In
the opposite transept to Poet's Corner stands a monument which is among the
most renowned achievements of modern art, but which to me appears horrible
rather than sublime. It is the tomb of Mrs. Nightingale, by Roubillac. The
bottom of the monument is represented as throwing open its marble doors, and a
sheeted skeleton is starting forth. The shroud is falling from his fleshless
frame as he launches his dart at his victim. She is sinking into her affrighted
husband's arms, who strives with vain and frantic effort to avert the blow. The
whole is executed with terrible truth and spirit; we almost fancy we hear the
gibbering yell of triumph bursting from the distended jaws of the spectre. But
why should we thus seek to clothe death with unnecessary terrors, and to spread
horrors round the tomb of those we love? The grave should be surrounded by
everything that might inspire tenderness and veneration for the dead, or that
might win the living to virtue. It is the place not of disgust and dismay, but
of sorrow and meditation.
Washington Irving - The Sketchbook of Geoffrey
Crayon (1819)
Usually
quoted as an encomium, Irving’s description of Louis-François Roubiliac’s
memorial to Joseph and Elizabeth Nightingale as “among the most renowned
achievements of modern art” is in fact mordant sarcasm. The American was not a
fan of the French Sculptor’s overwrought composition which shows Joseph Gascoigne
Nightingale trying to protect his swooning young wife from a predatory death. Elizabeth
Nightingale died on 17th August 1731 after the shock of a lightning strike
caused her to go into premature labour. Her baby survived. The memorial was
commissioned by the Nightingale’s son William following the death of his father
in 1752; however, William never saw the monument completed as he died in 1754
and Roubiliac did not finish it until 1761. It is a little surprising that the
author of ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ did not find the memorial in sympathy
with his gothic sensibilities, but it is quite astonishing to find that the otherwise
puritanical John Wesley loved it. In his journal for the 16th February 1764, he
notes “I once more took a serious walk through the tombs in Westminster
Abbey. But there was one tomb which
showed common sense: that beautiful figure of Mr. Nightingale endeavoring to
screen his lovely wife from death. Here indeed the marble seems to speak, and
the statues appear only not alive.”
A
few years later, in February 1771, Wesley is back in the Abbey and once again
drawn to Roubiliac’s memorial:
If on the sculptured marble you
rely,
Pity that worth like his should
ever die.
If credit to the real life you
give,
Pity a wretch like him
should ever live
In
February 1893 Archdeacon Frederic W. Farrar, then the Dean of Westminster
contributed to the Christian magazine Good Words his views on the depiction
of Death in the Abbey, singling out Robiliac for particular censure:
The early tombs in Westminster Abbey were like radiant phantoms with blue and vermilion, and gold, and glass mosaic, and lustrous enamels, and floral sculpturings, and Angels with outspread wings. In these death was not presented as a thing revolting and abhorrent, nor was any prominence given to the mere accidents of corruption and decay. The tombs of a later age become wildly different. The skull and cross-bones—most futile, most conventional, most offensive of all ‘decorations’ - appear for the first time on the unfinished tomb of Anne of Cleves. After that we get, with increasing frequency, the ridiculous nudities of weeping children, and the females who sit under willows and clasp urns to their breast. The attempt to force into prominence the fact that death is a thing for which to weep and the angel of death a king of terrors culminates in two tombs in the Chapel of St John the Evangelist. One—with the inscription Lacrimis struxit amor—is spotted all over with imaginary teardrops falling from an eye which is carved above it! The other is the tomb of Lady Elizabeth Nightingale, of which Barke disapproved, but which is usually regarded as Roubiliac’s masterpiece, and which Wesley is said to have considered the finest monument in the Abbey, as showing “common-sense among the heaps of unmeaning stone and marble.” Considered merely as sculpture the contrasted figures of the dying wife and the startled, agonised husband are undeniably fine and skilful, but nothing can be more repellent or less like the feeling with which the early Christians regarded death than the revolting skeleton who issues, with his javelin, from the dark tomb below. Such allegory is preposterous jumble of the material and immaterial. The “Death,” as Allan Cunningham says, “is very meanly imagined—the common dry bones of every vulgar tale.” Apparently Roubiliac’s imagination could not rise above this fleshless anatomy, for he repeats it on the tomb of General Hargrave in the nave. Here Time is breaking the arrow of a crowned skeleton across his knee. But how different is this bony Grotesque from the vague and awful magnificence of Milton’s imagination:— What seemed his head, The likeness of a kingly crown had on...
Louis-François Roubiliac is generally thought to have been born in Lyon in either 1702 or 1705. He was the son of a silk merchant who moved his business and family to Frankfort in 1710. He trained in Dresden but in 1730 after failing to secure the Prix de Rome and the opportunity to study in Italy he moved to England. After a brief spell at Thomas Carter’s stone yard in Shepherd Market he accepted a position as assistant to the successful sculptor Henry Cheere. In 1838 he had his first solo success with a statue of Handel commissioned for Vauxhall Gardens by Jonathan Tyers who was so pleased with the seated figure of Handel in modern dress, (now in the V&A) that he asked Roubiliac to provide the centrepiece sculpture for the temple dedicated to Fleeting Life and Inevitable Death at Tyers Surry estate, Denbies. Now sadly lost, this stucco monument to Tyer’s friend Lord Petre, the botanist and gardener who had died at the early age of 29, was Roubiliac’s first foray into his full blown Death mode. An angel was shown blowing the last trump and causing a stone pyramid to crumble. Inside the pyramid a corpse threw aside its shroud and prepared to rise from the dead with an expression of ecstasy and bewilderment on its cadaverous face. Echoes of this piece are to be seen in the Nightingale and Hargreave memorials in Westminster Abbey. Sepulchral memorials were in fact Robiliac’s main source of income; he received his first commissions for a monument in Westminster Abbey in 1745 and went on to complete five others there. He died penniless in 1762 and was buried in the churchyard at St Martins in the Fields.
