English Church Architecture - Gloucestershire.
SHERBORNE, St. Mary Magdalene (SP 169 148) (October 2010) (Bedrock: Middle Jurassic, Upper Inferior Oolite Group)
None of this is
of much consequence but the church deserves its visitors due to its
exceptional collection of monuments. Inevitably, these all
commemorate members of the Dutton family, owners of Sherborne House from the
sixteenth century till World War II, but that they were a family of real
substance is evident from the artists they commissioned, amongst whom were
some of the best of their generation. Monumental statuary did not come cheap
in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even for the well-to-do,
and Matthew Craske, in his excellent book
The Silent Rhetoric of the Body(Yale University Press, 2007) gives the comparison that
"whilst
[in the first half of the eighteenth century] a butler could be engaged at six guineas
The most striking is surely the monument by Westmacott on the N. wall of the sanctuary (illustrated at the top of the page, on the left). Commemorating James Dutton (d. 1776) and his second wife, Jane, it stands "nearly eighteenth feet high and has a life-size figure of an angel with outspread wings who tramples underfoot a prostrate figure of Death, represented by a realistic and macabre skeleton" (Dictionary of British Sculpture: 1660-1851 by Rupert Gunnis, The Abbey Library, 1951). It provides above all, however, an opportunity for Westmacott to celebrate the female form and his skill in handling draperies.
Facing Westmacott's monument from the sanctuary
S. wall, is Rysbrack's monument to John Dutton (d. 1743)
(shown above right),
featuring the deceased in Roman attire, leaning nonchalantly against an urn.
The design has a classical simplicity,
largely free of extraneous clutter, and one might imagine there is little to
say about it. That would be a mistake,
however,
as Matthew Craske makes clear (ibid), for in the first
Finally, John Bacon the Younger's monument on the wall to the southeast, where the chancel narrows into the sanctuary, also deserves close consideration. (See the photograph, left.) This commemorates Frances Princess Bariatinsky, née Dutton, who died in childbirth in 1807, aged 29, and features the mother and child below, looking up at an allegorical female figure, while, higher up, they ascend to heaven on a cloud. Monuments such as this, overtly depicting death in childbirth, were almost in vogue around the turn of the nineteenth century, whereas for much of the eighteenth, the subject would have seemed indelicate. Bacon is seen at his best in this work: the child appears a thing of real flesh and blood and there is evident emotion in the pose and face of the mother even though the allegorical female (Pevsner said she represents Faith) seems rather less concerned.
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