Details of Sculptor

Surname

Burnard

Alternative Surname

First Name

Nevil Northey

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

1818

Flourished

1818-78

Year of Death

1878

Biographical Details

He was a Cornish sculptor of humble origins who achieved a national reputation as a portrait sculptor, but died in poverty not far from his birthplace. Burnard was born on 11 October 1818 at Penpont, a small village on Bodmin Moor, the son of George, a stonemason. He received a rudimentary education from his mother, Jane, who kept a dame school and supplemented the family income by making straw bonnets. Methodism was an important influence on Burnard’s early life. His aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Digory Isbell, had been among John Wesley’s first Cornish followers and are remembered for building the region’s first Methodist meeting place, the Wesley Cottage at Trewint. The Burnards and the Isbells were both well-established local families who specialised in stoneworking, and Burnard was related, through his uncle, to Robert Isbell of Stonehouse and James Isbell of Truro.
When he was 10 Burnard started work as his father’s assistant or mortar-boy, and as they travelled between building jobs he must have become familiar with the region’s architecture and monuments. In his spare time he amused himself by drawing or carving in wood and soon progressed to working in slate. His earliest known works are a shell cameo portrait of the hymn-writer James Montgomery and a slate tombstone commemorating his nine-year-old cousin Grace Burnard, both executed when he was 12 (52, 1). While still in his teens, Burnard carved several gravestones and tablets for local churches (2-6), a relief head of John Wesley on local polyphant stone for the façade of the Altarnun Methodist Chapel (51) and a small, delicate relief of Homer on slate (53). In 1832-3 he was employed at Place House, Fowey, a Tudor mansion then being extensively re-modelled by Joseph Treffry, a wealthy industrialist. Burnard probably carved medallions and other architectural ornaments (49). Treffry evidently took an interest in the young sculptor’s progress, later commissioning an expensive porphyry pedestal for Burnard’s bust of the Prince of Wales (39) and sitting for his own portrait (46).
In 1835, the recently established Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society held its first exhibition at Falmouth and Burnard submitted a small relief of Laocoön based on an engraving in The Penny Magazine, for which he was awarded a silver medal (54). He continued to exhibit with the society, winning bronze medals for carvings of Christ bearing the cross and Jupiter and Thetis in 1836 and 1837 (55, 56). These works brought him to the attention of Sir Charles Lemon, the MP for Carclew and first President of the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society, who introduced him to Sir Francis Chantrey RA. Burnard carved a farmyard scene of a sow and her litter as a demonstration piece (57) and Chantrey was impressed enough to find him employment in the London studio of his former pupil, Henry Weekes RA. Soon after arriving in London Burnard struck up a friendship with the artist G F Watts, who showed him the city. He went on to work for E H Baily RA, William Calder Marshall RA and J H Foley RA and exhibited works independently at Falmouth in 1841 and 1843 (58, 13).
A turning point in his career came in 1847 when, through Sir Charles Lemon’s influence, Queen Victoria granted him permission to model a bust of the young Prince of Wales (16). This was Burnard’s first Royal Academy exhibit: it established his reputation and in due course brought him a number of important commissions. When it was exhibited at Falmouth, Burnard was entertained by the Fox family at their home, Penjerrick, where eminent writers, scientists and politicians were frequent visitors. This connection with the Foxes and their circle must have been useful for Burnard’s future career. Caroline Fox described him as ‘a great powerful pugilistic-looking fellow of twenty-nine; a great deal of face, with all the features massed in the centre; mouth open and all sorts of simplicities flowing out of it’. She considered his bust of the Prince of Wales ‘a beautiful thing, very intellectual, with a strong likeness to the Queen’ (Fox II, 1882, 89-90).
