1. 70 | Sculpture Journal 17.1 [2008]
Public sculpture’s origins: an
Elizabethan defence
David Hulks
The Public Monuments and Sculpture
Association (PMSA) has recently put an
interestingly historical note of clarification
onto its website that may merit the atten-
tion of other sculpture historians. The note
is made under the heading ‘Public
Sculpture: What Counts’ and is addressed
to researchers working for the PMSA on its
National Recording Project and the Public
Sculpture of Britain series, published by
Liverpool University Press for the PMSA.
They need to know what they should and
should not be including in databases they
are compiling. What ‘counts’ as public
sculpture, according to the statement, is
work dating ‘roughly from the Stuart peri-
od’. This is when sculpture of the sort the
PMSA is interested in ‘start to appear in the
street and in the landscape’.1
The certainty
of this statement, however, is somewhat
undermined by the further remark that
‘there are and will always be anomalies’;
the word ‘roughly’ is also telling of some
sort of hesitancy. Nevertheless, what is
being put forward here, albeit with qualifi-
cations, is a fairly clear suggestion that the
point of origin for the emergence of public
sculpture in Britain is somewhere in the
seventeenth century, coinciding perhaps
with the social landscape that the diarist
Samuel Pepys observed and recorded. The
implication furthermore is that in
Elizabethan Britain there was no public
sculpture – or at least it is nonsensical to
think of it in these terms. The aim of this
article is to challenge this point of view and
to explore other possibilities.
To understand why Tudor contribu-
tions to sculptural expression might be
routinely discounted, or at least underesti-
mated, it is helpful perhaps to return to
what might still be regarded as the classic
text, Margaret Whinney’s Sculpture in
Britain 1530–1830, first published in 1963
and revised by John Physick in 1988.
Whinney’s start date of 1530 pushed back
Rupert Gunnis’s date of 1660 for his
Dictionary of British Sculptors.2
Whinney,
however, considered these early years of
only occasionally enlightened sculptural
practice hardly significant by comparison
to her main point of reference, the Italian
Renaissance. For Whinney, a true Vasarian,
the Renaissance in Italy is the main event,
so that her chief concern in Part One of her
book, devoted to the latter two-thirds of the
sixteenth century, is to demonstrate the
waves of impact from that event.
Consequently, in her first three chapters
she is mainly involved in demonstrating
the relative poverty of British sculpture
before the ‘lessons of the Renaissance’ were
widely acquired. Hence her strikingly
downbeat sentence to open Chapter 1,
which suggests that ‘The history of English
sculpture is a sorry tale’.3
In Chapter 2 she
records some reason for hope, if not cele-
bration, but what consolation there is con-
cerns only a limited period of Italian and
French influence which never really takes
off, so that on the whole sculpture in this
period is in her view essentially ‘isolated
and dreary’.4
The catalyst for change, in Whinney’s
view, was Inigo Jones, whose contribution
to architectural and sculptural history rep-
resents, according to Whinney, nothing less
than a ‘transformation, perhaps the most
striking in its whole history’.5
This was the
product of what she assumes must have
been ‘genius’; yet it was in her view largely
an impact confined to architectural prac-
tice. In sculpture, she says, there was no
parallel ‘brilliance’, so that it was not really
until the 1660s, in other words after the
Restoration, that ‘sculpture proper’ really
began. Up to that point ‘the influence of
the Low Countries’ remained dominant,
and because of this, while ‘slight traces of
Italian influence (but of the High
Renaissance, rather than the rising
Baroque) can occasionally be seen’ – and
the Antique collections of Charles I and
the 2nd Earl of Arundel,6
are ‘not without
their effect’ – nevertheless Whinney finds
little that she can say is particularly signifi-
cant. With the outbreak of Civil War in
1642, there are ‘no marked developments’
whatsoever, and this lamentable situation
does not ease up until the Stuart monarchy
is restored to power in 1660, enabling
finally the sculptural genius of John
Bushnell to emerge. Bushnell, according to
Whinney, was the first sculptor to have
‘something new to say’, serving therefore
as the most plausible point of origin for the
‘English Renaissance’. In other words, it
seems Whinney fully accepted the initial
Pointings

2. suggestion made by Gunnis of a 1660 start
date, although that date had been arrived
at purely to make the earlier Dictionary
project manageable.7
The basis for seeing the history of
British sculpture in this way is the assump-
tion that a belated ‘Renaissance’ took place
