Details of Sculptor

Surname

Carpenter

Alternative Surname

Charpentiere

First Name

Andrew

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

c1677

Flourished

Year of Death

1737

Biographical Details

Carpenter, ‘a Man in his time esteemd for his Skill’ (Vertue III, 83) was responsible for a number of major statues and monuments in marble and was the most successful designer and modeller of lead garden figures in the generation between John Nost I and John Cheere.
His background is obscure, though the diarist, George Vertue, who knew him well, noted that ‘Charpentiere’ had been born between 1675 and 1677. He may have been a native of the French-speaking Netherlands. Carpenter told Vertue that he had been instructed in ‘the rudiments of drawing’ by the French academician, Peter Eude, who later settled in Scotland (Vertue IV, 35). No details are known of his early training, but he was John Nost I’s principal assistant, engaged in modelling and carving over several years for Nost before he set up independently (Vertue III, 83). Carpenter’s name first appears in the rate-books in 1703, when he acquired premises in Portugal Row, close to the Nost workshop. His neighbours were predominantly French and included the sculptor Nadauld, the decorative painter Louis Laguerre and, from 1707 to 1714, the ironsmith Jean Tijou. J T Smith recorded that the workshop stood on the site in Piccadilly later occupied by Egremont House.
Carpenter’s first major commission and one of his finest works was the statue of Queen Anne for the Moot Hall in Leeds, commissioned by Alderman William Milner and erected in 1713 (8). The Leeds antiquary, Ralph Thoresby, paid numerous visits to the sculptor’s London workshop to check the work’s progress and persuaded Carpenter to make a drawing of the statue to be engraved for Thoresby’s Ducatus Leodiensis (1715). In tones that suggest intense civic pride, Thoresby described the erection of this ‘most noble magnificent statue of her Majesty ... to the full proportion; in the best white marble.’ The statue, in a niche on the principal front of the hall above the town’s coat of arms, ‘was viewed by many of the nobility and gentry who generally esteemed it the best that was ever made, not excepting the most celebrated one [by Francis Bird] in St Paul’s Church-yard’ (Ducatus Leodiensis, 250). The directors of the building scheme at St Paul’s Cathedral were sufficiently impressed with Carpenter’s work to approach him as well as Bird in 1716 when they contemplated commissioning statues for the west end of the cathedral, but they gave the contract to Bird.
On one visit to the workshop in May 1714 Thoresby recorded that as well as works in marble he also saw ‘curious workmanship’ by Carpenter in lead (Diary 2, 209) and leadwork appears to have been Carpenter’s mainstay. In 1716 he supplied garden sculpture to the 1st Earl of Bristol (9) and in 1722, an ‘abundance of works’ to the Duke of Chandos for Canons (10). Drawing on Nost’s work, as well as classical and renaissance prototypes and his own innovations, Carpenter built up a substantial repertoire of lead figures. His price list submitted to Lord Carlisle at Castle Howard who made purchases in 1723 gives some indication of the range as well as the dimensions and prices of his garden ornaments:
Feet Pounds
Cain and Abel l6 20
Do 6 20
Hercules & Wild Boar 6 20
Dianna & Stagg 6 20
Narcifsus 7 1/2 27
Venus de medici 6 15
Antonius 6 18
Saturnus 6 1/2 20
Triton 6 20
Bacchus sitting 6 18
Faunus 6 20
Meleager 6 20
Adonis 6 18
Apollo 6 18
Flora 6 16
A Gladiator 6 12
Duke of Marlborough 6 28
Roman Wrestlers 20
Narcissus 5 1/2 20 ?
Neptune 5 1/2 9
Mercury 5 1/2 10
Antinous 5 8
Venus 5 10
Do 5 7
a Bagpiper 5 10
An Indian 5 8
Apollo 5 9
Flora 5 9
Mercury 5 9
Cleopatra 5 7
Daphne 5 8
A french paisant & paisanne [two figures] 4 10
Jupiter 4 1/2 6
Apollo 4 5
Winter & Autumn [2 :fig] 4 1/2 8:08:0
4 Signs of ye Zodiac 4 16
A faunus & Nimph [two figures] 4 8:08:0
Mercury & fame [two figures] 3 6:06:0
Apollo 3 1/2 3:10:0
Love & disdain [two figures] 3 1/2 8
A large vase 6 20
3 do 5 24
1 do 4 6
Boys and Girls 18:18:0
4 Large Bustos 16
a pr of vase 7
6 vases 22
12 flower potts large & small 24
The list was not comprehensive, for it did not include Carlisle’s chosen figures (12). The sculptor was also prepared to provide bespoke items: : William Aikman visited Carpenter and several other Hyde Park Corner figure makers in November 1725 on behalf of Sir John Clerk of Mavisbank and reported that although he was not impressed by the goods in stock it was possible to ‘get something done a-purpose after a good design’ (Fleming 1962 (1), 38). Packing and freight for leads required as much care as for marbles: Carlisle paid £84 for his statues, packing cases cost £9 7s 9d, and it took a workman nine and a half days, twenty-one pounds of ‘spike’ and a thousand ‘double-tenns’ nails to prepare the works for the journey to Yorkshire.
