The Bust of William Wither at Wooton St Lawrence. Hampshire.

 

The Mural Monument to William Wither (d. 1733).

 St Lawrence Church, 

Wootton St Lawrence, Near Basingstoke. Hampshire.

Dated beneath the main inscription 1735.

The bust here attributed to Louis Francois Roubiliac.

For Roubiliac's repeated use of similar drapery on busts see -

 See - http://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-portrait-sculpture-in-codrington_14.html

I experienced the usual difficulties in the photography of this monument - particularly the bad light and its inaccessibility but I don't give up easily!

The carving on the shirt on this bust particularly the detailed stitching on the collar should be noted.

Note the stitching on the collar - a fabulous detail only visible on close inspection.

......................

The Gounter Nicholl Monument.

 St Peters Church, Racton, West Sussex.

The Marble Bust of Charles Gounter Nicoll (1704 - 33).

 Here attributed to Louis Francois Roubiliac.

 I previously posted some time ago briefly on the subject of this bust,

and also on the Thomas Missing Monument which both use the same dress in the same post.

see -

 http://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-portrait-sculpture-in-codrington_14.html

 St Edmunds Church, Crofton and Stubbington, Hampshire.

There is an article online  by Dr Clive Easter.

 

The Three Gunter family monuments at Racton, West Sussex. published in Sussex Archaelogical Collections 156 (2018), 147–158. see -

 https://www.academia.edu/39333654/Three_Gunter_family_monuments_at_Racton_West_Sussex

 It has been suggested that the monument came from the Westminster workshop of Henry Cheere with the bust subcontracted to Louis Francois Roubiliac

 Matthew Craske in The Silent Rhetoric .... his excellent work on 18th Century Church monuments suggested the work of Roubiliac on the Thomas Missing bust and I concur - particularly as we now have some reasonable photographs to compare the two busts.

For the thorny question of its removal for safekeeping? to the home of Sir Michael Hamilton, Lord Dartmouth and substitution with a resin replica see -

The Report and Conclusions of the Chichester Consistory Court.

Ref the bust and monument.

https://cofechichester.contentfiles.net/media/documents/document/2019/02/011019_Racton_St_Peter.pdf

The bust was removed and conserved and a cast taken off it by Messrs Plowden and Smith in the late 1990's.

It was intended to replace the original with a resin cast, payed for by Sir Michael Hamilton, a distant relative.

It has since been replaced in its original position, with I believe a stainless steel dowel fixing it firmly to the sarcophagus.

Here be the Remains  /  Of the Honourable Sr. CHARLES GOUNTER NICOLL  /  Knight of the most Honourable Order of the Bath;  /  Descended from a long Train of Ancestors  / Fam’d for their Religion, Loyalty and Virtue,  /   He had all the Qualifications  /  Of a compleat and accomplishe’d Gentleman, /  Amiable in his Person,  /  Gracefull in his Address. /  In Private,  /  He was easy, affable, condescending’  /  In Publick,  /  He was steady, uniform consistent;  /  Favour’d by this Prince,  /  And a Friend to his Country.  /  In this distinguish’d Situation, /  Esteem’d, belov’d and honour’d, /  He died the 24th Day of November 1733  /  In the 30th Year of his Age.

................

The Busts of Charles Gounter Nichol at Racton and Thomas Missing at Crofton.

Side by Side for comparison.

The Design of the Gounter Nicholl Monument is based on the plate from James Gibbs.

 Plate CXVII from A Book of Architecture by James Gibbs pub. 1728.

Below.

.........................

Charles Gounter Nicoll (1704 - 1733). - a brief biog.

Charles Gounter Nicoll, was baptised on 7 October 1704, the eldest son of George Gounter, MP of Racton, and his wife Judith Nicoll, daughter of Richard Nicoll of Norbiton Place, Surrey. His grandfather, Colonel George Gounter, helped Charles II to escape from England after the battle of Worcester. Gounter succeeded his father to Racton in 1718. He matriculated at New College, Oxford on 4 April 1722, aged 17.

 In 1726, he changed his name by an Act of Parliament, adopting the surname of Nicoll, according to the deed of settlement of William Nicoll. He married Elizabeth Blundell, daughter of William Blundell of Basingstoke, Hampshire, whose mother Alice Blundell was the alleged victim of a notorious premature burial.

 Gounter Nicoll was returned as Member of Parliament for Peterborough at a by-election on 29 January 1729. He voted with the government and was knighted as Knight of the Order of the Bath on 30 June 1732.

 Gounter Nicoll died on 24 November 1733, having had two daughters Elizabeth, and Frances Catherine and was buried in St Peter's Church in Racton. His widow prosecuted a journalist, soon after her husband's death, for defaming him for accepting KB.