in England as a kind of aftershock to the
primary event in Italy. Whinney and others
of her generation thought they could per-
ceive a marked shift from a primitive, utili-
tarian sculptural practice that could largely
be discounted, into a new era where a
much more enlightened and artistically
liberated climate could emerge, so produc-
ing a genuine sculptural flowering. This
impression of great and sudden change,
and the assumption therefore that it repre-
sents a point of origin, is, however, fairly
transparently the product of a blinkered
Italocentrism that in recent years has been
thrown into question. The tradition of
regarding Italy as the single point of origin
for what was in fact a much wider
European development we now know to be
a Western cultural construction rather than
an objective fact. A new generation of art
historians has emerged who either ques-
tion the very notion of ‘Renaissance’ or
who see it in wider European, if not global
terms. They stress the collaborative nature
of sculptural projects, are far more scepti-
cal about the importance of virtuosity,
and tend to be sceptical about the real
influence of Italianism.8
All of this is crucial when it comes to
deciding upon dating. The scholarly focus
on Italian styles has created the impression
that sculpture explodes onto the public
stage in England only after the passing of
events associated with the Civil War and
the Restoration. There may, however, have
been an earlier and equally valid public art
initiated by Henry VIII and developed by
the Elizabethans in a post-Reformation,
English Protestant environment. The evi-
dence for this earlier sculptural activity
may be more difficult to come by since so
much has been destroyed, but this does not
mean it does not amount to an equally
plausible point of origin.
Another ‘what counts’ criterion for
inclusion in the PMSA’s public sculpture
category is visibility: whether or not the
work ‘can be [or could have been] seen
from the public highway’, in which case it
may well have been made for private enjoy-
ment but should also be counted as some-
thing public. Pepys would certainly have
understood this visibility principle, fond as
he was of peering through gates at private
palaces otherwise hidden behind high sur-
rounding walls: ‘We went through
Nonsuche Parke to the house, and there
viewed as much as we could of the outside,
and looked through the great gates, and
found a noble court’.9
The example given
by the PMSA in today’s visual environment
is Adrian Jones’s equestrian statue at
Sandringham, Norfolk: a ‘rendering of
Edward VII’s favourite race horse
Persimmon’. Although the statue is behind
a wall on the Queen’s estate and very much
associated with the Royal Family’s private
racing interests, Persimmon is also ‘clearly
visible’, because of its size, and because it is
raised on a pedestal and therefore ‘in the
public eye’.10
The implication seems to be
that, although there were undoubtedly
many examples of outdoor sculptural
works in Tudor, not just Stuart, England,
nevertheless these earlier works were
enjoyed only by an aristocratic elite and
were not seen, or even known about, by the
general public. The origins of public sculp-
ture are, to this way of thinking, only estab-
lished at the point when sculptural works
are not just extant in England but more
importantly ‘start to appear in the street
and in the landscape’. Pepys was one of the
first to observe the leakage as it were from
the private sphere to the public domain as
sculpture suddenly became observable.
There is, however, evidence of an earli-
er visibility. We might for example refer to
the diary of Baron Waldstein (1581–1623),11
a
Moravian nobleman who perhaps is not a
very plausible ‘member of the public’, but
who can be consulted as a way of gauging
what might have been visible to ordinary
Elizabethans. From Waldstein’s diary we
have an account of various sculptural
works located in palaces in the south-east
of England. The problem, however, is in
establishing whether or not he had privi-
leged access to works that were invisible
to the general public, or whether this was
the equivalent of today’s public access to
stately homes, so that many of the things
that Waldstein saw might be described as
rather like Persimmon – privately owned
outdoor objects that nevertheless were
widely known about because they could be
seen from the street.
71 | Sculpture Journal 17.1 [2008]

3. Martin Andrew’s reconstruction of one
of the Tudor palaces that Waldstein visited,
Theobalds Palace in Hertfordshire, includes
evidence that at least one of the sculptural
works that the Baron noted was indeed,
potentially at least, noticeable to ordinary
passers-by. This was a fountain incorporat-
ing figures of Cupid and Venus, located
within an inner courtyard of the palace.
