Details of Sculptor

Surname

Taylor

Alternative Surname

First Name

Sir Robert

Initial of Surname

T

Year of Birth/Baptism

1714

Flourished

Year of Death

1788

Biographical Details

Though best remembered as a distinguished architect, Taylor trained as a sculptor and practised the profession with considerable success for nearly 30 years. He was born in Woodford, Essex in 1714, the son of Robert Taylor I. After ‘some common schooling’ (Anecdotes 1937, 192) he was apprenticed in 1732 to Sir Henry Cheere at a fee of £105. Taylor was still working for his master in 1736-37, when payments were recorded to the younger man in Cheere’s account at Hoare’s Bank. To gain ‘more pretension in his profession’ (Farington vol 16, 5744) Taylor travelled to Rome in the early 1740s ‘on a plan of frugal study’ (Anecdotes 1937, 192), but felt compelled to return home when he heard that his father had fallen ill. He was unable to get passports because of the continental wars and so disguised himself as a friar and crossed hostile territory in the company of a Franciscan monk. He apparently kept his ecclesiastical apparel as a keepsake until his death.
Taylor’s father died in October 1742, leaving considerable debts. Although Taylor later told a friend that he had only eighteen pence in his pocket at the time, he was soon able to set up a thriving sculptural practice, thanks to hard work and good connections. He received financial help from the Godfreys of Woodford, a family of distinguished East India Company merchants to whose memory he later erected a large marble column (34). In the mid 1740s he took premises in Spring Gardens near the King’s Mews, to the east of Cheere’s workshop. On 3 August 1744 he became free by patrimony of the Masons’ Company.
In the same year, despite competition from the more established sculptors, L F Roubiliac, Peter Scheemakers, Henry Cheere and Michael Rysbrack, Taylor won the contract to carve the pediment group for the Mansion House in the City of London (42). Vertue suggested that Taylor (who was so unfamiliar to the writer that he mistakenly called him ‘Carter’) was chosen because he was English, a ‘Cittizen & son of a Mason’ (Vertue III, 122). Taylor executed a large allegorical relief extolling the benefits of trade in London. In April 1746 the architect George Dance told the Mansion House committee that the work was ‘very well done’ (CLRO Minutes, quoted in Ward-Jackson 2003, 242). Interpretations of the iconography appeared in the London Magazine and the Gentleman’s Magazine.
In 1747 Taylor was chosen, apparently without a competition, to carve the monument in Westminster Abbey to Captain Cornewall, a victim of the Battle of Toulon (22). This monument was the first in the Abbey to a war hero financed with parliamentary funds and was intended to salvage some glory from a battle which had resulted in two court-martials. The design, depicting Fame and Britannia on either side of a palm tree above a rocky base, was felt by a French critic, Grosley, to be closer in spirit to the magnificence of a pompe célebre than a standing monument (Grosley 1772, vol 2, 67). When it was unveiled in February 1755, The Gentleman’s Magazine, less-concerned with its iconographical qualities than its political significance, called it an ‘illustrious instance of national gratitude as well as of good policy’ (GM, vol 25, 89).
Taylor’s other Abbey monument, to Joshua Guest (17) was considered by Horace Walpole to be his finest memorial (Anecdotes 1937, 193) and Vertue praised the work, adding that the ornaments and the multicoloured marbles had brought Taylor some reputation. Vertue added that Taylor had ‘infinitely polishd his work beyond comparison this being another English artist who made the tour of Italy’ (Vertue, III, 161). In his church monuments Taylor developed an innovative and distinctive vocabulary of motifs: he presented portrait busts en negligé (4, 6, 19), and made use of medallion portraits (29, 30), praying putti precariously placed on a pedestals (21, 25, 31) and one almost grotesque weeping widow (15). The monuments often incorporated polychrome marbles (17, 19) and were framed with floral rococo ornaments (11, 12, 16), oak sprigs (21), crossed palm branches (21, 27, 28, 30), and egg and dart carving (20, 26). Taylor may well have repeated these designs. There are several more unsigned works in the British Isles and the former colonies which closely resemble these signed works or else Taylor’s surviving drawings. His most ambitious design was for the monument to Henry, Earl of Shelburne at High Wycombe, a multi-figured baroque fantasy which drew heavily on modern Roman models. This was rejected in favour of a design by Peter Scheemakers but Taylor was paid £20 for his trouble. In addition to the identified works he is credited with the monument to Thomas and Robert Crosse, c1745, at Nettleswell, Essex and to John, Lord Somers, †1716, at North Mymms, Herts (Baker 2000, 51-2, 57, 60, 172 n33, repr; Bilbey 2002, 157, repr).
The executed works rarely match the designs in quality and Walpole hinted at one good reason: Taylor’s method ‘was to bost, as they call it, to hew out his heads from the block; and except some few finishing touches, to leave the rest to his workmen’ (Anecdotes 1937, 193). Bartholomew Cheney is his only identified assistant: Smith remembered that Cheney was paid £4 15s a week for carving the figures on the Cornewall monument (Smith 1828, vol 1, 151).