 The cost of the prosecution was met from secret service funds. In 1735 she married Lord Lindsey, 3rd Duke of Ancaster with £70,000. Gounter Nicoll's daughter Frances Catherine married William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth with £100,000 in 1755.

 The paragraphs above should be fact checked - information from Wikipedia.

...................................

The Thomas Missing Monument.

Put up in 1738.

 The Marble Bust on the Monument.

 Holy Rood Church, Crofton and Stubbington, Hampshire.

  Formerly Crofton.

Thomas Missing (d. 1733).

Photographs here very  kindly provided by David Dawson Taylor of the Friends of Crofton Old Church.

 

http://www.fococ.co.uk/cochistory.php

Thomas Missing - some notes -

Thomas Missing built the south transept of the church in 1725 to accommodate his family pews and mausoleum. He was MP for Southampton and the merchant responsible for victualling Gibraltar. He was presumably responsible for the shaped gable and segmental windows to the south transept shown in a mid C19 illustration in the National Monuments Record.

 Thomas Missing was made Freeman and Alderman of Southampton in January 1711.

 In March 1715 he obtained a lucrative contract for victualling the garrison at Gibraltar, which he held till his death.1 Five years later he was given similar contracts for troops in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.2 Returned, presumably as a Whig, for Southampton in 1722, he was defeated in 1727. In September 1728 he proposed to the board of Trade that ‘as he hath a correspondence that way and hath with reputation carried over a great many to America’, he should be engaged to transport yearly a number of Protestant Palatines to Carolina ‘and victual them till they can support themselves’  He died 6 July 1733.

 

A cursory inspection (given the not very high resolution quality of this photograph) suggests to me that the clothing on these two busts s the same.

...............................

The Life Size Plaster bust of Nicholas Hawksmoor.

 Louis Francois Roubiliac.

 Height 54.6cm.

 In the Buttery, All Souls College, Oxford.

Once again we have Roubiliac adapting a bust and adding the head.

Much of the dress on this bust is repeated on the Gounter Nicholl and Thomas  Missing Busts.

For the last fifteen years of his life he was responsible for the designs for the redevelopment of All Souls and was the architect of  what was formerly called the Codrington Library, the Buttery, the North Quadrangle and the Hall, all built between 1716 and 1740.This bust is the only known likeness of Hawksmoor. The  bronze cast  was given by the Warden and Fellows of All Souls in 1962 to the National Portrait Gallery in London.

 

Photograph at All Souls from the Art UK Website.

 https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/nicholas-hawksmoor-16611781-275517/search/venue:all-souls-college-university-of-oxford-7507/page/3

With Grateful thanks to Gaye Morgan, Chief Librarian and Conservator at the Codrington (now renamed), All Souls for making this entry possible with reference to the plaster bust of Hawksmore at All Souls College Oxford.

 It appears that there is another bust - perhaps by the same hand (Roubiliac?) and inscribed Giles Bennett, / Manciple 1736, was in The Buttery at All Souls in 1925, but I have not yet had the opportunity to closely inspect it on my visits.

 Mrs Webb suggests that they were both made by Henry Cheere in about 1736.

 see Poole vol II, 1925.   - https://archive.org/stream/b22652061_0002#page/190/mode/2up

 

 For refs to Manciple Gile Bennett see - https://archive.org/stream/catalogueofarchi00mart#page/n7/mode/2up

 

Both of these busts are noted as at All Souls (Bennett in the Buttery) in A History of the University of Oxford Including the Lives of the Founders ...  By Alexander Chalmers pub.1810.

This dating of the Giles Bennet bust (if the 1736 date is correct) is perhaps important in dating the bust of Hawksmore which 

For an introduction to Hawksmoor and the Codrington Library see

https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2022-10/Scrn3_Arch_edit1.pdf

............................

Roubiliac and the re use of the drapery on his busts.

 

 In my experience Louis Francois Roubiliac was the only sculptor who reused or adapted the clothing from his prototypes on other busts - good examples of this are the bust of  George Streatfield, Jonathan Tyers. and John Ray

see http://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2015/07/jonathan-tyers-and-his-bust-by-roubiliac.html

The busts of Andrew Fountain at Wilton House and its several variants, the bust of  Thomas Winnington on his monument at Stanford on Teme, Worcestershire and the bust of John Bamber on the monument in Barking Church, Essex.

see - https://bathartandarchitecture.blogspot.com/2019/03/monument-to-thomas-winnington-stanford.html

The busts of Hawksmoor at All Souls College, Oxford and that on the Monument to William Wither. d.1732 in Wootton St Lawrence Church, Hampshire which  both use the same almost baroque drapery as on the  busts on the monument of Thomas Missing at Crofton and Gounter Nicholl monument at Racton.

This suggests to me that Roubiliac used some sort of fairly sophisticated pointing machine so that he or his assistants could transfer the details from the original clay, terracotta or plaster prototypes.