Part 4. Samson slaying the Philistine.
AKA Hercules and Cacus.
Colossal Lead Group.
c. Early 1730's
Andreas Carpentiere aka Andrew Carpenter (c. 1677 - 1737).
Formerly at Stowe, Buckinghamshire now at Trent Park.
The Lead group
by Andrew Carpenter, along with an Hercules and Anteus were introduced to the garden at Stowe in the 1730's, they had formerly stood on the sloping lawn in front of the
Temple of Venus, as suggested in Samuel Boyse’s poem The Triumphs of Nature
(1742).
In 1765 he groups were moved to the Grecian Valley at Stowe perhaps by Capability Brown..
Recently replaced by replicas.
The original now at Trent Park. Enfield.
Taken to Trent Park along with Hercules and Anteus in the 1923 at the final dispersal of objects from Stowe and re-erected by Sir Philip Sasoon.
The Group of Samson slaying the Philistine/ Cain and Abel was restored and returned to Trent Park in 2012 along with the lead also by Carpentiere of Hercules wrestling Anteus.
1) The significance of this lead group by Andrew Carpenter,
which formerly stood on the sloping lawn in front of the Temple of Venus, was
suggested in Samuel Boyse’s poem The Triumphs of Nature (1742):
"Thy temple, beauteous Venus, we survey’d; Before, fit
emblem of the lover’s view, Stand the first foes which nature ever knew; Fit
emblem, goddess, of thy cruel pow’r, Which oft has bath’d the warring world in
gore; Has smil’d to set the dearest friends at strife, And make the brother
snatch the brother’s life: Yet mild at first, thy savage yoke appears, And like
this scene a beauteous prospect wears; For scenes like this, thy fatal flame
inspire, Unnerve the soul – and kindle soft desire!
It was moved to the far end of the Grecian Valley in August
1765 perhaps under the instructions of Capability Brown..
(1) Whately’s French translator, M. Latapie, recorded the
presence of ‘several statuary groups in whitened lead ... the best of which are
Hercules and Anteus [and] Cain & Abel, both pieces full of vigour.’
These
colossal lead groups were supplied by Andrew Carpenter in the 1730s. The
Hercules and Antaeus is first recorded in another part of the garden in 1735;
in 1756 Earl Temple decided to remove the Grenville Column to its present
position close to the Temple of Ancient Virtue, and the Hercules and Antaeus
took its place to the north-west of the Grecian Temple.
The Cain and Abel (see
p. 18) was part of the original iconographical scheme of the Temple of Venus
and was moved to the far end of the Grecian Valley in 1765.
These two groups,
and a Hercules and the Boar, which also stood at the north-eastern end, all
celebrate the triumph of physical strength, which would have supported the
imperial programme of the valley when fully established in the 1760s.
They were
carefully positioned in the way that painters such as Claude used figures to
frame a landscape and enhance the effects of perspective.
Latapie’s description
provides useful evidence that such lead statues were frequently painted to
resemble stone.
......................................
Carpentiere
Biographical Notes.
from https://gunnis.henry-moore.org/henrymoore/sculptor/browserecord.php?-action=browse&-recid=461&from_list=true&x=7
Carpenter,
‘a Man in his time esteemd for his Skill’ (Vertue III, 83) was responsible for
a number of major statues and monuments in marble and was the most successful
designer and modeller of lead garden figures in the generation between John
Nost I and John Cheere.
His
background is obscure, though the diarist, George Vertue, who knew him well,
noted that ‘Charpentiere’ had been born between 1675 and 1677. He may have been
a native of the French-speaking Netherlands.
Carpenter told Vertue that he had
been instructed in ‘the rudiments of drawing’ by the French academician, Peter
Eude, who later settled in Scotland (Vertue IV, 35).
No details are known of
his early training, but he was John Nost I’s principal assistant, engaged in
modelling and carving over several years for Nost before he set up
independently (Vertue III, 83).
Carpenter’s name first appears in the
rate-books in 1703, when he acquired premises in Portugal Row, (now part of Piccadilly) close to the van Nost workshop. His neighbours were predominantly French and included the
sculptor Nadauld, the decorative painter Louis Laguerre and, from 1707 to 1714,
the ironsmith Jean Tijou.
J T Smith (in Nollekens and his Times pub 1828) recorded that the workshop stood on the
site in Piccadilly later occupied by Egremont House.