Taylor produced some remarkable ‘Chinese Chippendale’ designs for chimneypieces, a book of which survives at the Taylorian Institute, Oxford. These reproduce in multiple form the floral motifs used on his monuments. In 1750 he supplied a chimneypiece for the London house of Peter Du Cane, a Director of the Bank of England and the East India Company (38) as part of a larger project of building and renovation, and this is Taylor’s first datable architectural work. Taylor still described himself as a ‘statuary’ in 1758 (Survey of London, vol 29, 141), and he continued to produce monuments until the late 1760s, but his business moved steadily into the field of architecture.
Working chiefly for a City clientele of bankers, East and West Indian merchants, government financiers and lawyers, Taylor became one of the two leading architects of his day. Thomas Hardwick wrote that before Robert Adam entered the lists, Taylor and James Paine ‘nearly divided the profession between them’ (Hardwick 1825, 13). Taylor’s architecture, like his sculptural work, made use of recurring elements, such as astylar elevations, vermiculated rustication, cantilevered staircases and rich rococo chimneypieces. His particular strength lay in his designs for compact houses for rich city dwellers and he is often credited with moving the Palladian style towards neoclassicism. His only major public building was the Bank of England (1765-87), now demolished. Walpole said Taylor was responsible for the statue of Britannia, pouring coins from a cornucopia, which survives on the pediment of one of the current buildings. This claim is brought into question by a press report of 1733 which records that the commission was originally given to Sir Henry Cheere.
By 1768 Taylor had amassed a fortune of £40,000 and his professional income was £8,000 a year. This is a remarkable achievement, bearing in mind that his first £15,000 was used to clear family debts. At the time of his death he was said to be worth £180,000. Much of this wealth came from his position as surveyor of several London estates, including the Duke of Grafton’s. He was surveyor to the Bank of England, the Admiralty, the Foundling Hospital, Greenwich Hospital and Lincoln's Inn. He also held a number of posts in the Office of Works. In 1782 he was knighted, on the occasion of his election as Sheriff of London.
Contemporary sources construct Taylor as a paragon of stoical and devout professionalism. He ate little meat, abstained from alcohol, devoted all his evenings to his wife and a handful of sensible friends, and rarely slept beyond four in the morning. According to Farington he had three rules for growing rich ‘viz; rising early, - keeping appointments, - and regular accounts’ (Farington vol 3, 841). He was said to be attentive to his pupils, and he trained many of the most successful architects of the next generation, notably Samuel Pepys Cockerell and John Nash.
Taylor died on 27 September 1788 at the home in Spring Gardens, London which he had built in 1759. He fell ill after attending the funeral of his friend, the banker and one-time Lord Mayor, Sir Charles Asgill, and died a few days later of a ‘violent mortification in the bowels’ (Anecdotes 1937, 197). After a grandiose funeral attended by over a hundred people, Taylor was laid to rest in a vault near the north-east corner of St Martin-in-the-Fields. The bulk of his fortune was left to the University of Oxford to found an institution for the teaching of modern languages. His will was challenged by Taylor’s son, Michel Angelo Taylor MP, but after his death in 1834 the Taylorian Institute was founded in accordance with Taylor’s wishes. It houses Taylor’s library of architectural books and two volumes of his drawings. Michel Angelo Taylor later commissioned Thomas Malton the Younger to draw and engrave a set of 32 plates of his father’s architectural designs (1790-2, SJSM, Ashmolean).
A cenotaph was erected in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey asserting that Taylor’s ‘works entitle him to a distinguished rank in the first Class of British architects.’ This verdict has been endorsed by later architectural historians but much less attention has been given to his achievement as a sculptor. Whinney dismissed Taylor’s oeuvre as ‘clumsy’ and ‘foolish,’ but her view fails to do justice to the Cornewall and Mansion House commissions, nor does it take into account the innovative nature of Taylor’s monumental designs. Baker has drawn attention to Taylor’s assimilation of continental influences from the works of Gille-Marie Oppenard (1672-1742), Juste Aurele Meissonnier (1695-1750) and Sebastien-Antoine Slodtz (1695-1754), and has concluded that Taylor was one of the three major artists, who, with Sir Henry Cheere and Roubiliac, evolved the rococo style in English sculpture ( Rococo 1984, 282-3) .
MGS
Literary References: Vertue, III, 122, 161; GM, vol 18, pt 2, 1788, 930-1, reproduced with other obituaries of Taylor in Anecdotes 1937, 191-198; Hardwick 1825, 13; Smith 1828, I, 151; Builder 1846, no194, 505; Esdaile 1948 (1), 63-6; Survey of London, vol 29, 141; Gilson 1975; Farington, passim; Summerson 1980, 2-5; Rococo 1984, 277-309; Binney 1984; Whinney 1988, 248-9; Colvin 1995, 962-7; Grove 30, 1996 385-7 (White); Coutu 1997, 79, 85; Craske 2000 (2), 106; Ward-Jackson 2003, 239-41; ODNB (Baker)
Collections of Drawings: TI (Arch Tay 1), book of 54 designs, 52 of which are for monuments, pen, pencil, chalk, ink and wash, Rococo 1984, 297-298, 308 (repr), Baker 2000, 65 (repr), Garstang 2003, 853 (repr), photos of about 50 of these drawings, Conway; TI (Arch Tay 2) 12, highly finished designs for chimneypieces, pen, ink and wash, Binney 1984, reprs 59-62, Esdaile 1948 (1), 66 (repr), C Lib (repr); TI (Arch Tay 3), a book of ‘Problems in Geometry and Mensuration with Diagrams,’ red and black ink.
Portraits of the Sculptor: Anon (possibly William Miller), half length portrait, RIBA, Binney 1984, repr 1; Anon, half length portrait, TI (similar to that in RIBA)