Dutton
Cook in his Art in England of 1869 draws a vivid picture of Roubiliac’s
supposed eccentricities:
Roubiliac — a thin, olive-skinned Frenchman, with strongly-marked, arching eyebrows, mobile features, and small, sharp, dark eyes—liable at all times to fits of abstraction, attacks of inspiration. He will drop his knife and fork while at dinner, sink back in his chair, assume an ecstatic expression: the fit is on him; he must abandon his meal and hurry away at once to lock himself in his studio, and place upon record the superb idea which has so inconveniently visited him. His companions make allowances for him: men of genius are often thus. At other times he is absorbed in meditation upon his art: address him, and he makes no reply, fails to hear. While engaged upon his statue of Handel, he decides that the great musician must have possessed an ear of exceeding symmetry, and searches everywhere for a model. He scrutinizes the ears of all his acquaintances. Suddenly he pounces upon Miss Rich, the daughter of the Covent Garden manager. 'Miss Rich,' he cries, 'I must have your ear for my Handel!' In Westminster Abbey he permits himself to be 'discovered'—to use an appropriate theatrical term—lost in contemplation of the kneeling figure at the north-west corner of Sir Francis Vere's monument. His servant, having thrice delivered a message, without receiving a word in reply, finds his arm suddenly seized, and his master whispering mysteriously in his ear, while he points to the statue: 'Hush! hush! he vill speak presently!' At another time he invites a friend to occupy a spare bed at his house, gives him his candle, and bids him good-night. Presently the friend is heard crying aloud in great excitement and alarm; the bed is already occupied: the dead body of a negress is laid out upon it. 'I beg your pardon,' says the artist, 'I quite forgot poor Mary vas dere. Poor Mary! she die yesterday vid de small-pox. She was my housemaid for five, six years. Come along; I vill find you a bed somevhere else.' All this was but acting up to the idea Mr. Roubiliac had formed of the abstractedness and eccentricity of genius.
I
found this story about Roubiliac and the Nightingale memorial in the Illustrated
Sporting and Dramatic News of 16 July 1898:
The story is told of Roubiliac that when he was engaged at Westminster Abbey erecting his famous monument to Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale, he was found one day by the Abbey mason gazing intently on a knightly figure supporting the canopy over the statue of Sir Francis Vere. As the man approached, the sculptor laid his hand on his arm, pointing to the figure, and whispered, "Hush! hush! he vil speak presently!"
On
30 March 1826 the distinguished architect and pioneer of the study of medieval
gothic architecture, Lewis Nockalls Cottingham wrote a letter to the editor of
the Representative lamenting the state of Westminster Abbey and
concerned that the ecclesiastical authorities were considering allowing the
general public unfettered access to the edifice. “I recollect visiting this
building a few years since, when it was a common thoroughfare,” he wrote “and
remarking how slight a protection the iron cages, which then enclosed the tombs
and statues, were against the constant depredations committed by the careless
and mischievous.” He told the newspaper that he could provide ‘a hundred
instances’ as evidence why the church should remain shut to the common visitor,
monuments he said, “are nearly destroyed; in several instances the heads,
fingers, and toes of the figures are broken off. The sanctity of the place was
daily violated, and the stones which covered the mortal remains of a Pitt and a
Fox trodden on with as much indifference as common pavement. Surely, in a
country which boasts of so much taste and refinement of feeling, something
should be done to preserve the most interesting of its monuments from premature
ruin.” His feeling was that an entrance charge should be levied, and quite a
stiff charge, not less than 15 pence. One and three! That would have been quite
a hefty entrance fee in the 1820’s. Perhaps almost the equivalent of the £31 it
currently costs to buy a basic ticket to the Abbey. Despite the price the place
was still full when I visited earlier this week. There is, for anyone
interested in funerary monuments, far more to see than you can take in in one
visit. The estimate is that around 3600 people are buried here, all of them
either prebendaries of the Abbey or the great and the good of the Kingdom. No
one ordinary in interred here, you have to be royalty, aristocracy or
ridiculously famous. I found it a bit overwhelming; too much to see and too
many other people in the way. Let me leave the last words to Washington Irving:
It seems as if the awful nature of the place presses down upon the soul and hushes the beholder into noiseless reverence. We feel that we are surrounded by the congregated bones of the great men of past times, who have filled history with their deeds and the earth with their renown. And yet it almost provokes a smile at the vanity of human ambition to see how they are crowded together and jostled in the dust; what parsimony is observed in doling out a scanty nook, a gloomy corner, a little portion of earth, to those whom, when alive, kingdoms could not satisfy, and how many shapes and forms and artifices are devised to catch the casual notice of the passenger, and save from forgetfulness for a few short years a name which once aspired to occupy ages of the world's thought and admiration.
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| Monument to Mary Beaumont, Countess of Buckingham, and her 1st husband Sir George Villiers (died 1606). St. Nicholas' chapel, Westminster Abbey |
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| Elizabeth Russell (died 1601) rests her foot on a skull and is not dying, but sleeping, according to the latin tag on the memorial |
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