stoning of St. Stephen. This relief remained in his private possession until the end of Gibbon's life.

Commissioned by Thomas Betterton and Hughes May

Esterly believes that Gibbons made a very pragmatic decision after the experience at the English royal court. He focused on making purely decorative carvings. The London theater impressario Thomas Betterton was Gibbons' first client in 1671. Gibbons was asked to carve decorative ornaments to decorate the cornices and capitals for the new Dorset Gardens Theater. It was a purely handicraft assignment and, according to Esterly, gibbons were not particularly skilled in decorative ornamentation. Nevertheless, Gibbon's work must have been so striking that the court painter Peter Lely noticed it. Lely's closest friend was the courtier and architect Hugh May, and it was May who ultimately influenced Gibbons' professional development.

May hired Gibbons to work on two new country estates that were being built. In the mid-1670s, Lely and May arranged for Charles II to be presented again to Gibbon and his work. Charles II had commissioned May to remodel the royal apartments and St. George's Hall of Windsor Castle . The renewed presentation was about whether Gibbons should be commissioned to carry out carvings for these rooms. As a test piece, this time Gibbons did not bring a relief work with a religious theme, but a supraporte with a garland of fish, shells and other ornaments. Gibbons was hired to work for Windsor Castle, making it the leading carver in England.

During the renovation of Windsor Castle, May replaced the original apartments from the time of the Plantagenets on the north terrace with the cube-shaped star building . These rooms are decorated with ceiling paintings by Antonio Verrio and carvings by Grinling Gibbons. The king also purchased tapestries and paintings to furnish the rooms. These works of art formed the basis for today's royal collection, the Royal Collection . Three of the rooms have remained largely unchanged: the queen's lounge and audience room, both designed for the wife of Charles II, Catherine of Braganza , and the king's dining room. Both the ceiling paintings by Verrio and the wall paneling by Gibbons have been preserved in these rooms. Originally there were twenty rooms with this equipment. Some of Gibbon's work was saved when changes were made as a result of alterations or restorations. In the 19th century, these carvings were then integrated into the new interior of the throne room of the Order of the Garter and into the water look chamber.

Reconstruction of the carvings lost in the 1986 fire at Hampton Court Palace

In 1986 a fire damaged parts of Hampton Court Palace . The fire had broken out above the king's parade room. The ceiling construction chosen by Christopher Wren in this part of the palace prevented the fire from quickly spreading to the rooms below. The fire was discovered early enough to save the portable works of art in this part of the palace. However, the decorative carvings of Grinling Gibbons nailed high up on the paneling were damaged by fire and extinguishing water. A carving more than two meters long that adorned the side of a door was completely burned. The American sculptor David Esterly was commissioned to create a reproduction of this lost carving and worked at Hampton Court Palace for a year. Esterly's experiences during this time are described in the non-fiction book The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making , which was published in the USA in 2012 and in Great Britain in 2013. In it, he describes, among other things, the resistance within the palace administration to commission an American with the restoration of a British cultural heritage, his collaboration with other wood sculptors who worked on the restoration of the gibbons carvings damaged by the fire and extinguishing water, their joint endeavor, the specific technique of capturing gibbons and discussing the extent to which the carvings should be restored to a state they had at the time gibbons, or whether the wax layers that had been applied over the centuries to these original untreated carvings should be removed and thus the Should be restored to the state they had immediately before the fire.

Esterly was critical of the use of sandpaper for the final smoothing of wooden surfaces. Sandpaper is an invention of the 19th century. Influenced by the art historian John Ruskin , who had argued that surfaces developed a boring, diffuse calm when they were treated with sandpaper (Ruskin speaks of smooth, diffused tranquility in the original text ), he had assumed that baroque woodcarvers like gibbons had a special effect on their shimmering surfaces would achieve careful work with the carving tools. On careful examination of the carvings that had been spared by the fire, however, regular notches were noticed, which made it clear that Gibbons had used winter horsetail as a natural abrasive to smooth the surfaces. The use of this abrasive has also been documented for Michel Erhart , Veit Stoss and Tilman Riemenschneider .

literature

  • David Esterly : Grinling Gibbons and the art of carving , London 1998, ISBN 1-85177-256-1 .
  • David Esterly: The Lost Carving - A Journey to the Heart of Making . London 2013, ISBN 978-0-7156-4649-6 .
  • Geoffrey Beard: The work of Grinling Gibbons , London 1989, ISBN 0-7195-4728-8 .
  • Frederick Oughton: Grinling Gibbons and the English woodcarving tradition , London 1979, ISBN 0-85442-011-8 .
  • David Brontë Green: Grinling Gibbons: his work as carver and statuary, 1648-1721 , London 1964.
  • Henry Avray Tipping: Grinling Gibbons and the woodwork of his age (1648-1720) , London [u. a.] 1914.

Web links

Commons : Grinling Gibbons  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Exhibition information from the Victoria & Albert Museum , accessed January 18, 2013.
  2. ^ Esterly: The Lost Carving, 2013, Chapter II: The Use of Time is Fate. In the original Esterly writes: These exotic European works would have dropped down onto a sleepy British sculpture scene as if from Mars.
  3. ^ Esterly: The Lost Carving, 2013, Chapter II: The Use of Time is Fate.
  4. ^ Esterly: The Lost Carving, 2013, Chapter II: The Use of Time is Fate.
  5. ^ Esterly: The Lost Carving, 2013, Chapter II: The Use of Time is Fate.
  6. ^ Esterly: The Lost Carving, 2013, Chapter II: The Use of Time is Fate.
  7. ^ Esterly: The Lost Carving, 2013, Chapter II: The Use of Time is Fate.
  8. ^ Esterly: The Lost Carving, 2013, Chapter II: The Use of Time is Fate.
  9. ^ Esterly: The Lost Carving, 2013, Chapter I: A Metaphor for everything.
  10. ↑ Esterly: The Lost Carving, 2013, Chapter V: The Art That Arrives Even to Deseption.
  11. ^ David Esterly: The Lost Carving - A Journey to the Heart of Making . London 2013, ISBN 978-0-7156-4649-6 . Chapter VIII: Meaning isn't the Meaning
personal data
SURNAME Gibbons, grinling
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch-English sculptor
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1648
PLACE OF BIRTH Rotterdam Netherlands
DATE OF DEATH August 3, 1721
Place of death London