Details of Sculptor

Surname

Young

Alternative Surname

First Name

John I

Initial of Surname

Y

Year of Birth/Baptism

Flourished

Year of Death

1679

Biographical Details

Young worked in turbulent times, beginning his career as a mason during the reign of Charles I, surviving the Commonwealth and coming into his own after the Restoration. Having been ‘made sinisterly free of ye Weavers’, he was taken and presented for disfranchisement together with his master in 1636 (Knoop and Jones 1935, 31). He then wooed the Masons’ Company and agreed to pay £5 for his translation from the Weavers, £3 being paid on 16 May 1637 and the balance of 40s in 1637-8. In 1652 and again in 1655, he was a warden of the Masons’ Company and was appointed master in 1657.
In 1638-40 he was one of the masons responsible for building the tower of Goudhurst church, Kent. He was also working at the Inner Temple where he received £140 for repairs to the Temple Church. Further payments totalling £14 7s were made for unspecified work and £1 12s for taking down the staircase of the steeple and scaffolding the same. In 1640 he began work on the new Temple bridge receiving a first payment of £100 and in 1641 he was paid a further £335 for stonework. In 1655 another £33 18s was made over for work ‘about the Garden Gate and Stairs’ (Inderwick 1896-1936, 2, 321). A new contract was drawn up for repairs in 1663, by which time Young was working in partnership with his son Nicholas Young. He had designed and built the new church at Berwick-upon-Tweed by 1653.
From 1664-69 Young and Joshua Marshall worked in partnership at Greenwich Hospital, building first the north end and later the east front, where they also provided quantities of Portland stone for paving. They carried out a good deal of decorative carving (2, 3).
Young was the master-mason at Mercers’ Hall, building it and its chapel in the years 1668-75, to designs by John Oliver. In 1669 he was paid £100 for work at St Paul’s School and on the schoolmasters’ houses. In 1669 he made the great gateway and in 1670 he and his son Nicholas were paid £50 for statues of the Christian Virtues (3) and a further £350 for building the chapel gate and setting up the figures. He was assisted in other work by Thomas Cartwright I: Young and Cartwright were paid £500 in January 1673 for stonework on the porch and columns. £100 was paid solely to Young in April 1674 for ‘plaistering the cupilo’ and that year he earned a further £100 for work on the clerk’s house. In 1669 the Grocers’ Company commissioned ‘Mr Young, Mason’ to carve a statue of Sir John Cutler, but for some reason Young did not comply. There is an obscure reference in Robert Hooke’s diary to a visit in May 1674 by Sir John Cutler ‘about Young and theater’. Later the same month Hooke ‘View’d Young’s work for Sir J Cutler’ (Robinson and Adams 1935, 101, 102). He was the master mason building the Apothecaries’ Hall in 1669-7: apparently the Company was in financial difficulties and offered one of the building plots on the site of their old hall to Young, who in return agreed to make the grand staircase to the new hall ‘for his own credit and gratefuly for the Company’. In 1673 he was paid £147 for paving the courtyard. In October 1670 he carried out ‘tiling about the Church’ and other work at St Dunstan-in-the-East. He was employed at Bethlem Hospital in 1675, for Robert Hooke noted in his diary on 1 April that year that he had ‘signed Young’s bills for carvings’ (Robinson and Adams 1935, 156). He died in March 1679 leaving two sons, Nicholas and John Young II, both of whom followed their father’s craft.
Literary References: Inderwick 1896-1936, 2, 246, 247, 258, 263; 3, 21; Wren Soc XIX, 18; Knoop and Jones 1935, 31; Gunnis 1968, 451; RG/JP, 9, 1660; Colvin 1995, 1136
Archival References: TNA A.O.l 2487/357 fol 3 (paving: Greenwich Palace); Mercers Misc Ms 17.1; Mercers Acts of Ct 1669 fols 7v & 12r (St Paul's School and school masters' houses); Mercers S & R W Accts (chapel, hall, and clerk's house); Mercers’ Acts of Ct, fols 126, 128 (plastering the cupola); GPC