Details of Sculptor

Surname

Carter

Alternative Surname

First Name

Thomas I

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

1702

Flourished

Year of Death

1756

Biographical Details

He founded a major London workshop, one of the first to specialise in elaborate marble chimneypieces. Carter was born on 2 May 1702 in Datchet, Bucks, the son of Thomas and Anne Carter. The unsigned monument with a portrait medallion to Thomas Carter Senior (†1726) in Datchet seems likely to be a tribute carved by the Carter children for their father. The family was of well-established yeoman stock, but Thomas, his brother Benjamin Carter, and his nephew Thomas Carter II, all pursued successful careers as sculptors in London.
A colourful vignette published in the European Magazine (vol II, 178) a century after his birth, described Carter’s first premises as ‘a shed near the chapel in Mayfair’ where he scratched a living for himself, his wife and his child, pursuing ‘the lower branches of his profession, such as tomb-stones, grave-slabs, &c.’ and labouring ‘from the rising until the setting of the sun.’ The author, Joseph Moser, who as a young man met Carter, wrote that the sculptor’s luck had changed when a near-neighbour, Charles Jervas, Principal Painter to the King, noticed his work and lent Carter (depicted as an industrious but incredulous simpleton) £100 to buy materials and hire an assistant. However fanciful the anecdote, it is possible that Jervas, a keen collector of sculpture, provided early contacts, for one of Carter’s major commissions was the monument to William Conolly, Speaker of the Irish Parliament, and his wife, both patrons of Jervas (6). This is a remarkably assured early work, with two full length reclining effigies in a towering architectural setting. Catherine Conolly, who holds a book, is on a slightly raised platform behind her husband and leans on her hand to look down at him. The Dublin Gazette recorded the work’s completion on 17-19 August 1736 – ‘On Friday last two curious fine monuments, lately finished by Mr Carter near Hyde Park Corner, was put on board a ship in the river in order to be carried to Ireland’ (Potterton 1975, 39).
In 1734 Carter moved into a yard rated at £12 annually on Portugal Row. The Carter workshop stood here for over fifty years. His immediate neighbour was Thomas Manning, the lead ornament manufacturer, and the lead workshops of Andrew Carpenter and Catherine Nost were nearby. In the 1730s it appears that Carter found employment as a carver on development projects. He worked under the architect John Wilkins on the building of 13-17 Queen Street, Soho in 1733, and under Isaac Ware and Charles Carne involved in the rebuilding of William Pulteney's houses on Chandos Place in 1737 (29). Most of Carter’s signed or documented monuments also date from the 1730s, and include wall-tablets with portrait medallions commemorating Mary Carew (1) and William Arnold (3), and the memorial with two busts to Sir Cecil Wray, Churchwarden of St George, Hanover Square, and his wife (5).
The full sized reclining figures of Colonel Thomas Moore, in Roman armour (4), and the muscular Sir Henry Every (2) both demonstrate Carter’s skill and show a sensitivity to the work of foreign masters in London. Moore’s effigy was modelled on a canvas portrait in his family’s possession, lent ‘to Mr. Carter, the stonemason, who is making a monument’ (Bodl MS North Archives, b.14, fol 19). The effigy is reminiscent of Michael Rysbrack’s monument to Lord Stanhope in Westminster Abbey. The Every memorial was erected by his widow, Anne, Lady Guise, whose family was well-satisfied with the results. In a letter of 1734 written by Sir Simon Every to his sister-in-law, he expressed ‘most humble thanks for ye beautiful monument you have given my brother’ (Every/Guise). The full extent of the monument’s beauty can no longer be appreciated, since the impressive effigy is all that has survived the Victorian restoration of the church.
In the 1740s the Carter workshop began to specialise increasingly in chimneypieces. These were often elaborate, incorporating polychrome marbles, reliefs of literary subjects, classically-derived telamonic figures and carving of the highest quality. They must have been marketed in keen competition with the rich, multi-coloured confections on offer from Henry Cheere. For the Great Apartments at Holkham Hall, Carter and another London neighbour, Joseph Pickford, provided architectural chimneypieces ‘for the most part copied from Inigo Jones’s works’ (Brettingham 1773, ix). In other rooms Carter used colourful Sicilian and Sienese marbles as grounds for reliefs of subjects after the Antique, taken from engravings in Montfaucon’s influential L’Antiquité Expliquée, 1719 (19, 23). Sir Matthew Featherstonehaugh of Uppark paid Carter nearly £1000 between 1747 and 1756 for fireplaces decorated with caryatid figures of classical philosophers and tablets representing Androcles and the Lion and Romulus and Remus (the former relief employed also at Saltram and perhaps elsewhere) (22). Carter used the novel ‘gothic’ style, a fashionable alternative to tired classical ornaments, for chimneypieces at Welbeck Abbey (11) and Bolsover Castle (13). The style had recently been explored by William Kent for interiors at Rousham, by the antiquarian James West at his London home and by the architect Sanderson Millar at Belhus. Carter supplied fireplaces for all these sites (8, 12, 17). A clue to the associations attached to the style comes from the Countess of Oxford’s proud description of Carter’s ‘Gothic chimneypiece’ for Welbeck (11). This was ‘designed partly from a fine one at Bolsover, but composed of great variety of English, Scotch and Irish marbles and alabaster, and not one bit of foreign in it’ (Turberville 1938, 394).
