Details of Sculptor

Surname

Pearce

Alternative Surname

First Name

Edward

Initial of Surname

P

Year of Birth/Baptism

c1635

Flourished

Year of Death

1695

Biographical Details

Pearce was a carver in stone and wood and also a designer and a mason-contractor with a thriving business in the construction industry. He was one of three sons of Edward Pearce, or Pierce (†1658), a history and landscape painter and a designer of ornaments. Pearce senior’s drawings for friezes, engraved by Robert Peake, were published in 1640 and re-issued by his son Edward in 1668 and again around 1680. The family lived in the City of London in the parish of St Botolph, Aldersgate in 1641, and Pearce was still living in that area when he was granted a licence to marry Anne Smith of St Bride’s, a widow, at St Michael, Bassishaw, on 22 October 1661. In 1678 the couple were domiciled in the parish of St Andrew, Holborn, and c1681 they moved to Arundel Street, immediately west of Temple Bar, where Pearce already had a workshop in 1678. They remained in that street for the rest of Pearce’s life.
Nothing is known of his early training, but he became a freeman by patrimony of the Painter-Stainers’ Company on 16 January 1656 and was admitted to the livery on 20 February 1668. He continued to serve the Company throughout his career and became its master in 1693.
Pearce was employed as an assistant or mason-carver by the leading architects of his day. In 1665 he worked as Sir Roger Pratt’s clerk of works at Horseheath, at Lord Alington’s house near Cambridge, and around the same date he provided carved work under the architect, William Wynde, at Hamstead Marshall, the 1st Earl of Craven’s Berkshire seat (15). He became heavily involved in building work in the City after the Great Fire and was ‘was much employd by Sr. Chr. Wren in his Carvings & designs’ (Vertue V, 9). Pearce was the master mason for three of Wren’s City churches (St Lawrence Jewry, St Matthew Friday Street, St Andrew, Holborn) and he supplied ornaments in wood for four of them (St Lawrence Jewry, St Matthew Friday Street, St Andrew, Holborn, St Benet Fink). He also carved the preliminary wooden model of a dragon for a copper weathervane above St Mary-le-Bow (27). He worked under Wren at St Paul’s Cathedral as a mason from 1678 to 1690 and was responsible for work including carved ornamental details on the south side of the choir, the south-east quadrant of the dome and the whole of the south transept front (38). Among his City contracts was masonry work undertaken at Fishmongers Hall, 1669, with the otherwise unknown Thomas Bedford, for which the pair were paid £890. He also worked ‘in front of Guildhall’, perhaps on the frontispiece (18), which was billed in 1673 with a public cistern in Pancras Lane. In 1676 Pearce was involved in development of the site of Norfolk House, Strand, where he provided a design for the front of a mansion. The project was abandoned, but Pearce himself leased 45 feet of frontage on the east side of Arundel Street. He supplied a doorway with an armorial panel for the Fishmongers’ Hall (16), another doorcase for his own Company Hall (19), and was responsible for sundry ‘works done about ye hall’ of the Grocers’ Company in the years 1680-84 (30).
Pearce sent carved woodwork for domestic interiors out of London a number of times in the 1670s and early 1680s. Around 1677 his assistants set up panelling and carved ornaments in the dining-room at Wolseley Hall, Staffs (25). The work was singled out for praise a decade later in Robert Plot’s history of the county: ‘of all the joiner’s work I have met with in this County there is none comparable to that of the new dining-room of Sir Charles Wolseley at Wolseley, the carved work therof is also very good, both done by one Pearce’ (Plot 1686, 383). In 1675-78 he was working for George Vernon at nearby Sudbury Hall, where he provided carvings for the great staircase including a richly carved pine and limewood balustrade, which perhaps drew on his father’s engraved designs for acanthus scrolls (22). He also supplied crisply carved floral and foliate festoons for the panelling and overdoors of the saloon (24). Beard and Knott have noted that that there is no indication in Vernon’s Creditor and Debtor Book for 1675-78 that Pearce visited Sudbury himself. The carving was prepared in his London workshop, and an assistant, John Grew, to whom there are small payments in Vernon’s account book, went down to Sudbury three times to install it with the help of a small team of local joiners. Whilst working on the Sudbury commission, Vernon’s wife Margaret died, and Pearce provided her monument, his only known solo monument (1, 3). It consists of a gadrooned urn above a pedestal with carved consoles.
