First draft.
Thomas King (1741 - 1804).
The following paragraphs adapted from -
https://www.bathabbeymemorials.org.uk/sculptor/t-king
Thomas King (1741-1804), was the founder of one of the most prolific west country firms of monumental masons, he was the son of Henry King, a clockmaker of St Dunstan-in-the-West in the City of London.
Thomas was apprenticed on 26 March 1752 to Charles Saunders, a London mason, but settled in Bath soon after completing his apprenticeship which would have been for seven years.
I can find no record of a Charles Saunders - but William Saunders fl.1743 - 54 was a London mason who worked on the reconstruction of Leicester House (Biog Dictionary British Sculptors pub Yale 2009) with an address in Windmill Street.
He married Elizabeth, the daughter of Thomas Paty of Bristol on 6 May 1779 at St Augustine the Less, Bristol.
The Paty family were architects and masons, responsible for Royal Fort, The Bristol Exchange, Bristol Bridge and many monuments. The Paty family was a prominent multi-generational dynasty of masons, surveyors, and architects based in 18th-century Bristol, originating from Somerset stonemasons and carvers who established workshops in Bristol at the Horsefair and Limekiln Lane.
For an introduction to the Paty family and to be treated with caution (generated by AI) see - https://grokipedia.com/page/william_paty#biography
King maintained cordial relations with the Paty family and was left £250 in his father-in-law’s will. When his brother-in-law, William Paty, died, clients were instructed to forward outstanding debts to King. see - (Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 4 April 1801).
King
had three children, Thomas and Charles, who came into the business, and Mary,
who did not marry during his lifetime.
The firm produced a large number of small, wall monuments, often incorporating coloured marbles in an elegant oval, rectangular or inverted shield frame. Most were sold to clients from stock.
Thomas used the customary
range of neoclassical motifs: urns, sarcophagi, willow trees, mourning women,
crumpled scrolls held by cherubs and broken columns.
Thomas Gainsborough’s account at Hoare’s Bank records a
payment of 18 guineas made to Thomas King in May 1771, perhaps for a picture frame (Gunnis).
King also worked on bespoke commissions, such as the memorial to James Quin with a portrait medallion of the actor.
His memorial to Robert Walsh in Bath Abbey has a relief of a broken Ionic column clad with yew on an oval ground of streaked grey marble. It has been suggested that this was the first time the broken column, a traditional symbol of Fortitude, was employed alone on a monument.
Richard Warner, in his History of Bath, 1801, considered the monument the ‘most remarkable for happiness of design in the whole Abbey’.
His memorials for Venanzio Rauzzini and Sir Nigel Gresley are
framed with deep swathes of fabric brought together with three knots.
King died a prosperous man and left his widow a number of properties in Bath, including offices, a garden and a yard ‘now in my own occupation’ at Beaufort Place, Walcot. His three children received generous bequests.
He is buried at Woolley, where a modest tablet, for which he earmarked 20 guineas in his will, bears the epitaph:
‘Many Years an eminent
statuary in the parish of Walcot, who after sustaining a long and painful
illness with exemplary fortitude and resignation, calmly departed this life
December the 5th, 1804, in his 63rd. year.
The will of ‘Thomas King, Gentleman of Walcot, Somerset’, PROB
11/1427, proved July 1805.
......................
The Monument to James Quin.
1766.
Bath Abbey.
..........................
Monument to James and Anne Sutton.
After 1788.
Devizes.
......................
There is an indenture of 20 September 1791, when Thomas King, the statuary of Walcot, with Mr.Charles Harford, gent., as his trustee, conveyed to John Greenway in trust for Francis Greenway, mason, of Walcot (not the transported Australian architect), who would have been only thirteen at the time], ‘part of a pasture of 2a 22p called Upper Tyning [Walcot], being all those plots on the west side of an intended building called Mount Pleasant and all those two messuages thereon erecting at the cost of Francis Greenway.
