Details of Sculptor

Surname

Mallcott

Alternative Surname

Malcott

First Name

Family

Initial of Surname

M

Year of Birth/Baptism

Flourished

1730-1862

Year of Death

Biographical Details

John Mallcott I c1717-1766
John Mallcott II b1742
John Mallcott III b c1777-1851
A family of stonemasons, they were responsible for masonry work, carved decoration and a number of funerary monuments. John Mallcott I was the son of William Mallcott, a carpenter of St James, Westminster. His father died before he was apprenticed in 1730 to Robert Taylor I. He became free on 9 September 1737. In the Masons’ Company list of 1740 he is described as living at Grey Friars, but in the same list a ‘John Mallcott, mason’ is noted as working with ‘Mr Taylor’, which suggests that he continued to work for his former master (Masons’ Co Freemen List, fol 45). He was mason to the Royal College of Physicians in Warwick Lane from 1743, perhaps until his death in 1766, though the last payment refers merely to payment of ‘a mason’s’ bill. In 1765 he was elected renter warden of the Masons’ Company, but was too ill to take up the post. He died in 1766, leaving properties in Leicester Street and Air Street, as well as his business and leasehold estate at Grey Friars in the City of London. His wife, Ann, and Sir Robert Taylor were his executors. His business, stock and utensils were left to his son, John Mallcott II.
John Mallcott II was christened at Grey Friars in December 1742. He was apprenticed to his father in 1757, and was freed from service on 4 October 1764. In 1766 he took his father’s place as mason to the College of Physicians. The Mallcott tradecard, dated 1788, survives in the British Museum Print Room. The firm, which included a partner called Scrimshaw, worked under the architect Sir John Soane, rebuilding a house for William Cooke in Walthamstow in 1790, and they were building contractors for developments in Chelsea in 1804. In 1802 John II and ‘E. Malcott’ were appointed masons to the Ironmongers’ Company. Mallcott was a warden of the Masons’ Company in 1810-11 and became master in 1812. By 1809 he had taken a son, presumably John Mallcott III, into the business, for in Holden’s Directory of 1811, the firm is described as ‘Mallcott and Son’ of 12 Newgate Street.
John Mallcott III was was apprenticed to Samuel Ireland in 1792 and became free in 1799. He married Louisa Susannah Grace at Grey Friars church on 30 August 1804. By 1809 he had been taken into the family business and in 1811 he received a press notice for his monumental tablet to William Hawes, founder of the Humane Society (4). The Gentleman’s Magazine illustrated the work, described as a ‘neat and elegant’ slab with a ‘small but correct’ portrait-medallion of Hawes. The magazine hailed the sculptor as ‘an ingenious young artist’ (GM 1811 vol 81, pt I, 307, 313). The firm produced numerous monuments and tablets over the next 30 years, described by Gunnis as ‘mostly dull’, though he considered the monument to Sir Wharton Amcotts (3), designed by William Kinnaird, to be ‘really rather a charming work’.
In 1821 the Gentleman’s Magazine illustrated Mallcott’s monument to Robert Wells (7), a Greek stele with palmette brackets and acroteria, and relief carvings of the two sides of a medal awarded to the deceased by the Royal Society. On the engraving Mallcott is described as a ‘Statuary’ of 12 Newgate Street, so he clearly took this aspect of the business seriously. In 1824, he provided carved ornaments for the new Post Office (19).
The firm continued to be involved principally in masonry work. Mallcott succeeded his forebears as mason to the College of Physicians, he became the principal mason working on the new National Gallery and the Insolvent Debtors' Court in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and in 1820 he was employed at Stationers’ Hall. In 1823-4 he built the Lombard Street premises of the bankers, Glyn Mills and Co, at a cost of £2,278. In 1830-31, he was warden of the Masons’ Company, and in 1832 he became master. In 1845 The Builder illustrated a view of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, which the firm had cased in Portland stone ten years earlier, and referred to Mallcott as a ‘practical mason who has been engaged for fifty years in repairing old Churches and raising new buildings’ (Builder 1845, 78).
Mallcott’s will was proved in January 1851. He left houses in Newgate Street and Streatham Hill, as well as a lease on stonemasonry premises in West Street in the parish of Saint Sepulchre. To his second wife, Mary Ann, he left household goods and ‘detached articles of sculpture,’ as well as ‘all machinery, implements, utensils, plant, stock ... employed by me in my business of a stone-mason’. His various premises were left in trust for the seven children of his second marriage.
His son by his first marriage, John Rowles Mallcott, was apprenticed to his father in 1823 and became a renter warden of the Masons’ Company in 1840. In the 1830s the firm is known to have signed at least one tablet ‘J Malcott & Son’ (16) and it therefore seems likely that John Rowles Mallcott had joined it by this date. In 1841 father and son succeeded Thomas Burnell as masons for the restoration of the Temple church. The firm produced monumental work as late as 1862 (18), so either John Rowles Mallcott, one of his step-siblings, or his trustees must have chosen to continue the business after the death of John III.
One of the Mallcotts must have had talents beyond his skills as a stonemason for there exists, in private possession, a pen, ink, watercolour and body-colour trompe-l’oeil painting of playing cards, newspapers, pens, and other items signed ‘JOHN MALCOTT Delint.’ The painting includes Malcott’s own tradecard marked ‘MALLCOTT Mason ... Newgate Street, London.’
MGS
Literary References: Holden 1811; Condor 1894, 297, 302; Gunnis 1968, 251
Archival References: IGI; Masons’ Co, Freemen, fols 45, 75; Assistants fols 2, 7; RC Physic, Cash Book, 1726-78, 1743, p 4 (John Malcott I) 1766, p 335 (John Malcott II); Soane Bill Book 3, fols 8-9 (William Cooke’s house, Walthamstow); GPC
Wills: John Mallcott I, 5 Feb 1766 PROB 11/916/144-5; John Mallcott III, 18 January 1851 PROB 11/2126/13-16
Tradecards: Banks Collection, BM, 106.20, dated 1788; Heal coll, BM 106.17, undated