Post under construction.
Illustrations and brief notes.
A Book of Designs in Pen and Ink and Watercolours at the Taylorian Institute, Oxford.
Photographed by the author 14 August 2019.
Sir Robert Taylor Part 1.
I am very grateful to staff at the Taylorian Institute for allowing me access and to photograph this group of exquisite drawings.
This is the largest surviving group of drawings by a sculptor in the mid 18th Century.
There is a small group of drawings by Henry Cheere at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
For a useful introduction to Taylor see - Binney, Marcus. Sir Robert Taylor : from Rococo to Neoclassicism. London: Allen & Unwin, 1984.
As far as I know no one has attempted an in depth biography and I will not attempt to do so here -
the purpose of this website is to illustrate and discuss English sculpture of the 18th century - I will of course touch on the work of Taylor as an architect and property developer but here is not the place to go into detail - I will leave that to others.
For an interesting article on speculative building by Henry Cheere and Robert Taylor see -
https://georgiangroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/GGJ_2002_13-GARNIER.pdf
Though best remembered as a distinguished architect, Taylor
trained as a sculptor and practised the profession with considerable success
for nearly 30 years. He was born in Woodford, Essex in 1714, the son of Robert
Taylor I. After ‘some common schooling’ (Anecdotes 1937, 192) he was
apprenticed in 1732 to Sir Henry Cheere at a fee of £105. Taylor was still
working for his master in 1736-37, when payments were recorded to the younger
man in Cheere’s account at Hoare’s Bank. To gain ‘more pretension in his profession’
(Farington vol 16, 5744) Taylor travelled to Rome in the early 1740s ‘on a plan
of frugal study’ (Anecdotes 1937, 192), but felt compelled to return home when
he heard that his father had fallen ill. He was unable to get passports because
of the continental wars and so disguised himself as a friar and crossed hostile
territory in the company of a Franciscan monk. He apparently kept his
ecclesiastical apparel as a keepsake until his death.
Taylor’s father died in October 1742, leaving considerable
debts. Although Taylor later told a friend that he had only eighteen pence in
his pocket at the time, he was soon able to set up a thriving sculptural
practice, thanks to hard work and good connections. He received financial help
from the Godfreys of Woodford, a family of distinguished East India Company
merchants to whose memory he later erected a large marble column (34). In the
mid 1740s he took premises in Spring Gardens near the King’s Mews, to the east
of Cheere’s workshop. On 3 August 1744 he became free by patrimony of the
Masons’ Company.
In the same year, despite competition from the more
established sculptors, L F Roubiliac, Peter Scheemakers, Henry Cheere and
Michael Rysbrack, Taylor won the contract to carve the pediment group for the
Mansion House in the City of London (42). Vertue suggested that Taylor (who was
so unfamiliar to the writer that he mistakenly called him ‘Carter’) was chosen
because he was English, a ‘Cittizen & son of a Mason’ (Vertue III, 122).
Taylor executed a large allegorical relief extolling the benefits of trade in
London. In April 1746 the architect George Dance told the Mansion House
committee that the work was ‘very well done’ (CLRO Minutes, quoted in
Ward-Jackson 2003, 242). Interpretations of the iconography appeared in the
London Magazine and the Gentleman’s Magazine.
In 1747 Taylor was chosen, apparently without a competition,
to carve the monument in Westminster Abbey to Captain Cornewall, a victim of
the Battle of Toulon (22). This monument was the first in the Abbey to a war
hero financed with parliamentary funds and was intended to salvage some glory
from a battle which had resulted in two court-martials. The design, depicting
Fame and Britannia on either side of a palm tree above a rocky base, was felt
by a French critic, Grosley, to be closer in spirit to the magnificence of a
pompe célebre than a standing monument (Grosley 1772, vol 2, 67). When it was
unveiled in February 1755, The Gentleman’s Magazine, less-concerned with its
iconographical qualities than its political significance, called it an
‘illustrious instance of national gratitude as well as of good policy’ (GM, vol
25, 89).
