Details of Sculptor

Surname

Burch

Alternative Surname

First Name

Edward I RA

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

1730

Flourished

Year of Death

1814

Biographical Details

One of a handful of London gem-engravers, Burch was also a wax modeller and medallist. He was baptised on 30 October 1730 at St Botolph-without-Aldgate, the son of Andrew and Hannah Burch. He worked initially as a Thames waterman, and his ‘first effort in painting was exercised in the imitation of a gold band round his hat and the superior style of the interior of his wherry’ (New Monthly Mag 1816, 417).
In 1760, when he showed at the first Society of Artists exhibition, he was working as a seal engraver in Bedford St, Bedford Row and his submission was an engraving on a semi-precious hardstone (2). This form of gem carving was classical in origin and the popularity of engraved gems with British grand tourists prompted the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce to attempt to found a native school. The society offered a series of premiums, several of which were awarded to Burch between 1763 and 1766, including one for a head of the Apollo Belvedere in 1764 (6).
Burch studied drawing and modelling at the St Martin’s Lane Academy and in the Duke of Richmond’s gallery of casts after the Antique. In Mortimer’s Director of 1763, he described himself as ‘Burch, Edward, engraver in stone. The upper end of Red-lion-court, Fleet Street’ (Mortimer 1763, 4). By 1764 he had taken Nathaniel Marchant as an apprentice, and in 1765 he relocated to Warwick Street, Charing Cross. That year he was elected a fellow of the Society of Artists and in 1768 he and Marchant were made directors on the governing committee. Marchant wrote to the committee in October asking that he and his former master be described as ‘sculptors’, because the term was ‘more applicable’ to their profession than the word engraver (Seidmann 1987, 7-8). His skill won him important patrons, including the Duke of Marlborough, who commissioned some of Burch’s most attractive surviving work (8, 9, 23, 24, 27, 30).
On 2 September 1769, aged 39, Burch enrolled as a student at the newly founded Royal Academy Schools. The following year he was elected an ARA, and in March 1771 he presented to the council ‘a small model of a figure of Neptune, in wax as a specimen of his abilities’. The council asked him also to supply an intaglio or cameo, since it was for this work that he was renowned (10). In June he became the first Royal Academician to be elected by his fellow members (RA Council Minutes, vol 1, 1770, fols 82, 85; 1771, fol 109).
At the Academy exhibitions Burch exhibited portraits and carvings of models from the Academy life class in poses of biblical and classical figures (53, 68). An interest in anatomical precision influenced a good deal of his work and he was a close friend and admirer of the Professor of Anatomy, Dr William Hunter. He executed an écorché figure for Hunter (1) and also designed the Hunter medal, which has a portrait of the anatomist on one side and a scene of the doctor instructing an anatomy class on the reverse. In 1788 Burch described himself as ‘Engraver to his majesty for medals and seals in stones and to HRH the Duke of York’ and in 1790 as the medallist and gem-engraver to the King of Poland. He also worked for Wedgwood (21, 82, 83) and with the Scot, James Tassie.
In spite of these honours Burch struggled to make a living and in 1794 he was appointed librarian to the Royal Academy, a post traditionally given to indigent artists, which Burch filled with erratic application. In 1794 he alone voted for himself as future president of the Royal Academy after the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He seems not to have endeared himself to his fellow academicians by his coarseness of manner and expression. In 1795 he had privately printed his Catalogue of One Hundred Proofs from Gems, Engraved in England by E Burch RA, in an apparent move to drum up trade. The attempt must have failed, for in that year John Bacon RA told Joseph Farington that Burch (who on occasion engraved Bacon’s designs on gems) had repeatedly and unsuccessfully asked Bacon for money. In 1796, when living at 2 Paynes Place, Kentish Town, he complained to Farington that he had only two commissions in hand, an oft-repeated carving of a head of Shakespeare (which he had taken from Peter Scheemakers’s portrait) and an image of Lady Mansfield’s favourite cow (34, 26).
Burch became increasingly dependent on the Royal Academy’s charity. In February 1800 he was described as ‘in great distress’ as a result of ‘long illness and want of employment’ and he was advanced a quarter of his salary, and granted £50. Between 1811 and 1814 he received a pension of £40 pa (RA Council Minutes, vol 3, fols 47, 51, 56, 85; vol 4, fol 377; vol 5, fol 59). He died on 11 February 1814. His obituary, probably written by his son Henry Jacob Burch, remarked that the gem-engraver’s profession had become virtually obsolete, but that ‘our artist’s self-taught knowledge warrants the term genius’ (New Monthly Mag, vol 1, 1814, 192, quoted in Seidmann 1997, 265).
Burch’s works have subsequently occupied an historiographical no-man’s land, between sculpture and engraving, and have received little serious consideration in the text books of either discipline. Gertrud Seidmann’s work has recently done much to illuminate his life and career and to place his technically remarkable work in the visual culture of the day.
MGS
Literary References: Farington, passim; Graves I, 1905-6, 340; Graves 1907, 43; Hutchison 1960-62, 134; Brown 1980, 44; Stainton 1983, 18; Seidmann 1985, 150-153; Seidmann 1987, 5-8, 16, 19, 20, 21, 26; Grove 1996, 187 (Seidmann); Seidmann 1997, 263-279
Archival References: IGI
Representations of the Sculptor: J Zoffany Life School at the Royal Academy 1771-2, oil on canvas (Royal coll); Edward Burch Jr, exhib RA 1814, untraced