Details of Sculptor

Surname

Paty

Alternative Surname

First Name

William, of Bristol

Initial of Surname

P

Year of Birth/Baptism

1758

Flourished

Year of Death

1800

Biographical Details

Like his father, Thomas Paty, William was an architect, who also supplied funerary monuments. He studied briefly at the Royal Academy Architectural Schools in 1775 and may have worked in the office of a London architect, but he was back in Bristol by 1777, when his father started to advertise his firm as Thomas Paty and Sons. After the death of his father and brother John in 1789 he continued the family business alone from Limekiln Lane and College Place. Paty married Sarah Hickes, the daughter of Alderman Hickes, a ‘foreigner’ from Gloucestershire in January 1784. The marriage did not give him free access to the burgess list and on 9 December 1790 he paid a fine of 15 guineas to become a freeman of Bristol. He had two children, George William Paty, who did not follow his father’s profession and a daughter, Marie.
Paty was one of the three Bristol surveyors appointed under the act of 1788 and he played an important part in the development of Bristol, particularly Great George Street, where he designed a number of houses. He appears also to have designed many of the terraces in Clifton and was responsible for Blaise Castle House on the outskirts of Bristol, 1795-6. He rebuilt Christ Church, considered by Howard Colvin to be his best building, between 1785 and 1790.
Most of Paty’s wall-monuments are in the south-west of England though he built up a connexion with the West Indies, sending several to Barbados (6, 11, 22, 36). Like his father, he employed a repertoire of elegantly carved classical motifs on his monuments, including urns, paterae, portrait medallions and mourning women garlanding obelisks. He used variegated marbles, indicated on his designs with colour-washes, and often backed his compositions with an inverted shield ground. A number of designs in the Paty copybook are thought to be by William: they include nine for wall tablets with urns (nos 3, 16, 25, 46, 47, 49, 63, 68, 69) and three with heraldic shields (nos 95, 97, 102). The Copybook also includes ground and first floor plans for an unidentified house (no 126) and several refined Adamesque chimneypieces (nos 128, 129, 131, 132, 135, 136).
Paty, who was the last surviving sculptor member of his family, died in December 1800, aged 48, and was commemorated with a tablet in St Augustine’s, Bristol. His former pupil and assistant, James Foster of Bristol, was established in independent practice, so the workshop, Paty Copybook, architectural practice and goodwill were sold to an outsider, Henry Wood. In the business-like manner characteristic of the family, a notice in Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal on Saturday 4 April 1801 directed all to whom Paty owed debts to take their demands to his banker, and those who owed sums to him to pay them to Paty’s brother-in-law, Thomas King of Bath.
Literary References: Gunnis 1968, 295; Whinney 1988, 459 n.23; Dale-Jones and Lloyd 1989, 56; Colvin 1995, 372, 743-4, 1071-2; Priest 2003, passim
Will: PROB 11/1352
Collections of Drawings: Paty Copybook
Miscellaneous Drawings: sketches of proposals for monuments with some estimates of costs, including one signed by William Paty, Bristol RO, Ashton Court Papers AC/F/9/5