ARTS

Ifirst heard of the calamitous fire at Hampton Court while carving a bunch of grapes in my workshop in upstate New York. I put my chisel down to listen. The American radio newsreader mentioned no- thing of woodcarvings, but through that day and the next I felt a vague uneasiness. Then came a telephone call from London, and I learned that some of the most magnificent carving in the land had perished.

Grinling Gibbons's work at Hampton Court dates mostly from the 1690s, the decade when his carving was in what seems miraculously full flood. Gibbons's commis- sions during these years included the Wren Library at Cambridge, Trinity College Chapel at Oxford, Kensington Palace, Petworth House, and the Choir of St Paul's Cathedral. In 1693 Gibbons was given title to the position which he had held de facto for many years: Master Carver to the Crown. He was by then one of Britain's famous men, and his prices were such that few below the Crown could afford his services. But royal commissions kept pour- ing in, as if to confirm the horoscope prediction earlier given to Gibbons: 'Kings shall succeed kings, all will favour you.'

No single man, even in several lifetimes, could carve the hundreds of square feet of high-relief foliage work which these com- missions represent. But by 1690 Gibbons could draw upon a host of imitators, English carvers grown skilled in what had become the blue-chip style of the day. The carving at Hampton Court is workshop work; that is one of the miracles of it. Just how Gibbons suffused his intentions through his entourage of assistants we shall never know, but probably he engaged in that oldest of workshop master's tricks: ruthless specialisation of labour.

For many years I had the fancy that by close examination I might be able to detect individual hands in Gibbons's carvings. Gibbons himself I was sure I could recog- nise. There are some whole carvings and some touches in other carvings which seem to me to be indubitably his, for technical reasons to do with the way that the gouges are used in the treatment of surfaces, as well as for a characteristic ambitiousness in the modelling of forms. But I had imagined that some day I might disentangle other hands as well, in Gibbons's great cascades and arches of flowers, fruits and veget- ables. The Hampton Court carvings were to have been the acid test of this academic exercise, because they more than any others showed a single impulse through- out, as if not only conceived by one mind but executed by one pair of hands.

What was lost last month was probably

Grinling Gibbons

Lost at Hampton Court

David Esterly

the finest example of Gibbons's public, royal style. The carvings at Hampton Court, markedly superior to those at Windsor Castle, took the same form of cresting-and-drops, usually set around a painting or doorway. In addition there was a high-relief acanthus-scrolled frieze in the King's Bedchamber which was one of Gibbons's true masterpieces of design. But at Hampton Court Gibbons's carving oper- ated with a greater formality of shape and a greater restraint in content than elsewhere. There were no tour de force flower baskets, no trophies of game or fish, no overpower- ing eagle crestings, no trompe l'oeil musical instruments or Grecian urns. All was flowers and fruits, airy lightness and easy self-confidence. No carvings of Gibbons's were in a better state of preservation, and one might have thought that they had survived their most dangerous centu- ries.

Though of English parents Gibbons was born in Rotterdam and did not come to Britain until he was about 19, well past his apprenticeship years. In 1671 Gibbons was recommended to Charles II by the diarist John Evelyn. He was at that time working on a carved relief (now in the V&A) of an engraving of Tintoretto's 'Crucifixion'. Although apparently a success with the king, Gibbons was not received favourably by the queen and he disappeared from historical view.

Six years later Gibbons was recom- mended to the king again, by Sir Peter Lely. By this time he had abandoned the great European tradition of religious figure and relief sculpture and become simply a decorative carver. (There is evidence that Gibbons remained a closet sculptor throughout his life. After his death he was found to possess 'a fine collection of picture Models and other Curiosities'.) Gibbons might well have felt like the great South German religious carvers of the century before, who after the iconoclasm of the Reformation fell on hard times and were forced to turn to small-scale secular work.

Yet it was precisely this unapt training in sculpture which allowed Gibbons to trans- form carved decoration in England. Native English carvers had been producing f10 wered swags and drops for years before Gibbons appeared on the scene. They provided Gibbons with his vocabulary, but not his manner of treatment. And they did not provide Gibbons with his medium. Before Gibbons no English carver used lime, which in Europe was the pre-eminent wood for fine figure work. Lime is unsurpassed in its response to the chisel, and it is difficult for a carver experienced in this wood to speak of it without falling into reverential tones. Lime is mild, close-grained, crisp and strong. It will accept fine detail and radical undercut' ting. Most important of all, its grain structure allows it to be persuaded into that distinctive curviform softness of outline We associate with Gibbons's carving. There were other things Gibbons's European background brought him. He almost certainly had developed modelling techniques far more sophisticated than the English carvers knew, and he probably had a finer, more varied set of carving tools. Gibbons too may have learned to be bolder in his use of a technique of separate carving and superimposition. Gibbons's great works are assemblages of scores of indi- vidually carved elements, with no pretence of carving 'out of a solid block of wood', 85 tour guides are wont to put it. But beyond this there is something admirable, I have often thought, in the resilience and flexibility of the man him- self. self. Denied a career in sculptural high a/ Gibbons turned an almost religious atten• tion to flowers and fruits, and the common harvest of the field; he carves a blossom as a sculptor in an earlier age might carve the face of a saint. I myself spend my life doing foliage carving, without feeling the slight", est impulse to reproduce Gibbons. But can never embark upon a bunch of graPes; for example, without calling to mind certain extraordinary bunch of Gibbons , grapes, and wondering at the intensity and fluency of the man's skill. Gibbons's sensibility is allied to Elute!! flower painters of his century, with the:, poignant sense of the transitoriness beauty and their use of growing things 8,5_ symbols of this. Gibbons's medium itself I j5 from the organic world, however, an carving vegetable forms out of a vegetable medium is apeculiarly self-reinforcing enterprise. It may be a carver's prejudice

to think that this confluence of subject and medium plays some unconscious part in the viewer's response to the work.

Should the Hampton Court carvings be restored? Should completely missing pieces be re-carved? One hopes those in authority will proceed cautiously. Daunt- ing technical problems will arise, not to mention a serious question of principle. Many man-years of highly skilled carving probably would be involved, and this is not 1690: carvers genuinely capable of this work are scarce on the ground, to say the least. London carving workshops, what few there are, mainly operate in an 18th- century idiom, producing gilt or painted acanthus-based forms, usually in pine. A full-blown limewood technique is some- thing quite distinct, in its methods and its results.

There are few abuses to which 17th- century carvings have not been subjected, in the name of restoration. Not too many years ago, for example, the parishioners of a London church decided to clean and repair their Grinling Gibbons carving and with the best will in the world thought it advisable to use glass paper to 'clean' the wood where other methods failed. Peaches turned into billiard balls, the skin of the cherubs into plastic. Originally the carvings were never finished with any form of abrasion; their peculiar softness of surface comes only from a certain use of the chisel. Sand the surface and what comes off is Gibbons.

Perhaps, at Hampton Court, it is best to let be, consoling ourselves with the thought that impermanence is at the heart of Gibbons's world. And we might remember Yeats's words: 'Many ingenious lovely things are gone/ That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude. . .