Whilst the Sudbury and Wolseley commissions were under way, Pearce was again working under Wren and with the architect, Robert Hooke, on the Monument commemorating the Great Fire in Pudding Lane. The principal contractor for the great column was Joshua Marshall, and the controlling sculptor, Caius Gabriel Cibber. Pearce is not mentioned in the surviving accounts, but Vertue, who had access to a manuscript statement of payments made in 1679, noted ‘the four dragons at 50 pounds each dragon done by Edward Pierce’ above the pedestal (21), (Vertue V, 80). The dragons and probably also the festoons linking them, are likely to have been sub-contracted to Pearce by Cibber. Pearce was one of the signatories endorsing costs after the death of Joshua Marshall in 1678 and he then inherited Marshall’s position as joint mason, with John Shorthose, at St Clement Danes, where he remained from 1679 until the church’s completion in 1682.
In 1676 he worked with Wren on the chapel at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which was paid for largely by Archbishop Sancroft. Pearce supplied drawings for the ground plan, wainscot and seats and was paid £2 for his designs, which were executed by Cornelius Austin (20). It was probably through Sancroft’s influence that Pearce obtained the commission in 1686 for the Bishop’s Palace at Lichfield, the only complete building he is known to have designed. It is an elegant house of seven bays and has pedimental sculpture and piers topped with urns flanking the main entrance. The carved ornaments were supplied by the workshop (34). Colvin suggests that he may also have been responsible for a screen and panelling in the chapel at Winchester College, 1681.
Pearce may have been angling for contracts in 1674, when on New Year’s Day he made a present of sack and claret to Robert Hooke, the architect of a new theatre at the Royal College of Physicians. In 1675 he discussed a possible statue of Sir John Cutler with Hooke, but the commission eventually went to Arnold Quellin. He was more successful in obtaining commissions from the City livery companies. In 1684 he carved a full-length figure in oak for the Fishmongers’ Hall, of Sir William Walworth, the 14th-century lord mayor who stabbed Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt (5). The texture of the velvet bonnet and fur-lined gown are finely realised and Walworth’s sharply turned head, which has considerable vitality, succeeds in indicating the agitation the uprising must have provoked in the mayor. Pearce also provided three stone figures of English sovereigns for the line of kings in the second Royal Exchange (6-8). He was considered by the Tallowchandlers in 1685 for their statue of Henry VII, together with John Bushnell and Cibber, but they were all passed over in favour of Arnold Quellin. Following the success of Walworth’s statue, the Fishmongers, together with the Mercers, chose Pearce for the statue of Queen Elizabeth (7), which was modelled on her image in Westminster Abbey. Cibber provided a model and an estimate of £60 for the statue of Edward III for the Skinners, but he apparently passed the assignment on to Pearce (6), who also carved the figure of Henry V for the Goldsmiths, commissioned on 30 March 1686 (8).