Carpenter’s
first major commission and one of his finest works was the statue of Queen Anne
for the Moot Hall in Leeds, commissioned by Alderman William Milner and erected
in 1713 (8). The Leeds antiquary, Ralph Thoresby, paid numerous visits to the
sculptor’s London workshop to check the work’s progress and persuaded Carpenter
to make a drawing of the statue to be engraved for Thoresby’s Ducatus
Leodiensis (1715). In tones that suggest intense civic pride, Thoresby
described the erection of this ‘most noble magnificent statue of her Majesty
... to the full proportion; in the best white marble.’ The statue, in a niche
on the principal front of the hall above the town’s coat of arms, ‘was viewed
by many of the nobility and gentry who generally esteemed it the best that was
ever made, not excepting the most celebrated one [by Francis Bird] in St Paul’s
Church-yard’ (Ducatus Leodiensis, 250). The directors of the building scheme at
St Paul’s Cathedral were sufficiently impressed with Carpenter’s work to approach
him as well as Bird in 1716 when they contemplated commissioning statues for
the west end of the cathedral, but they gave the contract to Bird.
On one visit
to the workshop in May 1714 Thoresby recorded that as well as works in marble
he also saw ‘curious workmanship’ by Carpenter in lead (Diary 2, 209) and
leadwork appears to have been Carpenter’s mainstay. In 1716 he supplied garden
sculpture to the 1st Earl of Bristol (9) and in 1722, an ‘abundance of works’
to the Duke of Chandos for Canons (10). Drawing on Nost’s work, as well as
classical and renaissance prototypes and his own innovations, Carpenter built
up a substantial repertoire of lead figures.
His price list submitted to Lord
Carlisle at Castle Howard who made purchases in 1723 gives some indication of
the range as well as the dimensions and prices of his garden ornaments:
Height in Feet / Pounds
Cain and
Abel l6 20
Do 6 20
Hercules
& Wild Boar 6 20
Dianna &
Stagg 6 20
Narcifsus 7
1/2 27
Venus de
medici 6 15
Antonius 6
18
Saturnus 6
1/2 20
Triton 6 20
Bacchus
sitting 6 18
Faunus 6 20
Meleager 6
20
Adonis 6 18
Apollo 6 18
Flora 6 16
A Gladiator
6 12
Duke of
Marlborough 6 28
Roman
Wrestlers 20
Narcissus 5
1/2 20 ?
Neptune 5
1/2 9
Mercury 5
1/2 10
Antinous 5 8
Venus 5 10
Do 5 7
a Bagpiper 5
10
An Indian 5
8
Apollo 5 9
Flora 5 9
Mercury 5 9
Cleopatra 5
7
Daphne 5 8
A french
paisant & paisanne [two figures] 4 10
Jupiter 4
1/2 6
Apollo 4 5
Winter &
Autumn [2 :fig] 4 1/2 8:08:0
4 Signs of
ye Zodiac 4 16
A faunus
& Nimph [two figures] 4 8:08:0
Mercury
& fame [two figures] 3 6:06:0
Apollo 3 1/2
3:10:0
Love &
disdain [two figures] 3 1/2 8
A large vase
6 20
3 do 5 24
1 do 4 6
Boys and
Girls 18:18:0
4 Large
Bustos 16
a pr of vase
7
6 vases 22
12 flower
potts large & small 24
The list was
not comprehensive, for it did not include Carlisle’s chosen figures (12). The
sculptor was also prepared to provide bespoke items: : William Aikman visited
Carpenter and several other Hyde Park Corner figure makers in November 1725 on
behalf of Sir John Clerk of Mavisbank and reported that although he was not
impressed by the goods in stock it was possible to ‘get something done
a-purpose after a good design’ (Fleming 1962 (1), 38). Packing and freight for
leads required as much care as for marbles: Carlisle paid £84 for his statues,
packing cases cost £9 7s 9d, and it took a workman nine and a half days,
twenty-one pounds of ‘spike’ and a thousand ‘double-tenns’ nails to prepare the
works for the journey to Yorkshire.
Carpenter
clearly prospered in his middle years, for in 1718 he took a second site in
Portugal Row, described in the rate-books as ‘workhouse and land.’ He also
invested in property at Edgware, building ‘some houses and an Inn’ on the
outskirts of the Canons estate.
Vertue relates that the sculptor advertised his
presence in the area with one of his own works ‘and in the middle of the road
way put up a statue for a sign’ (Vertue III, 83). Chandos was incensed at this
vulgarity, but the sculptor refused to remove the figure.