In 1849 Burnard started work on a statue commemorating the Cornish explorer Richard Lander, to be placed on a Doric column in Truro (14). It was described soon after its completion in 1852: ‘The figure is clad in loose trowsers and paletot, or frock coat, and holds a palm branch in one hand, while pointing with a scroll in the other, to a map of the Niger. The countenance in place of staring into indefinite space or vacancy, is directed towards the spectators in front’ (Builder, 1852, 205). This was followed by a second public statue honouring Ebenezer Elliott, ‘the Corn-Law Rhymer’, erected in Sheffield in 1854 (15). Burnard seems to have admired Elliott and to have been sympathetic to his radical political views. He published a poem lamenting Elliott’s death (The West Briton, 30 Jan 1852, cited by Martin 1978, 49) and wrote to a member of the Elliott statue committee of his ‘love for the poet of the poor’ (Burnard/Fowler, cited by Martin 1978, 48-9). Between 1847 and 1873 Burnard was engaged chiefly in carving portrait busts and he portrayed many contemporary celebrities including Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Makepeace Thackeray, Richard Cobden, John Bright and W E Gladstone (27, 33, 34, 35, 38).
In his 50s Burnard seems to have lost the will to continue his career as a sculptor. He became discontented and unsettled, left his wife, drank heavily and neglected his work. His unhappiness was caused, or perhaps compounded, by the death of his youngest daughter, Lottie, of scarlet fever in March 1870. She was buried with her uncle, a little-known artist called Tom Nicholson, and Burnard carved an unusual headstone with profile portraits for their grave (11). Finally, Burnard left his London studio and returned to Cornwall. There he wandered the countryside, staying with old friends and neighbours, to whom he presented drawings and poems in return for hospitality, and writing political lampoons and verses for local newspapers. For some months in 1875-6 he lodged with the Dawes family at Crow’s Nest, St Cleer, near Liskeard and an album of his drawings and poetry survives in family hands (Dawes Album). Burnard died at Redruth workhouse on 27 November 1878 of a heart and kidney complaint and was buried in Camborne churchyard. The only mourners are said to have been masons who were working at the church. His son, Thomas, was also a sculptor and exhibited at the RA from 1868 onwards, when he showed a bust of Sir Charles Lemon.
Although Burnard has been little studied nationally by sculpture historians, he is celebrated as a talented and colourful local figure in his native Cornwall. One early-20th-century local historian wrote of him, ‘Burnard was cast in such an ample mould that he rarely failed to arrest attention: tall, broad-shouldered, well-knit, with limbs of a giant, and the flashing eye of a man who knows the heart of humanity. He was the ideal of physical perfection. Had he cared he could have carved for himself a niche in the temple of fame by the side of the country’s greatest sculptors’ (Davey 1910, cited by Martin 1978, 45). In 1954, Camborne Old Cornwall Society erected a headstone of local Delabole slate over his previously unmarked grave, and in 1968 the 150th anniversary of his birth was celebrated with a memorial service at Altarnun and a plaque was erected at his birthplace. Ten years later an account of his life, which stresses the importance of his Cornish roots, was published by Mary Martin.
EH
Literary References: Palgrave 1866, 225; Fox II, 1882, 89-90, 94-5, 109; DNB VII, 1886, 382-3; Gunnis 1968, 71; RG/JP, 2, 216-7; Martin 1978, passim; Read 1982, 50-2, 69; ODNB (Burnard and Peach)
Archival References: GPC
Additional Manuscript Sources: Dawes Album (including drawings and poetry, see Martin 1978 reprs 57-68)
Miscellaneous Drawings: ‘Hieraspistes: A Defence of the Ministry of the Church of England’ (1831) and pencil portraits of Betty Venning (1876), Emily Herring, John Vosper, Emma Bath, Edward Nicholls Vosper, William Bickford Smith, Henry Richards and Jane Richards, various private colls, Cornwall; portraits of Rev William Rowe and unidentified gentleman, Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro (Martin 1978, reprs 45-6).
Portraits of the sculptor: self-portraits, medallions (59, 68); self-portrait pencil drawing, Dawes Album (Martin 1978, frontispiece)