DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68074#0202
IX
THE LATER MONUMENTS
‘ I found [on visiting the Abbey] several new monuments erected to the memory of several
great men; the names of the great men I absolutely forget, but I well remember that Roubilliac
was the statuary who carved them. Alas ! Alas ! cried I, such monuments as these confer
honour, not upon the great men, but upon little Roubilliac.’—Goldsmith’s Citizen of the
World.
THE visit to Italy marks a crisis in Roubiliac’s life. The Wade shows him
already a master of the Baroque, and after 1752 pyramid and sarco-
phagus tend to disappear, or if they recur, as on the Fleming monument, it is
in a modified form. After his return from Italy the Picturesque dominates his
imagination. Bravura in sculpture has rarely gone beyond the Hargrave and
Nightingale monuments, nor has the realistic portrait statue been more reso-
lutely connected with the Unseen than in the work which shows Handel taking
down the notes sung in heaven itself.
I have found no record of the exact dates at which the monuments of
Generals Fleming and Hargrave were erected, but although both were dead
shortly before Roubiliac went to Italy, works so elaborate can hardly have
been executed until after his return and after the completion of the Warren
monument. That of General Fleming, who, having fought at Blenheim and
Culloden, died in 1751 and was buried in the Abbey on 2nd February, con-
sists of figures of Athena and Hercules in the foreground of a large curved
pyramidal slab, with a medallion of the general at its apex, flanked by growing
trees of laurel and cypress;1 military trophies are heaped to right and left of
this rather unsuccessful but well-executed composition, whose style recalls the
Wade, its companion in banishment above the windows of the south aisle of
the nave. Like the third of this ill-placed trio, it was erected by order of the
Government.
Greatly admired at the time, the monument of General Hargrave, Governor
of Gibraltar (Plate xxxvi Z>), was thought too good for its subject. General
Conway gleefully reports to Horace Walpole the scurrilous lines scribbled on
it by a Westminster boy,
1 We may recall both here and in the Warren ‘ We are not in the least surprised to see . . .
monument the saying of the Connoisseur of 1753: Pallas or Hercules supporting ... a warrior.’
THE LATER MONUMENTS
‘ I found [on visiting the Abbey] several new monuments erected to the memory of several
great men; the names of the great men I absolutely forget, but I well remember that Roubilliac
was the statuary who carved them. Alas ! Alas ! cried I, such monuments as these confer
honour, not upon the great men, but upon little Roubilliac.’—Goldsmith’s Citizen of the
World.
THE visit to Italy marks a crisis in Roubiliac’s life. The Wade shows him
already a master of the Baroque, and after 1752 pyramid and sarco-
phagus tend to disappear, or if they recur, as on the Fleming monument, it is
in a modified form. After his return from Italy the Picturesque dominates his
imagination. Bravura in sculpture has rarely gone beyond the Hargrave and
Nightingale monuments, nor has the realistic portrait statue been more reso-
lutely connected with the Unseen than in the work which shows Handel taking
down the notes sung in heaven itself.
I have found no record of the exact dates at which the monuments of
Generals Fleming and Hargrave were erected, but although both were dead
shortly before Roubiliac went to Italy, works so elaborate can hardly have
been executed until after his return and after the completion of the Warren
monument. That of General Fleming, who, having fought at Blenheim and
Culloden, died in 1751 and was buried in the Abbey on 2nd February, con-
sists of figures of Athena and Hercules in the foreground of a large curved
pyramidal slab, with a medallion of the general at its apex, flanked by growing
trees of laurel and cypress;1 military trophies are heaped to right and left of
this rather unsuccessful but well-executed composition, whose style recalls the
Wade, its companion in banishment above the windows of the south aisle of
the nave. Like the third of this ill-placed trio, it was erected by order of the
Government.
Greatly admired at the time, the monument of General Hargrave, Governor
of Gibraltar (Plate xxxvi Z>), was thought too good for its subject. General
Conway gleefully reports to Horace Walpole the scurrilous lines scribbled on
it by a Westminster boy,
1 We may recall both here and in the Warren ‘ We are not in the least surprised to see . . .
monument the saying of the Connoisseur of 1753: Pallas or Hercules supporting ... a warrior.’