Details of Sculptor

Surname

Tuffnell Family

Alternative Surname

First Name

Initial of Surname

T

Year of Birth/Baptism

Flourished

Year of Death

Biographical Details

John Tuffnell 1643-1697
Edward Tuffnell 1678-1719
Samuel Tuffnell - 1765
John Tuffnell and his son Edward were members of a family of masons and master-builders. John may have been the son of Edward Tuffnell and Catherine Moorecocke of Christ Church, Newgate, London, who were married at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 8 October 1638. John was the master-mason at Westminster Abbey for 23 years and was also employed on repairs to St Margaret, Westminster in 1674 and later. He died on 18 February 1697, and was buried ‘near the east end of the south Cloister’ of the Abbey on 23 February (Chester 1876, 241, 297 n5). His wife, Dorothy née Smythe, whom he had married in 1673, afterwards became the wife of a Mr Noble and died in 1720.
Edward Tuffnell, who succeeded his father as Abbey mason, was baptised at St Margaret, Westminster, on 21 February 1678. He was apprenticed to Christopher Kempster on 14 June 1692. In 1697 he married Anne Browne, the daughter and co-heiress of Samuel Browne of St Margaret’s, Westminster. He worked at the Abbey as master-mason for 22 years and his epitaph relates that during that time he restored and redecorated the south and east sides of the building. In 1702 he received £12 15s for ‘laying 21 ft of marble around the mouth of the vault and also 12ft of new marble to make good what was broken’ when the Royal vault in Henry VII’s chapel was opened to receive the coffin of King William III (TNA WORK 5/53 fol 400). He also worked with Edward Strong II at St Alphege, Greenwich, 1712-14, at St Anne, Limehouse, 1712-24, St Paul, Deptford, 1712-30, St Margaret, Westminster 1713-26, St John, Westminster, 1714-28 and St George, Wapping, 1715-23 (TNA, A 01.437/2). The two received a total of £5,000 for work on these six new churches erected by the Commissioners for building Fifty New Churches.
On 14 October 1717 Edward was appointed one of four auditors of the Westminster Fire Company. In the same year he made a model of one of the new churches designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor (Lambeth Palace Library, Bill Book for the New Churches in GPC). He died on 2 September 1719 and, like his father, was buried in the cloisters, where a large monument with a portrait-bust (presumably the work of his son Samuel) was erected to his memory (7). Tuffnell is described on his epitaph as an architect, and is depicted in the soft cap sometimes associated with artists. In 1721 his widow remarried a merchant, Thomas Mytton, of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch. She died seven years later.
Samuel Tuffnell was the son of Edward Tuffnell and followed in the family trade. The Northampton Mercury of 27 September 1725 noted that the ‘magnificent altarpiece for Bath Abbey’ was to be seen at his yard in Westminster (GPC). The work was removed in 1833, despite the very high quality of its design and execution, and now adorns a private house in Bath (12). He was the master-mason at St John, Horsleydown, from 1728 until 1733. He also made marble chimneypieces (9, 10). He succeeded Christopher Horsnaile I as mason at Westminster Abbey in December 1737. The extensive repair work on the Abbey continued until 1745 when the west towers were completed.
In 1743 Samuel became a director of the Westminster Fire Company (WFO, MB 343/7, 20 Oct 1743). He signed a number of monuments, usually architectural in character, such as that to Henry Phillips (1). It is a tall tablet of coloured marbles with Corinthian pilasters, a broken segmental pediment enclosing a rich cartouche, and an apron with a winged cherub’s head between fluted black ogee consoles. His monument to the Cart family was formerly in St Mary-le-Bow, but was destroyed when the church was bombed in 1940 (8). The antiquary Thomas Allen described this as ‘a plain sarcophagus surmounted by a well-executed bust of the deceased in the undress costume which marks the likeness of Thomson and other poets. At the back of the bust are four Corinthian Columns, sustaining a broken elliptical pediment. On the base is J. Potter arch. S. Tuffnell sculp’. Samuel died in 1765 and was buried with his wife Ann (née Mytton) in the churchyard of St Giles, Camberwell, London.
Edward and Samuel Tuffnell had another brother, William (l680-l733), who worked as a master-builder and bricklayer for the New River Company. A William Tuffnell, presumably another family member, became a director of the Westminster Fire Office on 27 October 1737, and a monument to a Samuel Tuffnell, who died in 1748, was carved by Sir Henry Cheere for Pleshey, Essex. Several members of the family served on the vestry of St Margaret, Westminster, and rose to high-ranking positions in the Middlesex militia.
The family seem to have had the right to be buried in Westminster Abbey, for as late as 1832 Ann White, Samuel’s grand-daughter, was buried in the west cloister, and her grave was reopened in 1839 on the death of her daughter, Emmeline-Eliza.
MGS
Literary References: Chester 1876, 241, 297 n5; Tuffnell 1924, 66; Gunnis 1968, 401; Craske 1992, 69; Baker 1995 (1), 100; Webb 1999, 33; Baker 2000, 74; Friedman 2004, 36-38, 42, 45
Archival References: WFO, DMB; MB, 343/6; WAM Chapter Books; GPC
Will: Edward Tufnell, mason of St Margaret, Westminster, 9 January 1720, PROB 11/572