It was nevertheless recorded in a
Parliamentary Survey of 1650 as being
‘clearly visible’ from the highway, even if
this was only ‘when the gates are open’.12
Examples such as this show that, although
the idea of public surveys only emerged
later under Cromwell’s regime, it was
nevertheless perfectly possible for ordi-
nary people in Elizabethan England to
observe in their surroundings glimpses of
statues, fountains and other sculptural fea-
tures. We might add that they also had
their own sculptural objects, shown and
used, for example, in seasonal festivities,
as another visitor, Paul Hentzner
(1558–1623), was able to observe.13
As we have seen and will further
explore here, Henry VIII’s interest in the
arts, and specifically his investment in
works of outdoor sculptural decoration,
were very well known to Whinney and her
contemporaries but dramatically under-
valued by them in terms of sculptural sig-
nificance. According to the Italocentric
perspective, England largely missed out on
the cultural shift signified by the word
‘Renaissance’ and consequently remained
until the 1660s stubbornly ‘Gothic’ – a cul-
tural backwater refusing to move with the
times, wedded to the new Protestantism
and turning its back on Italian excellence.
This, however, is not a perspective that
would have been understood by the wave
of Protestant noblemen who visited
England in substantial numbers in the
1590s and the early part of the seventeenth
century. These foreign visitors on the con-
trary seem to have been universally
impressed by the visual and material cul-
ture they found here, including, as we shall
see below, many a sculptural curiosity and
feature. A lack of Italianate design was not
an issue, indeed only to be expected, and
gave visitors to England no sense of empti-
ness or any idea that the English were not
at the leading edge of artistic expression.
Even at Nonsuch, famous for its un-
usual awareness of Italian art,14
there is
little evidence in fact that the Italian
Renaissance had any great influence. While
several writers, Whinney included, have
speculated that such figures as Antonio
Fantuzzi or Nicholas Bellin of Modena
may have been employed on the Nonsuch
project, the foremost authority on
Nonsuch, Martin Biddle – who excavated
the site in 1959 and has been working on
it ever since – concluded in 1984 that in
his view the programme for its famous
stuccoes is ‘most unlikely to have been
devised by Nicolas Bellin’.15
Biddle’s view,
carefully argued in his important ‘Stuccoes
of Nonsuch’ paper, is that the king himself
devised the scheme, implying a quintes-
sentially English conceptual origin.
According to Biddle, even if Nicholas Bellin
had been the advisor and perhaps even the
artist who drew up the cartoons, he was
nevertheless merely by doing this ‘keeping
in touch with Fontainebleau’ – in other
words, keeping up with the French.16
However, despite Biddle’s insistence
that Nonsuch was decidedly English in
both concept and design, ‘a vaunting of the
Tudors, and a talisman for the dynasty’, the
text of Whinney’s Sculpture in Britain was
not corrected for the 1988 revised edition.
The suggestion was retained that the work
at Nonsuch was mainly to be credited to
Nicholas Bellin, who not only had designed
the stuccoes but had also ‘in all probability’
made them. Furthermore, ‘Henry VIII’s
sudden attempt in the late 1530s to rival
Francis I’, as Whinney puts it, ‘brought no
parallel benefit to England’; it was work
that, she says, while ‘fabulous’ nevertheless
had ‘astonishingly little direct influence’.17
All of this is speculative rather than drawn
from clear evidence, but rather than cor-
recting these misconceptions, footnotes to
the revised text further diminish
Nonsuch’s importance, underlining
Whinney’s original stress on foreign influ-
ence.18
These notes do not appear to refer to
Biddle’s ‘Stuccoes of Nonsuch’, remarking
only that during extensive excavation work
‘no important sculpture was found’, and
only ‘some small fragments of decoration
have been recovered’.19
Biddle, however, had carefully recon-
structed these fragments and published a
very fine illustrated account long before
the revised version of Whinney came out.