Carpenter clearly prospered in his middle years, for in 1718 he took a second site in Portugal Row, described in the rate-books as ‘workhouse and land.’ He also invested in property at Edgware, building ‘some houses and an Inn’ on the outskirts of the Canons estate. Vertue relates that the sculptor advertised his presence in the area with one of his own works ‘and in the middle of the road way put up a statue for a sign’ (Vertue III, 83). Chandos was incensed at this vulgarity, but the sculptor refused to remove the figure.
There were other influential patrons. In 1719 he provided garden ornaments under the direction of the architect, James Gibbs, for Wimpole Hall (23) and in 1722 he transported marble figures from Chatsworth to Chiswick and bronzed busts for Lord Burlington (25). Gibbs and Carpenter collaborated again on allegorical figures at Ditchley Park in 1722 (11), and on the monument to Montague Garrard Drake, 1725 (2), which cost £180. Carpenter’s monument to the ‘restless malcontent’ Henry Booth, 1st Earl of Warrington (6), erected by his son, George, in 1734, was inspired by Gibbs’s dramatic design for the monument to Katharine Bovey, 1727-8, in Westminster Abbey, illustrated in A Book of Architecture,1728. The focal point of the Bovey monument is a pair of allegorical Virtues representing Learning and Truth, who point towards Mrs Bovey’s portrait, to emphasize her particular qualities. The same attendant figures appear again on the Warrington monument, but as fashionable trappings to an epitaph extolling Warrington’s revolutionary principles and exonerating him from allegations of corruption.
Carpenter’s monuments make use of ornaments familiar from John Nost I’s work, including scrolls, flaming urns, cartouches and putti. He appears to have kept his prices competitive, charging only £389 for the Warrington, a monument comparable in its materials and carving to Nost’s memorial to Viscount Irwin, 1697, at Whitkirk, which cost £600. Carpenter’s work did not suffer as a result of his careful budgeting: the reclining figure of Sir John Thornycroft, bewigged, in his nightgown and in mid-speech, is intricately carved, particularly the gesturing fingers and fleshy undersides of the feet (3).
In his later years Carpenter had business anxieties. He was increasingly obliged to give ‘time & study to Cast Leaden figures’ and complained that prices paid for work at this less prestigious end of the market were diminishing and that ‘he had much ado to hold up his head at last’ (Vertue III, 83). In January 1736 he announced in the Daily Journal that he intended to ‘leave off entirely the casting of lead figures’ and intended to sell ‘his entire stock of Statues of Figures in Hard Lead, Vases, Pots and Pedestals’. Perhaps encouraged by two recently completed commissions in Cheshire (6, 7), he advertised an intention to ‘apply himself solely to his other business, viz the Statuary and Carving Part in Marble and Stone’ (ibid).
The advertisement had little effect. Carpenter is not known to have won any further major commissions and ‘age and cares brought him to his end’ in July 1737, aged a little over 60. He was buried in his parish church, St George, Hanover Square (Vertue III, 83). In his will the sculptor left all his ‘cottages, houses, lands, tenements and estate’ in Edgware to his wife Ann, together with his chattels and shop contents. His son, John Carpenter, who ‘had been an Idle fellow many years’ (Vertue III, 83) received the proverbial shilling. Ann Carpenter continued to pay rates on the Hyde Park property and in May 1744, a sale was held there of her late husband’s ‘Metal Statues or Figures in Hard Lead ... together with his Moulds, Models and casts in Plaister’ (Daily Advertiser).
There is no known portrait of the sculptor, ‘a gross heavy man allwayes’ (Vertue III, 83). He was of particular value to Vertue while gathering information for his intended history of British painting and sculpture, since Carpenter provided accounts of several artists including Arnold Quellin, the elder Nost, John Nost II and Louis Laguerre.
Carpenter’s monuments have been described by Margaret Whinney as transitional works, hovering stylistically between the ornamental baroque of Nost and the new Gibbsian designs, which drew on developments in Continental sculpture. His lead garden figures, particularly the ambitious groups supplied for Powis Castle (19,20), are masterpieces of the genre.
MGS
Literary References: Vertue III, 83, IV, 35; Daily Journal, 26 Jan 1736 (Burney 319B); Daily Ad, 4 May 1744 (Burney 381B); Thoresby Diary (1830), vol 2, 98, 190, 209, 215, 221-2; Smith 1846, 15-16; DNB; Bolton 1939, 128, 132; Friedman 1973 (1); Friedman 1984 (1), passim; Fleming 1962 (1), 38-9; O’Connell 1987, 804-5; Whinney 1988, 244-251; Davis 1991 (1), passim
Archival References: WCA, Poor Rates, St Martin-in-the-Fields, 1703, (F1262) , 1718 (F447); St George, Hanover Square 1727, (C97), 1737, (C127); Carpenter-Carlisle, list
Will: PROB 11/684 sig155
Auction Catalogues: Carpenter 1736; Carpenter 1744