Taylor’s other Abbey monument, to Joshua Guest (17) was
considered by Horace Walpole to be his finest memorial (Anecdotes 1937, 193)
and Vertue praised the work, adding that the ornaments and the multicoloured
marbles had brought Taylor some reputation. Vertue added that Taylor had
‘infinitely polishd his work beyond comparison this being another English
artist who made the tour of Italy’ (Vertue, III, 161). In his church monuments
Taylor developed an innovative and distinctive vocabulary of motifs: he presented
portrait busts en negligé (4, 6, 19), and made use of medallion portraits (29,
30), praying putti precariously placed on a pedestals (21, 25, 31) and one
almost grotesque weeping widow (15). The monuments often incorporated
polychrome marbles (17, 19) and were framed with floral rococo ornaments (11,
12, 16), oak sprigs (21), crossed palm branches (21, 27, 28, 30), and egg and
dart carving (20, 26). Taylor may well have repeated these designs. There are
several more unsigned works in the British Isles and the former colonies which
closely resemble these signed works or else Taylor’s surviving drawings. His
most ambitious design was for the monument to Henry, Earl of Shelburne at High
Wycombe, a multi-figured baroque fantasy which drew heavily on modern Roman
models. This was rejected in favour of a design by Peter Scheemakers but Taylor
was paid £20 for his trouble. In addition to the identified works he is
credited with the monument to Thomas and Robert Crosse, c1745, at Nettleswell,
Essex and to John, Lord Somers, †1716, at North Mymms, Herts (Baker 2000, 51-2,
57, 60, 172 n33, repr; Bilbey 2002, 157, repr).
The executed works rarely match the designs in quality and
Walpole hinted at one good reason: Taylor’s method ‘was to bost, as they call
it, to hew out his heads from the block; and except some few finishing touches,
to leave the rest to his workmen’ (Anecdotes 1937, 193). Bartholomew Cheney is
his only identified assistant: Smith remembered that Cheney was paid £4 15s a
week for carving the figures on the Cornewall monument (Smith 1828, vol 1,
151).
Taylor produced some remarkable ‘Chinese Chippendale’
designs for chimneypieces, a book of which survives at the Taylorian Institute,
Oxford. These reproduce in multiple form the floral motifs used on his
monuments. In 1750 he supplied a chimneypiece for the London house of Peter Du
Cane, a Director of the Bank of England and the East India Company (38) as part
of a larger project of building and renovation, and this is Taylor’s first
datable architectural work. Taylor still described himself as a ‘statuary’ in
1758 (Survey of London, vol 29, 141), and he continued to produce monuments
until the late 1760s, but his business moved steadily into the field of
architecture.
Working chiefly for a City clientele of bankers, East and
West Indian merchants, government financiers and lawyers, Taylor became one of
the two leading architects of his day. Thomas Hardwick wrote that before Robert
Adam entered the lists, Taylor and James Paine ‘nearly divided the profession
between them’ (Hardwick 1825, 13). Taylor’s architecture, like his sculptural
work, made use of recurring elements, such as astylar elevations, vermiculated
rustication, cantilevered staircases and rich rococo chimneypieces. His
particular strength lay in his designs for compact houses for rich city
dwellers and he is often credited with moving the Palladian style towards
neoclassicism. His only major public building was the Bank of England
(1765-87), now demolished. Walpole said Taylor was responsible for the statue
of Britannia, pouring coins from a cornucopia, which survives on the pediment
of one of the current buildings. This claim is brought into question by a press
report of 1733 which records that the commission was originally given to Sir
Henry Cheere.
By 1768 Taylor had amassed a fortune of £40,000 and his
professional income was £8,000 a year. This is a remarkable achievement,
bearing in mind that his first £15,000 was used to clear family debts. At the
time of his death he was said to be worth £180,000. Much of this wealth came
from his position as surveyor of several London estates, including the Duke of
Grafton’s. He was surveyor to the Bank of England, the Admiralty, the Foundling
Hospital, Greenwich Hospital and Lincoln's Inn. He also held a number of posts
in the Office of Works. In 1782 he was knighted, on the occasion of his
election as Sheriff of London.
Contemporary sources construct Taylor as a paragon of
stoical and devout professionalism. He ate little meat, abstained from alcohol,
devoted all his evenings to his wife and a handful of sensible friends, and
rarely slept beyond four in the morning. According to Farington he had three
rules for growing rich ‘viz; rising early, - keeping appointments, - and
regular accounts’ (Farington vol 3, 841). He was said to be attentive to his
pupils, and he trained many of the most successful architects of the next generation,
notably Samuel Pepys Cockerell and John Nash.