His findings had shown that far from ‘no
important sculpture’ being found at
72 | Sculpture Journal 17.1 [2008]Pointings

4. Nonsuch, on the contrary many fascinating
pieces had been recovered and extensive
research had been done showing clearly
the impact that Nonsuch must have had far
and wide. John Summerson, who chaired
the committee overseeing the Nonsuch
excavation, in his companion volume
Architecture in Britain 1530–1830, not only
confirms the importance of French influ-
ence but also introduces the idea of a
‘School of Nonsuch’ – a term fully justifi-
able, he argues, since Nonsuch must have
been ‘as influential in its sphere [i.e. in
England] as was Rosso’s and Primaticcio’s
School of Fontainebleau’ in France.20
It might be objected, however, that
while the Englishness of Nonsuch and its
widely appreciated reputation are undeni-
ably important, they do not quite add up to
the palace representing a plausible point of
origin for the idea of public sculpture that
we have today. For sculpture to be ‘public’ it
has to be seen and enjoyed by the public;
and the high walls of Nonsuch Palace,
while perhaps not sufficiently high to pre-
vent public curiosity, nevertheless suggest
an experience very much restricted to a
privileged and isolated elite.
This situation, however, was to change
dramatically in the early 1590s, when the
ownership of the palace reverted to the
Crown so that the former owner could
settle his debts. At the point when owner-
ship shifts from the private interests of
Lord Lumley, son-in-law to Philip, 1st Earl
of Arundel, to the much more political
duties of the head of state, Queen Elizabeth
I, Nonsuch very noticeably changes from
being a private residence to the equivalent
of what today would be called a ‘visitor
attraction’ or ‘venue’ for ‘functions’. Not
only does it become under Elizabeth’s
reacquisition a place where international
political conferences are common and
diplomatic intrigue rife; additionally its
gates are opened, on request rather than
by invitation, to a new influx of foreign
visitors motivated by simple cultural
curiosity – an early modern form of
tourism.21
Today’s equivalent would indeed be
Sandringham, which is also notionally a
private residence, a place of quiet retreat
for the Sovereign and members of her
immediate family. But Sandringham is
also – and arguably mainly – a place of pub-
lic interest and pilgrimage, not essentially
different to the properties owned and man-
aged by the National Trust. Sandringham’s
parks and gardens in the twenty-first
century include not only the private acqui-
sitions of the Royal Family, including a
garden statue of Father Time alongside a
gilded bronze Buddha figure; they also
feature a series of wood-carvings of
mainly mythical figures, depicting classical
allegories such as The Fall of Icarus and
the local legend of St Felix.22
The royal
gardens that Protestant noblemen and
their entourages began visiting from
1592 onwards were not so different.
Furthermore, the diaries they kept of their
visits are arguably the equivalent of the
records posted on internet sites such as
‘YouTube’ and ‘Flickr’ by travellers today.
Biddle’s more recent and very thorough
paper on the ‘Gardens of Nonsuch’ allows
us not only to ‘observe’ this entry of sculp-
ture into greater public awareness, but also
to date it with reasonable accuracy.23
There
were of course earlier visitors to the palace
gardens, including Elizabeth in 1559, an
event that must have spurred the garden-
ers on to achieve some kind of finished
spectacle. However, in terms of a truly
sculptural experience, 1580–85 is when
substantial free-standing figure-work was
properly installed in the palace grounds
and visitors began to trail around in a man-
ner not unlike the way we walk around
sculpture parks today. Initially, it seems,
visitor numbers at Nonsuch were relatively
small. However, in the 1590s and first
decade of the seventeenth century, gardens
such as Nonsuch were visited by quite
substantial numbers, so that while they
remained technically private, entered by
request only, they were nevertheless part
of the standard traveller’s itinerary and as
such can fairly be described in terms of
greater access and a widening of public
awareness.24
This early cultural tourism was both
visual and literary, indeed both were in-
extricably linked. At Nonsuch, as else-
where, stones featuring poetic inscriptions
were just as important as those carved
into architectural symbols and allegorical
statues. Visitors were taken around the
house and gardens not only noting what
they saw but also writing down what they
read. Much of the material seen on such
visits in late Elizabethan England was high-
ly elaborate and seemingly installed not
73 | Sculpture Journal 17.1 [2008]

5. only for private delight but also for public
consumption and political as well as artis-
tic contemplation. The garden objects were
interpretations mainly of classical mythol-
ogy, benefiting from a relatively new liter-
ary awareness not only of the classics, from
Ovid to Vitruvius, but also of more recent
writers from Alberti to Sir Philip Sidney.