Pearce’s reputation as a sculptor is in need of some re-assessment since it rests principally on his portrait busts, several of which are insecure in their attribution. A clay head of the poet John Milton, which belonged to Vertue, who believed it was by Pearce, was thought by Thomas Hollis to be by the medallist and wax modeller, Abraham Simon. A bronze bust of Oliver Cromwell in the Museum of London is signed and dated 1672 (9), but a marble version in the Ashmolean, Oxford, which is also signed, though with uncharacteristic lettering, is almost certainly by an 18th-century sculptor, Francis Harwood. The head of Sir Christopher Wren, c1673 (10), which was presented to Oxford University by Wren’s son and is recognised as one of the most outstanding busts of the 17th century, may be a copy by Pearce after a lost bust by a French sculptor, perhaps Antoine Coysevox. Penny has drawn attention to the ‘alert conviviality’ of the face, the voluminous drapery across the chest, the loose shirt and disordered locks, all characteristic of Coysevox’s work. The busts of Dr Baldwin Hamey and Thomas Evans are securely documented (11, 12). Robert Hooke noted in his diary on 19 February 1675 that he had ordered Hamey’s bust for the Royal College of Physicians, and a payment of £50 is entered in their cash book for April 1684. The bust of Evans, a master of the Painter-Stainers, is recorded in the Company’s terrier of 1723 as being ‘carved by Mr Pierce at the Company’s charge’. Both are assured portraits in marble and Pierce once again used his skills to suggest contrasting textures.
He worked on prestigious commissions during the last decade of his life. In 1689 the temperamental William Talman, who was or became a close friend, began rebuilding the south and east fronts at Chatsworth, using Pearce as a mason contractor (35). Estimates prepared by Pearce, Thomas Webb and Edward Strong I in April-May 1692, include a sum of nearly £8,000 ‘ffor workmanship and setting and his carvings’ (Wren Soc, XVII, 35). In 1689 Pearce also began work on garden sculpture for Hampton Court. He made substantial alterations to Hubert le Sueur’s Diana Fountain, erected at Somerset House in the 1630s and moved to the privy garden at Hampton Court c1690 (39). The bill for ‘Carving in Portland stone two Dolphins and a cisterne for a fountain’ and ‘8 scrowles and 4 festoons with shells and sevll foot of sup. in the gt. stones under the cornish’ totalled £1,262 3s (PRO Works, December Accts, A.O. Roll 2981, bundle 2482, quoted in Harris 1969, 444). Pearce also provided two magnificent urns, both of which were unfinished at his death (36, 37). They were completed by John Nost I, who was paid in 1700, ‘for fluting ye foot of ye vases that came from Mr Pearce and polishing the plinth and moulding atop’ (PRO, Work 5/51). Pearce earned a substantial sum, £2,003, for his work at Hampton Court.
It is not known whether Nost worked for Pearce in the decade before the latter’s death, but he may have taken over at least one of Pearce’s unfinished contracts for monuments (4). Pearce prepared a design for a monument to a viscount, his wife and child (BL 1881-6-11-190), almost certainly for Viscount Irwin’s monument at Whitkirk (2), begun and significantly progressed by Pearce, and completed by Nost in 1697.
In 1694 Pearce took on his last new commission, preparing the design and supervising the erection of the column at Seven Dials, Covent Garden, London (40). He died in March 1695 and was buried at St Clement Danes, where he had worked a little over a decade earlier. His will states that he supposed himself ‘to be worth 2516 pounds’, left to his widow, his son-in-law, John Killingworth, and his son, John. His widow was to receive ground rents on three properties adjoining their house in Arundel Street, and his son was left ‘[his] picture & my wife’s of Mr [Isaac] Fuller’s Painteing’. Pearce had collected a ‘Clositt of Bookes, prints and drawings’, and his ‘very good friend’ William Talman was given his choice of these. The residue was divided between his son and son-in-law and was sold at auction early in 1696.
Pearce’s masonry contracts were sometimes undertaken in partnership, but he must also have had a large workforce of his own, and some of his apprentices and assistants have been identified. Richard Crutcher, who was put to the London mason, William King in 1674, completed his apprenticeship with Pearce. In July 1680 William Beard was bound to him and William Kidwell, who was originally apprenticed to John Bumpstead, was turned over to him, receiving his freedom in 1687. Thomas Grew, the son of John Grew, was an assistant at St Lawrence Jewry and also at Combe Abbey, Worcs, where Pearce was working in the 1680s (13, 32). Four ‘foreigners’ (who were not members of a London livery company) were named as working for ‘Mr Pearse in Arundel Street’ in the general search conducted by the Masons’ Company in 1686.