Taylor died on 27 September 1788 at the home in Spring
Gardens, London which he had built in 1759. He fell ill after attending the
funeral of his friend, the banker and one-time Lord Mayor, Sir Charles Asgill,
and died a few days later of a ‘violent mortification in the bowels’ (Anecdotes
1937, 197). After a grandiose funeral attended by over a hundred people, Taylor
was laid to rest in a vault near the north-east corner of St
Martin-in-the-Fields. The bulk of his fortune was left to the University of Oxford
to found an institution for the teaching of modern languages. His will was
challenged by Taylor’s son, Michel Angelo Taylor MP, but after his death in
1834 the Taylorian Institute was founded in accordance with Taylor’s wishes. It
houses Taylor’s library of architectural books and two volumes of his drawings.
Michel Angelo Taylor later commissioned Thomas Malton the Younger to draw and
engrave a set of 32 plates of his father’s architectural designs (1790-2, SJSM,
Ashmolean).
A cenotaph was erected in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey
asserting that Taylor’s ‘works entitle him to a distinguished rank in the first
Class of British architects.’ This verdict has been endorsed by later
architectural historians but much less attention has been given to his
achievement as a sculptor. Whinney dismissed Taylor’s oeuvre as ‘clumsy’ and
‘foolish,’ but her view fails to do justice to the Cornewall and Mansion House
commissions, nor does it take into account the innovative nature of Taylor’s
monumental designs. Baker has drawn attention to Taylor’s assimilation of
continental influences from the works of Gille-Marie Oppenard (1672-1742),
Juste Aurele Meissonnier (1695-1750) and Sebastien-Antoine Slodtz (1695-1754),
and has concluded that Taylor was one of the three major artists, who, with Sir
Henry Cheere and Roubiliac, evolved the rococo style in English sculpture (
Rococo 1984, 282-3) .
MGS
Literary References: Vertue, III, 122, 161; GM, vol 18, pt
2, 1788, 930-1, reproduced with other obituaries of Taylor in Anecdotes 1937,
191-198; Hardwick 1825, 13; Smith 1828, I, 151; Builder 1846, no194, 505;
Esdaile 1948 (1), 63-6; Survey of London, vol 29, 141; Gilson 1975; Farington,
passim; Summerson 1980, 2-5; Rococo 1984, 277-309; Binney 1984; Whinney 1988,
248-9; Colvin 1995, 962-7; Grove 30, 1996 385-7 (White); Coutu 1997, 79, 85;
Craske 2000 (2), 106; Ward-Jackson 2003, 239-41; ODNB (Baker)
Collections of Drawings: TI (Arch Tay 1), book of 54
designs, 52 of which are for monuments, pen, pencil, chalk, ink and wash,
Rococo 1984, 297-298, 308 (repr), Baker 2000, 65 (repr), Garstang 2003, 853
(repr), photos of about 50 of these drawings, Conway; TI (Arch Tay 2) 12,
highly finished designs for chimneypieces, pen, ink and wash, Binney 1984,
reprs 59-62, Esdaile 1948 (1), 66 (repr), C Lib (repr); TI (Arch Tay 3), a book
of ‘Problems in Geometry and Mensuration with Diagrams,’ red and black ink.
Portraits of the Sculptor: Anon (possibly William Miller),
half length portrait, RIBA, Binney 1984, repr 1; Anon, half length portrait, TI
(similar to that in RIBA)
He was the father of the sculptor-architect Sir Robert
Taylor (1714-1788) and a successful master mason and monumental sculptor in his
own right. The son of a yeoman from Campden, Taylor was apprenticed to the
mason Richard Garbut on 6 December 1705, and became free of the Masons’ Company
on 2 October 1712. He was master of the Company in 1733 and clearly took his
civic responsibilities seriously for he became a captain in the City’s trained
bands. In 1723 he subscribed to John Dart’s Westmonasterium as ‘Mr R. T.,
Mason, in Greyfriars’ and in 1726 enodorsed Dart’s History of the Cathedral
Church of Canterbury in like manner.