Lumley at Nonsuch, for example, had clear-
ly attempted to adapt such imagery to
more contemporary and even political pur-
poses, ending up with a sculptural scheme
that not only served to ennoble his family
history but that also represented an apolo-
gia to the Queen. Such an apologia was
aimed, presumably, not only at Elizabeth; it
was also a public statement, demonstrating
submission to the authority of the Crown.
The records of Lumley’s gardens are
good enough for us to reconstruct them
with some exactness. The most remarkable
sculptural object to be found beyond the
stateliness of the privy garden was the
Diana and Actaeon fountain in the Grove of
Diana, comprised of several mythological
figures as well as inscriptions. Actaeon was
represented in the moment of transforma-
tion, being sprinkled with water by the cen-
tral features on the fountain, Diana and her
maidens. Such an arrangement was more
than decorative. Lumley’s primary concern
was to demonstrate his allegiance to
Elizabeth, having earlier been sent to the
Tower for his involvement in the so-called
Ridolphi Conspiracy. Acteon’s punishment
is therefore also Lumley’s: just as Actaeon
continues forward towards Diana rather
than running away from her, so too was
Lumley chastened rather than defeated by
his punishment. Biddle notes the extent to
which Lumley’s textual equivalent of the
apologia, ‘The Smitten Fisher at Length
Grows Wise’ – verse that it seems Lumley
directly commissioned and that was appar-
ently made into a gilded inscription – is a
semantic key to the way the grove as a
whole was set up as Lumley’s personal but
also public statement of visible regret.25
The important fact then about Lumley’s
extraordinary creation at Nonsuch is that
this was not simply a sculpture garden
created for private pleasure, subsequently
opened up to a limited extent and shared
with carefully selected foreign guests.
While it was that, it was also, just as impor-
tantly, an early form of public art based on
the rhetorical strategy of public apology. It
seems, moreover, that this was a planned
public sculpture project, not just a private
expression of Lumley’s bookishness and
renewed fealty to Elizabeth. It was an
undertaking in fact very similar to the
creation of sculpture gardens on country
estates today, the primary purpose in
Lumley’s case being to display objects of
beauty, fascination and intellectual inter-
est with the secondary benefit of simulta-
neously transmitting ideas about family
status and class allegiance.
This short and admittedly rather
schematic study of the sculpture gardens at
Nonsuch is sufficient nevertheless to
demonstrate that there was public sculp-
ture in England long before the Stuarts and
the later Restoration. Public sculpture was
formed, it seems, in Elizabethan times,
when it was fully functional both techni-
cally and intellectually, entering the secu-
lar sphere and public domain certainly in
the 1590s.
We can now return to Samuel Pepys in
the 1660s to see if his perspective actually
matches up to Whinney’s celebration of
this moment as a new flourishing in
English sculpture, effectively her point of
origin. We left him near the start of this
article peering through the gates at
Nonsuch, glimpsing the ruined gardens
and describing his albeit somewhat limited
view of the external walls of the palace:
‘We . . . viewed as much as we could of the
outside, and looked through the great
gates, and found a noble court: and alto-
gether believe it to have been a very noble
house, and a delicate parke about it’.26
The
point here of course is that Pepys is using
the past tense; it seems there was very little
left of the ‘noble’ and ‘delicate’ environ-
ment that Pepys believes must ‘have been’
within and without the walls of Nonsuch.
In Pepys’s time, such things were notice-
ably lacking; hence his clear nostalgia for a
golden past, and failure to register any
English Renaissance.
Sculpture gardens such as Lumley
designed need regular maintenance, not
least because they involve not just static
effects but also the incorporation of vari-
ous complex water movements. An equiva-
lent today would be the gardens at
Chatsworth, where gravity-fed systems
supply the famous cascade, the new foun-
tain, and most spectacularly a squirting
tree – operated by a series of pipes, very
74 | Sculpture Journal 17.1 [2008]Pointings
1 www.pmsa.org accessed 6 August
2007.
2 R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British
Sculptors, 1660–1851, London, 1953.
3 M. Whinney, Sculpture in Britain,
1530–1830, Harmondsworth, 1963,
revised 1988.