There were
other influential patrons. In 1719 he provided garden ornaments under the
direction of the architect, James Gibbs, for Wimpole Hall (23) and in 1722 he
transported marble figures from Chatsworth to Chiswick and bronzed busts for
Lord Burlington (25). Gibbs and Carpenter collaborated again on allegorical
figures at Ditchley Park in 1722 (11), and on the monument to Montague Garrard
Drake, 1725 (2), which cost £180. Carpenter’s monument to the ‘restless
malcontent’ Henry Booth, 1st Earl of Warrington (6), erected by his son,
George, in 1734, was inspired by Gibbs’s dramatic design for the monument to
Katharine Bovey, 1727-8, in Westminster Abbey, illustrated in A Book of
Architecture,1728. The focal point of the Bovey monument is a pair of allegorical
Virtues representing Learning and Truth, who point towards Mrs Bovey’s
portrait, to emphasize her particular qualities. The same attendant figures
appear again on the Warrington monument, but as fashionable trappings to an
epitaph extolling Warrington’s revolutionary principles and exonerating him
from allegations of corruption.
Carpenter’s
monuments make use of ornaments familiar from John Nost I’s work, including
scrolls, flaming urns, cartouches and putti. He appears to have kept his prices
competitive, charging only £389 for the Warrington, a monument comparable in
its materials and carving to Nost’s memorial to Viscount Irwin, 1697, at
Whitkirk, which cost £600.
Carpenter’s work did not suffer as a result of his
careful budgeting: the reclining figure of Sir John Thornycroft, bewigged, in
his nightgown and in mid-speech, is intricately carved, particularly the
gesturing fingers and fleshy undersides of the feet (3).
In his later
years Carpenter had business anxieties. He was increasingly obliged to give
‘time & study to Cast Leaden figures’ and complained that prices paid for
work at this less prestigious end of the market were diminishing and that ‘he
had much ado to hold up his head at last’ (Vertue III, 83).
In January 1736 he
announced in the Daily Journal that he intended to ‘leave off entirely the
casting of lead figures’ and intended to sell ‘his entire stock of Statues of
Figures in Hard Lead, Vases, Pots and Pedestals’. Perhaps encouraged by two
recently completed commissions in Cheshire (6, 7), he advertised an intention
to ‘apply himself solely to his other business, viz the Statuary and Carving
Part in Marble and Stone’ (ibid).
The
advertisement had little effect. Carpenter is not known to have won any further
major commissions and ‘age and cares brought him to his end’ in July 1737, aged
a little over 60. He was buried in his parish church, St George, Hanover Square
(Vertue III, 83).
In his will the sculptor left all his ‘cottages, houses,
lands, tenements and estate’ in Edgware to his wife Ann, together with his
chattels and shop contents. His son, John Carpenter, who ‘had been an Idle
fellow many years’ (Vertue III, 83) received the proverbial shilling. Ann
Carpenter continued to pay rates on the Hyde Park property and in May 1744, a
sale was held there of her late husband’s ‘Metal Statues or Figures in Hard
Lead ... together with his Moulds, Models and casts in Plaister’ (Daily
Advertiser).
There is no
known portrait of the sculptor, ‘a gross heavy man allwayes’ (Vertue III, 83).
He was of particular value to Vertue while gathering information for his
intended history of British painting and sculpture, since Carpenter provided
accounts of several artists including Arnold Quellin, the elder Nost, John Nost
II and Louis Laguerre.
Carpenter’s
monuments have been described by Margaret Whinney as transitional works,
hovering stylistically between the ornamental baroque of Nost and the new
Gibbsian designs, which drew on developments in Continental sculpture.
His lead
garden figures, particularly the ambitious groups supplied for Powis Castle
(19,20), are masterpieces of the genre.
MGS
Literary
References: Vertue III, 83, IV, 35; Daily Journal, 26 Jan 1736 (Burney 319B);
Daily Ad, 4 May 1744 (Burney 381B); Thoresby Diary (1830), vol 2, 98, 190, 209,
215, 221-2; Smith 1846, 15-16; DNB; Bolton 1939, 128, 132; Friedman 1973 (1);
Friedman 1984 (1), passim; Fleming 1962 (1), 38-9; O’Connell 1987, 804-5;
Whinney 1988, 244-251; Davis 1991 (1), passim
Archival
References: WCA, Poor Rates, St Martin-in-the-Fields, 1703, (F1262) , 1718
(F447); St George, Hanover Square 1727, (C97), 1737, (C127);
Carpenter-Carlisle, list
Will: PROB
11/684 sig155
Auction
Catalogues: Carpenter 1736; Carpenter 1744.
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