Details of Sculptor

Surname

Byrd

Alternative Surname

Bird

First Name

William, of Oxford

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

1624

Flourished

Year of Death

1690?

Biographical Details

A sculptor, mason and architect of Oxford, he was the son of Thomas Bird and was baptised at St Nicholas, Gloucester, on 1 June 1624. Byrd served an 8-year apprenticeship with William Nicholls, a Gloucester mason, and must have moved to Oxford around 1647, for in 1681, when giving evidence in a lawsuit, he stated that he had worked in that city for 34 years. In 1652 his name appeared for the first time in the overseer’s ratebooks for the parish of St Peter-in-the East. By then he had a wife, Mary, and a daughter was baptised at St Mary Magdalene in November 1652.
In the difficult years after the Civil War when there was little work for masons, he experimented with stone pigmentation. In 1658 he ‘invented a method of staining or painting marble by sinking a colour of considerable depth into the body of polished white marble, by application of it to the outside only, so that the same figure delineated without, shall be perfectly represented within’ (Plot 1677, 277). The achievement made a considerable stir in local circles and encouraged him to present a specimen of his work to King Charles II.
By 1667 he was occupying a tenement near the racket court at the corner of Smith Street, Oxford, where he lived with his wife, two children, a boarder and two journeymen, Richard and Thomas Wood, to whom he paid £8 in wages. His yard was at Holywell in the Oxford suburbs. He remained at the Smith Street house until his death and in his last years paid rates for the whole house. In 1668 a payment of £24 0s 6d was made to Byrd ‘for repairing and setting up the remainder of the Marbles given by my Lord Howard and Mr Selden and 10£ in part for ye. two inscriptions intended for them’ (Oxford, Vice-C’s Accts, Archive WP /21/5, fol 12). This refers to the Arundel Marbles and the inscription tablets are now in the Ashmolean Museum.
Byrd claimed in the 1681 lawsuit that he had worked on ‘severall noble buildings’ in different counties, though most of his work was in Oxford. He was mason at Wadham College by 1656 and was involved in work on Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre, 1666-69. Wren commissioned Byrd to make a model of the theatre and Byrd supplied much carved work there (14). He was also responsible in 1660-69 for minor masonry work in the area, including ‘worke done in securing the Vault of the Divinity Schole, making the new Doore, altering the Professors Seat and ye windowes’ (Oxford, V-C’s Accts, WP /21/5 1667-1697, fols 13v, 20v). In 1670 he made the ornamental centrepiece for the fountain in Tom Quad at Christ Church (15). This took the form of a large rock, gilded and studded with the celestial planets, and a fountain of water, conveyed through the centre of the rock by a pipe running through the mouth of a serpent. The whole structure cost more than £250. The serpent was replaced in 1695 by a statue of Mercury.
In 1671-77 Byrd worked intermittently at New College, where he provided carved panels for the senior common room (16). He stated that he also built the chapel of St Edmund Hall (1680-86) and he designed and partly built the garden quadrangle at New College (1682-85), using a plan that was probably influenced by Wren’s recently prepared design for the palace of Charles II at Winchester. In November 1683, before the New College quadrangle was completed, Wren summoned Byrd to Winchester as building contractor for the south wing of the palace.
A large number of monuments in Oxford and Berkshire have been ascribed to Byrd, but only a handful are signed or documented. The Bishop Brideoake follows the convention for monuments to senior members of the Church, for it has a reclining figure in full vestments inside an architectural surround (2). The Fettiplace is much more elaborate than his other signed works (7). It has 3 life-sized, reclining figures in armour inside a composite frame, tiered one above the other on shelves, and was clearly designed to match an earlier monument in the church to members of the same family. The Dunch, Guise and Sandys monuments are all oval tablets set in elaborately carved frames, incorporating putti as well as foliate ornaments and heraldic shields (3, 4, 6).
Byrd signed his deposition in the lawsuit Wood v Frogley on 7 June 1681 as ‘Gulielmus Bird de Oxon’ and then as William Byrde. He stated that since becoming a master mason he ‘hath in divers Counties work’d at sev’all noble buildings (too many to be here mentioned)’. Stephen Clement, mason, noted that Byrd had been responsible for work at the Bishop’s palace and a chimneypiece at Hasely (10). (OU, Chancellor’s Ct Papers, fol 17, fol 14).
His wife died in 1680 and Byrd married again quickly, for a union between William Byrd and Grace Keeble is registered in the parish records of St Peter-in-the-East. A son, John, was born in 1682. Byrd appears to have ceased work in the late 1680s and in the last quarter of 1690 the words ‘not collected’ are written against his name in the poor rate lists. His fullest biographer, Mrs Cole, described his work as ‘daring, lavish…clumsy, showing an imagination greater than his powers’. Only one autograph monument in which he used his polychrome technique appears to have survived (3).
IR
Literary References: Cole 1947, 63-74; Cole 1952-3, 193-99; Gunnis 1968, 55; Pevsner, Oxon, 1974, 800, 808; Colvin 1995, 203-4; Grove 1996, 5, 336 (White); IGI
Archival References: GPC