4 Ibid, p. 31.
5 Ibid, p. 67.

6. reminiscent of the water systems that
Lumley created at Nonsuch.27
By the 1660s,
however, the gardens at Nonsuch had
become overgrown, the water features no
longer functioned, and the sculptural
arrangements were already dismantled – or
at least were incomplete and probably
obscured. Pepys, on a return visit to
Nonsuch Park in 1665, notes that the exter-
nal decorations are still largely intact: ‘all
the house on the outside [was] filled with
figures of stories . . . And one great thing is,
that most of the house is covered, I mean
the post, and quarters in the walls, with
lead, and gilded.’ The gardens, however, he
now describes as ‘ruined’.28
This is con-
firmed by Biddle, who describes the period
from 1645 to 1682 as one of general ‘aban-
donment and decay’.29
After the Tudors, the Stuarts certainly
did instigate artistic change, but any idea
of a new flowering of public sculptural art
seems simplistic if not entirely inaccurate.
Did sculpture suddenly start appearing in
the streets and in the landscape, signalling
a sea change that we can think of now as an
important point of origin? The evidence we
have does not in fact suggest anything of
the sort. The decline of the Nonsuch gar-
dens recorded by the public commission of
1650 suggests a new parliamentary interest
in urban renewal – quite natural given the
extent and nature of political change – but
not clear patronage nor substantial invest-
ment. Certainly new statues were put up in
London and elsewhere, but these new
installations can generally be described as
part of a programme of civic maintenance
and replacement; there seems to be little or
no evidence that new public sculpture
installations represented at the time any-
thing particularly novel or dramatic.
To return to the Elizabethan period: as
well as the innovations it seems were
appearing on country estates such as
Nonsuch, there was also new work and a
programme of restoration and renewal tak-
ing place in the cities. There is certainly
clear evidence that in London, statues of
Elizabeth, for example, were erected both
during her reign and after it, and also carv-
ings of the queen’s heraldic device, a gold-
en rose. Again, foreign visitors give us a
fairly reliable perspective on these and
other examples of public sculpture in an
urban setting. Such work concentrated on
visualizing, it seems, mainly royal lineages
and civic virtues, suggested by means of
depiction and allegory. Thus Thomas
Platter (1574–1628), passing through
London in 1599, observed a stone statue of
Queen Elizabeth set up on the tower of the
prison in Blackfriars Road,30
and Hentzner
while in London spotted another Elizabeth
on the west side of the city gate known as
Ludgate.31
In the case of Ludgate, we know
that additionally, on the opposite side fac-
ing east, could be seen newly restored
‘images of Lud and others’ as recorded by
John Stowe (1525–1605), ‘all which was done
at the common charges of the citizens’, the
work carried out by the Crown in 1586.32
Stowe mentions other schemes as well,
including an allegorical arrangement on
the fifteenth-century Guildhall’s ‘stately’
south porch, which he describes as ‘beauti-
ful with images of stone’ and accompanied
by an inscription including the line ‘And
thousands see them every year’; ‘There
Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance stand/
Where find ye the like in all this land?’33
Hentzner also gives us an intriguing
insight into the way public sculpture was
sometimes relocated, whereupon it could
change its meaning. Near Whitehall in
London in 1598, he came across the gilded
stone inscription that in the 1580s had
been installed at Nonsuch, accompanying
the Diana and Actaeon fountain, and serv-
ing there, if Biddle is correct, as a coded
apologia for the sins of Lumley:
Actaeon
It would cause resentment if a painter
should choose to join a horse’s
neck or a dog’s face to a human head.
Diana lays a stag’s head on my neck.
I demand against the unjust one my
proper flesh.
Diana
There must be humanity if Parrhasius
is not to paint
nor Praxiteles carves the morals of a
beast in human frame.
Your inclinations are a stag’s, Actaeon.
Why should there not be horns?
Prudent myself, I lament foolish
affections.34
Moved to the entrance of a London
park, however, the inscription seems to
have functioned differently. Hentzner
simply records the verse, and presumably
saw it as just another ‘curiosity’ for the
public to enjoy. His nineteenth-century
75 | Sculpture Journal 17.1 [2008]
6 See J. M. Robinson, The Dukes of
Norfolk, Oxford, 1982, pp. 97–116.
7 Agreement between Gunnis and
Whinney is due to evident indebted-
ness. Whinney records in her
Foreword to the First Edition that
‘without the generosity of Mr. Rupert
Gunnis, who has allowed me constant
access to his library of photographs,
answered endless questions, and
given me much unpublished materi-
al, the book could never have been
written’; Whinney, as at note 3,
pp. 9–10.