Taylor worked for several of the City Livery Companies. He
was paid £19 7s for unspecified masonry, commissioned by the Ironmongers’
Company in 1722, and his work for Masons’ Hall included a chimneypiece (15). He
received £69 from the Grocers’ Company for decorative carving undertaken in
1735-l736 (18) and Gunnis suggests that he acted as master-mason for the Barber
Surgeons when their theatre was rebuilt to designs by Lord Burlington. From
1725-39 he was mason for the Royal College of Physicians and he was also
responsible for a good deal of building work at St Bartholomew’s Hospital,
1728-40 (14, 16). In 1728 he rented two tenements in Duck Lane from the
governors of the latter Hospital. When the contract to build the London Mansion
House went to tender on 16 May 1738 Taylor, Christopher Horsnaile II and a
haberdasher, John Townsend, competed with a rival team of masons headed by
Thomas Dunn and John Devall. After much jockeying all five shared the contract,
providing obelisks, plinths and paving in addition to structural work.
Records of Taylor’s contribution to domestic buildings are
scant but the Hoare partnership ledgers record a chimneypiece supplied to
Stourhead in 1724 (13). In 1732 he received a further £150 for unidentified
work at Stourhead and in 1733 another £98. Gunnis thinks these payments were
probably for chimneypieces, but tentatively suggests that Taylor may have had
something to do with the building of Alfred’s Tower in the grounds, or with the
carving of King Alfred’s statue.
Taylor was responsible for a number of elaborate, if
repetitive, monuments in which he made use of a range of coloured marbles. The
Kidder (1) has a reclining female in a skimpy shift gesturing towards the plain
slab behind her, which is framed by a curtain, winged cherubs’ heads and
sunbeams within composite columns. The Askel (2) is a wall monument with
pilasters, flaming lamps, and cherubs at either side, one clasping a skull.
Gunnis considers the Deacon (7) his best work and Whinney notes that it is in the
manner of Francis Bird. It has a reclining effigy in contemporary dress, with a
baroque flourish to the draperies covering the lower body. Deacon again
gestures at the inscription slab behind him and he clasps a skull in the other
hand. The Corinthian frame is decorated with heads of putti backed by clouds,
and sunbeams slant through. The Raymond (4) is an architectural wall-tablet
with an armorial shield and winged cherub-heads on the apron, and the Napier
(9) uses a similar vocabulary of ornaments, but includes two stocky females on
either side of the architectural frame. The Chester (12) is a little different,
for it has a relief panel of Chester’s widow and children above the inscription
tablet. The classical pilasters are flanked by seated cherubs and two boys sit
at the bottom of the slab on the gadrooned base. All the figures gesticulate
dramatically.
The names of several apprentices are listed in the archives
of the Masons’ Company. John Percy joined him in 1715, Francis Cunningham in
1722 and John Mallcott in 1730. Charles, ‘son of Robert Taylor of Christchurch,
London, Mason’ was apprenticed on 23 June 1737 to Thomas Fletcher of Chipping
Campden.
The obituary, written by Horace Walpole in the Gentleman’s Magazine of the son, Sir Robert Taylor, notes
‘His father was the great stone-mason of his time; like Devall in the present day he got a vast deal of money; but again, unlike him altogether, he could not keep what he got. When life was less gaudy than it is now, and when the elegant indulgences of it were rare, old Taylor the mason enjoyed them all. He revelled at a villa in Essex; and as a villa is imperfect without a coach, he thought it necessary to have that too. To drive on thus, at a good rate, is generally thought pretty pleasant by most men; but it is not apt to be pleasant to their heirs.
It was so here.
For excepting some common schooling; a fee, when he went pupil to Sir Henry
Cheere, and just enough money to travel on a plan of frugal study to Rome,
Robert Taylor got nothing from his father.’ (Anecdotes 1937, 192). (Add inf,
AL/RG)
IR/MGS
Literary References: Webb (3), 1957, 116; Gunnis 1968, 381;
Whinney 1988, 248-9; Jeffery 1993, 49-50, 67-8, 297, 300; Colvin 1995, 962;
Webb 1999, 9, 19, 21, 25, 32
Archival References: Ironmongers, WA, vol 10, fol 19;
Masons’ Co, Freemen, fol 68; Masons’ Co, Court Book, 1705; Court Book, 1722-51
(29 Oct 1742); Apprenticeship Lists, 1737; Charles Taylor, Hoare partnership
ledger, 1725-34, 1725-34, fol 272, 22 Dec 1732 (£150); fol 282, 4 July 1733,
Joseph Cox’s bill to Robert Taylor (£98)
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