Details of Sculptor

Surname

Vierpyl

Alternative Surname

First Name

Simon

Initial of Surname

V

Year of Birth/Baptism

c1725

Flourished

Year of Death

1810

Biographical Details

He was born in London and after studying under Peter Scheemakers went to Rome in 1748, where he remained until 1756. He was much patronised by English and particularly Irish tourists wanting copies of the antique masterpieces.Throughout his stay he had rooms in the Palazzo Zuccari above the Spanish Steps, where his former master and a number of other English sculptors lodged during their Rome years. In 1750 he shared lodgings with Joseph Wilton and in 1752 with Francis Harwood. His popularity with the tourists in the city is suggested by his inclusion with Lord Charlemont and other Irish patrons in the Parody of the School of Athens which Sir Joshua Reymolds painted in Rome in 1751 (NGI).
Vierpyl’s first Italian commission came in the summer of 1749 from Lord Malton, acting for his father, the Earl of Rockingham. He ordered copies of the Apollino and Clapping faun in the Uffizi Galleries (3). Duplicates of both, together with marble tables and gesso busts, were commissioned by Ralph Howard (later Lord Wicklow), who paid Vierpyl a first installment for his work on 15 February 1752 (signed receipt, Wicklow Papers, noted by Ingamells 1997, 968, n3) (4). On 18 March the antiquary James Russel, who acted as Howard’s agent in Rome, reported: ‘Vierpyl, by working very hard, had reduc’d his block, into something of a human shape’ and on 20 September Howard heard from another source that the marble of the statues was flawless and ‘ye workmanship wont be disagreeable’. They were not completed until October 1753. When Russel wrote confirming their dispatch on 25 December he added ‘your statues have been extremely admired and prais'd by Gentlemen and Connoisseurs, from whence no small advantage has accru’d to Mr Vierpyle [who has] since had commissions to do the fighting & the dying Gladiator, the former for Lord Charlemont, and the latter for Lord Pembroke (6, 8), as likewise several busts for Lord Bolingbroke & other Gentlemen’. Henceforth Vierpyl’s activities were largely confined to making copies from antiquities in the Capitoline Museum and the French Academy in Rome, where he gained access thanks to the powerful influence of Cardinal Albani.
James, 1st Earl of Charlemont gave Vierpyl several commissions. On 26 July 1755 his agent John Parker reported that Vierpyl had yet to execute the ‘busts of Brutus, Pompey and Caesar in bronze, that he was to do, the busts too in red marble’, but the Gladiator, for which he had been paid on account, was ‘very forward’ (12, 6). On 24 December Parker wrote that Vierpyl was shortly to go to Carrara with gessos of ‘the little Apollo’ and the Mercury in the Farnese Gallery and in May 1756 Vierpyl wrote from Carrara that the two statues were ‘almost in a state of being forwarded to Dublin’ and he had sent twelve blocks of marble to await his arrival there.
Vierpyl’s largest commission, which occupied him from 1751 to 1755, came from Edward Murphy, Lord Charlemont’s tutor. It was for terracotta copies of 22 statues and 78 busts of Roman Emperors and others in the Capitoline Museum (5, 11). These were all sent to Dublin in 1755. Nearly two decades later, on 15 August 1774, Vierpyl discussed his work with Murphy in a letter: ‘your happy, and, I believe, singular thought (Of getting the whole series copied, and then by one artist only) has never before, nor to this day, been executed by any sculptor, except me. So that your imperial series is the only one of the kind now in the world’. He added: ‘an equal series will never again be made; for I am certain that no eminent artist will hereafter stand four years, winter and summer (as I have done) in the chilling Capitoline museum to model so many busts and statues with his own hand’. He undertook various other commissions and appears to have acted as an agent for collectors of antiquities since items such as a marble intaglio table and an excavated cinerary urn went to England from Rome at his direction.
He left Rome early in 1756, travelled to Venice and then to Ireland probably at Charlemont’s behest. He settled in Dublin, first in Marlborough Street, then Henry Street and finally at 41 (now 2) Bachelor’s Walk. On 26 December 1758 he married Frances Dickson, who was agreeable and had a fortune, though she met her death by throwing herself out of a window in the house in Bachelor’s Walk. There were two sons, William and Charles, both of whom were brought up as sculptors. Vierpyl took a second wife, Mary Burrowes, on 30 August 1779.
His principal work for Lord Charlemont in Ireland was on the casino at Marino House, Clontarf, near Dublin, designed by Sir William Chambers (20). Vierpyl was supervising mason and clerk of works, in charge of the construction of the casino and it is probably to him that the credit goes for the quality of the stonework, the precision of the dressing and all the fine carved detail. Chambers had dismissed Vierpyl to Lord Hopetoun in 1755 as ‘an Englishman [in Rome], many degrees inferior to those now at London as a maker of chimneypieces’ (Allen 1983, 201). He evidently revised his opinion for in his Treatise of 1791, he wrote of the casino ‘it was built by Mr Verpyl with great neatness and taste after models made here’. Vierpyl may also have worked under Chambers at Castletown, Co Kildare, for Thomas Conolly.
Vierpyl found other clients in Ireland. Two busts were commissioned for the Long Room at Trinity College, Dublin (13, 14). Claudius Gilbert is presented naturalistically in his own curled hair, with a double chin and a chest tapering into a triangle. His image was placed above the collection of 13,000 books he had bequeathed to the library. The Gentleman’s Magazine noted ‘It is the workmanship of Mr Verpoil; and for expression and elegance does great honour to the taste and skill of the statuary’ (GM 4 Feb 1758, 91). The second bust in the Library, of Provost Baldwin, is also characterised. This frontal image in wig and robes, has a small o-shaped mouth and again a tapering torso. A third, of the Bishop of Clogher, was bequeathed to the library in the early 19th century and it too is a round-jowled image, in clerical robes (17).
His only recorded monument, to Lady Donneraile, in St Patrick’s Cathedral, closely follows Henry Cheere’s monument to Viscount Donneraile in Donneraile, Co Cork. It has a central seated figure in an attitude of grief holding a portrait medallion. The surrounding arch has two tapering Corinthian columns supporting a pediment with an armorial shield flanked by two putti (1).
IR
Literary References: Charlemont Corr, HMC 1891, 225-6 (Gladiator), 227 (dispatch of 12 blocks of marble from Carrara); Strickland II, 1913, 488-490; Harris 1970, 43, 67, 201; Stainton 1983, 11, 35; Cornforth 1988, 70-3; Byrne 1995 (1), 31-56; Byrne 1995 (2); Ingamells 1997, 967-8; Casey 1999, 42-50; AAI 2014 [Sullivan]
Portraits of the Sculptor: Strickland II, 1913, repr LXI (detail from Reynolds’s portrait)