8 See, for example, N. Llewellyn,
Funeral Monuments in Post-
Reformation England, Cambridge,
2000, pp. 15–59.
9 26 July 1663; R. Griffin, 3rd Baron
Braybrooke (ed), The Diary of Samuel
Pepys, London and New York, 1825,
p. 170.
10 As at note 1. The statue of
Persimmon is an oversized equestrian
portrait in patinated bronze depicting
the horse as potent bloodstock. The
Visitor’s Guide stresses the extent to
which the estate benefited from the
prize money that Persimmon’s victo-
ries brought in; Duke of Edinburgh et
al., Sandringham: Norfolk Retreat of
HM the Queen, 1996, p. 48.
11 G.W. Groos (ed.), The Diary of Baron
Waldstein, A Traveller in Elizabethan
England, London, 1981.
12 M. Andrews, ‘Theobalds Palace: the
gardens and the park’, Garden History,
XXI, 2, 1993, p. 135.
13 Hentzner notes at Cambridge
an ‘image richly dressed’ made by
‘country people’ – a depiction of
Ceres. H. Morley (ed.) Travels in
England During the Reign of Queen
Elizabeth by Paul Hentzner, London,
Paris, New York & Melbourne, 1889,
p. 74.
14 See R. Strong, The Renaissance
Garden in England, London, 1979,
pp. 63–71. Here Strong stressed the
influence of Renaissance Italy. More
recently he has been sceptical of
Italian influence, insisting on a
‘proud’ native aesthetic; R. Strong,
‘The Renaissance garden in England
reconsidered: a survey of two decades
of research of the period 1485–1642’,
Journal of Garden History, XXVII, 1,
1999, pp. 4–5.
15 Author’s emphasis.
16 M. Biddle, ‘The Stuccoes of
Nonsuch’, Burlington Magazine,
CXXVI, 976, 1984, p. 412.
17 Whinney, as at note 3, p. 39.
18 At note 25, for example: ‘The only
foreigners whose names are known
are Nicholas Bellin and William
Cure . . . There is no foundation for
the legend that Holbein worked at
Nonsuch’; ibid, p. 429. Summerson
adds the name of Giles Geringe;
J. Summerson, Architecture in
Britain 1530–1830, New Haven and
London, 1993, p. 36. Biddle confirms
that Geringe succeeded the chief
artificer (William?) Kendall; as at
note 16.

7. editor, Henry Morley, however, suggests
how more thoughtful visitors and mem-
bers of the public might have reinterpreted
‘this romantic inscription’ in terms of rela-
tively recent historical events. The stone,
he suggests, ‘probably alluded to Philip II
[of Spain], who wooed the Queen after her
sister’s death; and to the destruction of his
Armada’.35
What this essay attempts to question,
then, is the assumption that public sculp-
ture first arose in Stuart England, along
with the implication that before the
seventeenth century it did not exist. The
evidence in fact points to a more complex
historical picture, and unsettles the very
concept of history understood in terms of
‘origins’ and ‘firsts’. Interestingly, Henry
Peacham makes a rather similar argument
in The Compleat Gentleman (1634).
Peacham was writing at a time when there
had indeed been a step-change in public
understanding of sculptural achievement
and ambition, but not, he insists, any origi-
nal invention. The Compleat Gentleman
was dedicated to one of the sons of Thomas
Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel and Earl
Marshall of England, who had, as Peacham
was happy to acknowledge, altered the cul-
tural landscape in England by his recovery
of antique statues in Greece and Rome.
Peacham’s suggestion is not that this
‘transplant[ing]’, as he puts it, of ‘old
Greece into England’ represents anything
physically new. Rather it represents, he
suggests, simply a shift in aristocratic taste,
a different set of expectations about pre-
cisely what ought to be collected and dis-
played. He is clear, however, that statues
have been around since time immemorial.