It is tempting to see Pearce principally as a successful mason contractor, who made occasional but brilliant forays into portrait sculpture. This judgment is challenged by a frequently quoted letter sent in 1711 from John Talman to his father, William, describing the decoration of a banqueting room at an entertainment John had given in Rome. Portraits of Palladio, Raphael and Michelangelo had been sited on one wall and opposite them were images of Inigo Jones, Isaac Fuller, the portraitist, and Pearce. In this galaxy Pearce was evidently intended to represent modern sculpture. (Add inf. Geoffrey Fisher).
IR
Literary References: Vertue I, 69, V, 9 ; Poole 1922-3, 32-45; Knoop and Jones 1935, passim; Robinson and Adams, 1935, 78, 145; Wren Soc XIII, passim, XVII, 35; Seymour 1952, 10-18; Colvin and Oswald 1954, 2312-6; Croft-Murray and Hilton 1960, 451-5, pl 243; Harris 1969, 444-7; Physick 1969, 23, 46-7, 58; Goodison, JW, 1985, 25-7; Fisher & Newman 1985, 531-2; Whinney 1988, 102-9; Penny 1992, III,142-6; Colvin 1995, 754-5, 1094-5; Grove 24, 1996,753-4 (Physick); Jervis 1996, 893-903; Gibson 1997 (2), 160, 161; Beard and Knott 2000, 26, 43-8; Ward-Jackson 2003, 473; ODNB (Eustace); Higgott 2004, 534-47
Archival References: Fishmongers’ PW and W Accts, 1669, 1684, 1686; Guildhall Restoration 1671-73, 8r, 9v, 9r; R C Physic, Cash Book, MS 2041, 1684, 92; CWA, St Clement Danes, Dutchy Liberty, 1681, WCA B13.178; H and B, St Clement Danes, April 1681, December 1695, WCA; St Matthew, Friday St, Accounts, 1685, 72, 1686, 68; Painter-Stainers, 11505; GPC
Will: proved 20 April 1695 Archdeaconry Court of Middx, Middx CRO (abstract repr Harvey 1965, 127)
Miscellaneous drawings: Design for a palace, Cumbria RO, Lowther papers 11/4/1; design for a church monument, Chicago A I, 1922.1306; Kingston Lacy, elevation drawn for Pratt, at Kingston Lacy; designs for church monuments, SJSM W3/62 (to a divine), W3/64; design for a porch, SJSM W3/65; design for a church monument, Ashm, Gibbs III, 110; design for a church monument to George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, BM, P&D 1881-6-11-176 (Croft-Murray and Hilton 452-3, repr 242); another, Ashm, smaller Talman album, fol 7v; design for a monument to a divine, BM, P&D 1881-6-11-189 (Croft-Murray and Hilton, 454); design for a church monument, BM 1881-6-11-189; two designs for a monument to a bishop, BM, P&D 1881-6-11-191, 1881-6-11-192 (Croft-Murray and Hilton, 455, reprs 244, 245); design for the parlour chamber chimneypiece at Combe Abbey, Warks nd, BL MS Gough drawings, a 2, fol 79; ground plan and elevation for the former bishop’s palace at Lichfield, Staffs, BL MS, Tanner 217, fols 48, 53; misc drawings formerly attrib William Talman and others, VAM 3436, 318-20 (chimneypieces), 432, 433, 441 (church monuments: Wren Soc 17, repr XXII, XXIII); Talman album, sold Sotheby, 27 May 1989, lot 737, inc fol 2 (gate piers, 1675), fol 13 (church monument), fol 18a (door), fol 40 (door), fol 41 (door), fol 43 (St Clement Danes, door), fol 45 (door), fol 52 (door), fol 54 (door), fol 57 (wainscot), fol 98 Fishmongers’ Hall, door (C Lib repr); design for an urban building, Lowther drawings c1680-90, Cumbria RO, Lowther Drawings, cat 2; design for a clock at St Stephen Walbrook, c1681-2, Guildhall Lib; design for a statue of King Charles I, VAM D.377-1885; design for a reredos, VAM. P&D, E.342-1937; design, perhaps for St Mary Abchurch, All Souls, Oxford, Wren drawings I.60; for St Edmund the King, Wren drawings II.44 (Wren Soc, IX, repr 15); for St Martin Ludgate, Wren drawings II.50; Wren drawings IV.90 (stalls); designs for frames, Ashm, smaller Talman album, fol 8R, fol 9R; design for a vase, Bodleian, Radcliffe, fol 172R; Sotheby, 16 July 1992, lot 40 & 31 March 1999, lot 97 (pulpit)
Auction Catalogues: Pearce 1696
Portraits of the sculptor: ‘a head of ... Pierce the Carver painted by Fuller in poses of Coll. Seymor ... a part of a Statue before him’ (Vertue 1, 135, IV, 114), before 1672, probably the version at Sudeley Castle, Glos (Beard and Knott, 46 repr). This identification is discounted by Eustace, who suggests this it perhaps represents Pearce’s father (ODNB)