Unmistakably Gibbons
Sir: While responding favourably to my Grinling Gibbons exhibition at the V&A (Arts, 14 November), your reviewer has conveyed some misleading impressions. There is no doubt that the drawings ascribed to Gibbons in the exhibition are his. In all these designs the hand is excep- tionally strong, distinctive and consistent and, to anybody who has looked repeatedly and carefully at these sheets, absolutely unmistakable. The circumstantial evidence linking them to Gibbons is no less over- whelming. The idea that some of these pro- posals are 'presentation drawings' by anoth- er hand flies in the face of all Gibbons scholarship, and I can understand why the person who floated that theory to your gullible journalist insisted on anonymity. Finally, it is false to say that I 'bullied and cajoled the powers that be' until they dropped plans for a competition to decide who should replace the one Gibbons carving destroyed in the Hampton Court fire. I thought the competition was a fine idea. But those powers that be wanted to limit the con- test to British citizens, an idea I (and the government of the time) found outrageous. After they were compelled to drop this citi- zenship test they seemed to lose interest in a contest. I suppose my selection for the job was the consequence of my being the only person available who (despite the defect of being foreign-born) had made a full-time profession of producing carvings in the Gib- bons manner from scratch.
David Esterly
Barneveld, New York, NY 13304, USA
Previous page
