Details of Sculptor

Surname

Burman

Alternative Surname

First Name

Thomas

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

1617/18

Flourished

Year of Death

1674

Biographical Details

Burman was a successful London sculptor who employed at least six apprentices and assistants in the 1660s. Something of his character can perhaps be gathered from George Vertue’s story that one of his team, John Bushnell, was trapped by his master into marrying a servant Burman had himself seduced.
He was apprenticed to Edward Marshall in 1632-33 under the auspices of the Masons’ Company, joined the livery in 1657-58 and became upper warden in 1673. He was said to have suffered poverty during the Commonwealth but appears to have become prosperous in later years and at his death owned a considerable amount of real estate. He lived in Drury Lane, Covent Garden from c1649 with his wife Rebekah, who carried on the business after his death, taking on two new apprentices in 1675 and a third in 1679.
His first known works were the effigy of the third Earl of Essex, 1646 (1) and an engraved plate for his coffin. The signed bill for the effigy survives (BM Add MS 46189, fol 113). He supplied two designs in 1651-52 for the family monument that Sir Ralph Verney intended to erect at Middle Claydon, Bucks, but the commission went to his former master, Marshall. One of Verney’s agents decribed Burman as negligent. In 1652 John Stone noted in his memorandum book that one of five heads commissioned from him by Sir William Paston was roughed out by a Mr Ellis (probably Anthony Ellis) and finished by ‘Mr Boreman’ (Vertue I, 94).
A considerable number of monuments have been attributed to Burman on stylistic grounds, but only three surviving ones have been authenticated. In 1661 he signed the large wall-monument to Sir John Dutton at Sherborne, a standing figure with hooded eyes and hollow cheeks, clothed in a tightly-stretched shroud, set within an elaborate architectural frame (2). Vertue records that there was documentary evidence (now lost) for the wall-monument to Bartholomew and Katherine Beale at Walton, Bucks, c1672, which has two delicate high-relief portrait busts in oval niches (3). A third commission, the reclining figure of Frances, Lady Chandos, at Chenies (4) is documented: a bill submitted after Burman’s death includes the item ‘for the new tomb of black and white marble and alabaster £90-00-0’ . The endorsement on the bill, which includes £12.10s for restoration work on other memorials in the Bedford chapel, reads ‘4 June 1675: £45 paid to Mistress Burman in part … 14th March 1675 [ie 1676] - £47 to Mistress Burman in full’ (Russell box 262).
Soon after Charles II's restoration Burman received the prestigious commission for a black and white chimneypiece for the King's bedchamber at Whitehall (7), but there is no evidence of further royal employment. Gunnis considers Burman’s most important work to have been the statue of Mary, Countess of Shrewsbury, 1671, erected over a gateway in St John’s College, Cambridge (5). He may have provided the statue of Lady Margaret Beaufort, 1674, also at St John’s College.
Burman’s apprentices included, in addition to John Bushnell, Thomas Ashurst, who was listed in the Masons’ Company Apprenticeship Records for 1666, John Dannett (1667), Matthew Pennyall (1667), William Robbins (1668), Oliver Fawcett (1669), Henry Prescott (1669), John Collins (1671) and John Cillinys. Nothing is known of their subsequent careers.
He died in March 1674 and was buried in the vault at St Paul, Covent Garden. His swagged table-tomb in the churchyard was sketched by Vertue (Vertue IV, 34). By his will he made bequests to his widow and three daughters; his son, Belthasar Burman, inherited his house and yard in Drury Lane and two of the apprentices, John Cillinys and William Carter (whose name does not appear in the Masons’ Company records), received £3 each. His friends, Joshua Marshall and Abraham Storey were each given £5 for a mourning ring. In 1675 Rebekah Burman was paid £2 14s 3d as Thomas’s widow for work on the gallery at the west end of St Paul’s, Covent Garden.
It is not possible to evaluate Burman’s status in the creative climate of Restoration London since so few of his works have been securely identified. A little earlier, during the Commonwealth period, he was described in a letter to Sir Ralph Verney as ‘one of ye best stone cutters … in London’ and one of Verney’s agents commended him as having ‘la reputation d-estre bon artisan’ (Stone 1955-6, 2, 74). Writing nearly a century after his death, Vertue was ambivalent about his achievement, describing him both as ‘A good mason & Carver of that time’ (Vertue I, 128) and as ‘No extraordinary Artist’ (ibid). Gunnis considered him to have been a sculptor of considerable merit, though Whinney, judging him by the Dutton monument, felt he did not have much talent. Beyond enlarging the possible corpus of his work, no later writers have sought to rehabilitate him.
IR
Literary References: Vertue I, 86, 89, 90, 94, 128, IV, 34; Willis and Clarke 1886, II, 320; Knoop and Jones 1935, 24; Stone 1955-6, 2, 67-82; Gunnis 1968, 71; Stone 1955-6, 67-82; Survey of London, vol 36, St Paul, Covent Garden, 1970, 105n; Whinney 1988, 95, 437 n50; 440 n12; Grove 5, 263 (White); White 1999, 13-17; Webb 1999, passim
Will: PROB 11/344/33