We even, Peacham says, ‘find idols among
those savages that had neither writing nor
money’.36
While Peacham intends to refer not to
an English public but rather to the peoples
of the East and West Indies, nevertheless
his comments seem to confirm that
‘Statues, Inscriptions, and coynes’ (which
in his view largely constitute the public
sculpture of his day) had always been
around, plentiful and everywhere, even
if they were now exposed as unbearably
‘vulgar’ by comparison with the newly
discovered ‘industrious and excellent’
antiques. The PMSA statement should
therefore be revised, and should be regard-
ed as largely arbitrary. It is simply not the
case that public sculpture only ‘started to
appear in the street and in the landscape’
in Stuart England. Examples of buildings
such as the Royal Exchange (1566) in
London, bristling with highly visible statues
and sculptural objects, clearly refute this.37
Peacham did in fact suggest a point of
origin, but not in his own time. After care-
fully consulting his Bible, he decided that
the first statue must have been erected
‘long before the two tables of the com-
mandments’. This, however, is rather
unhelpful. The only point I would argue is
that Elizabethan public sculpture should
not be discounted simply because people
like Peacham advocated partial replace-
ment in favour of new classical models.
Their success in doing this would have
been very limited anyway. In the public
domain, statues of Ceres and Justice, seem-
ingly common in Elizabethan times, would
have continued to have meaning over
and above new representations of obscure
figures from classical mythology. Turning
the clock back to Tudor England, it is clear
that sculpture could already be found on
country estates and was plentiful in towns
and cities; although the density of these
features is difficult to gauge and the quali-
ty not only impossible but also inappropri-
ate to judge.38
We can, though, say with
confidence that decorative and symbolic
public sculptural display certainly existed,
and that it was sufficiently visible and
spectacular by the 1590s to impress a new
wave of foreign visitors. The very different
situation that Pepys observed over half a
century later it seems, by contrast, was
neither novel nor particularly satisfactory,
and therefore rather implausible, surely, as
a point of origin.
76 | Sculpture Journal 17.1 [2008]Pointings
19 Whinney, as at note 3, note 23, and
p. 39.
20 Summerson, as at note 18, p. 36.
21 The transfer of Nonsuch to the
Crown and development of the site as
an Elizabethan tourist attraction is
described in J. Dent, The Quest for
Nonsuch, Sutton, 1981, pp. 172ff.
22 The Fall of Icarus (2005), by
Sebastian Seffert; Felix (2000), by
Mark Goldsworthy. Father Time is
from the Coade workshop, installed at
Sandringham 1951. The bronze
Buddha probably represents
Vaisravana, chief divinity of the Four
Heavenly Kings (cast 1689–90),
installed at Sandringham 1870.
23 M. Biddle, ‘The gardens of
Nonsuch: sources and dating’, Garden
History, XXVII, 1, 1999, pp. 145–83.
24 On the rise in foreign visitor num-
bers in the 1590s, see C. Williams (ed.),
Thomas Platter’s Travels in England
1599, London, 1937, pp. 77ff. See also
W. B. Rye, England as Seen by
Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth
& James the First, New York, 1865,
reissued 1967.
25 The full text, Brevis et vera descrip-
tio (c. 1582), was commissioned by the
local rector, Anthony Watson; Biddle,
as at note 23, pp. 168–78.
26 Pepys, as at note 9.
27 Some of these were accidentally
discovered in 1987. See Biddle, as at
note 23, p. 162.
28 Pepys, as at note 9, p. 262.
29 Biddle, as at note 23, p. 167.
30 Williams, as at note 24, p. 179.
31 Morley, as at note 13, p. 74.
32 J. Stowe, A Survey of London (1598),
Stroud, 2005, p. 54. Elizabeth and
Lud and his sons survive at
St Dunstan’s in the West, Fleet Street.
33 Ibid, p. 238.
34 Translation: Biddle as at note 23,
p. 178, after Hentzner (1598),
Waldstein (1600), von Schwarzstät
(1609) and von Hessen (1611).
35 Morley, as at note 13, p. 34.
36 Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman
(1634), Oxford, 1906, p. 106.
37 I am grateful to Margit Thøfner
for several comments on this essay
and for pointing out the visual
significance and public impact of the
opening of the Royal Exchange. For
evidence of the latter, see Stowe, as at
note 32, pp. 175–76.
38 For an example of such an attempt
see V. Morgan, ‘The construction of
civic memory in early modern
Norwich’, in M. Kwint et al. (eds),
Material Memories, Oxford, 1999,
pp. 183–97.

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