In 1741 Carter extended his premises in Portugal Row and was now liable for £16 in annual rates. By that date he clearly presided over an extensive business. In a letter to Lady Oxford’s agent, Thompson, in 1746, Carter boasted that ‘I have more than forty men under me and, thank God, without any disturbance in the least’ (Portland Archives quoted by Gunnis 1968, 84-5).) and numerous names of assistants appear in the house accounts. William Kay and [John?] Wildsmith, whose mutual animosity at Welbeck prompted the letter to Lady Oxford, were two of his best masons and Thomas Ker, another mason, with John Baker, a polisher, stayed at Blair Castle for 4 months whilst 9 chimneypieces were installed (Atholl Accounts) (16). Kay travelled between Welbeck and Okeover to set up chimneypieces, supported by Leak Okeover, who paid both his travelling and living expenses (Carter/Okeover MS). The extravagant owner of Okeover Hall paid Carter £98 for a chimneypiece in 1743 (10), and a bill for an unidentified mason sent out by Carter made allowance for maintenance over 176 days, which amounted only to £28 12s. In 1746-9 a mason worked at Okeover for 679 days, charged at £113 5s. Whilst relying on a large number of employees, Carter continued to control workshop production and to provide designs. In 1746, he informed Kay that he had sent Lady Oxford ‘a drawing of a Gothick chimney-piece’ (Carter I/Kay), which may be the surviving drawing in the Welbeck Archives.
At Okeover Carter acted as a supplier of sculpture from another neighbour in Piccadilly, John Cheere. The accounts show that £8, with 18s for casing, was paid for ‘work done by order of Mr Carter per John Cheere. To making a statue of a black’ (Oswald 1964, 175). In addition to the Blackamoor, which arrived in 1741, it is possible that ‘two spinx’, supplied by Carter in 1740, also came from Cheere’s workshop. The most prestigious name associated with the Carter workshop is Louis Francois Roubiliac, who, according to the painter James Northcote, was ‘working as a journeyman for a person of the name of Carter’ in or around 1752 (Northcote 1813, 29). Roubiliac had an independent workshop by this date, but may have assisted Carter or worked in sub-contract. Roubiliac later owned a bust of ‘Mr Carter, Statuary,’ although this could be by Benjamin rather than Thomas I.
From 1751 Carter’s much younger brother Benjamin was rated on the property next door to the Piccadilly yard and it seems likely that Benjamin and Thomas had some kind of working relationship, though perhaps not of a formal nature. The rateable value of Thomas Carter’s principal yard had risen to £24 in 1756, suggesting that the last few years of his professional life were the most prosperous. In the years 1751-6, for instance, Carter supplied nine chimneypieces to Blair Castle at a cost of £606 16s 7d (16,21), as well as fulfilling the extensive contracts at Holkham and Uppark.
He died in 1756 and was buried at Datchet, Bucks, where a grave-slab commemorates him and two of his children. A notice in the European Magazine of 1803 stated that he was then a very rich man, with a handsome house in Halfmoon Street, Piccadilly. In his will, proved on 3 September, he divided his estate between his wife, Mary (who inherited all his household goods), his daughter Ann, a minor, and another daughter, Elizabeth, described as ‘the wife of my nephew,’ Thomas Carter II. He asked to be buried in the family vault at Datchet, with the remains of his deceased children. To his brother Joseph he left £50, and to his brother, Benjamin, the workshops, lease of his house, working utensils and ‘all the drawing, models, marble and Portland stone.’ His executors were his neighbour John Cheere, and the master-builder and carpenter, John Phillips of Brook Street. Cheere and Phillips certified Carter’s bank account at Drummonds from June 1756 (Carter I Bank Account). After his death outstanding payments from the Duke of Atholl for 8 chimneypieces were made to his widow.
Carter is chiefly remembered as the one time employer of Roubiliac, although Moser’s anecdote suggests that Carter’s own tale of success was considered noteworthy nearly fifty years after his death. Moser also suggested that Carter benefited from the new fashion for rich architectural decoration, ‘previously very sparingly introduced’. He clearly ran a profitable business providing elegant focal points for the grand rooms of fashionable houses.
MGS
Literary References: Brettingham 1773, passim; Moser 1803, 178-9; Northcote 1813, 29; Turberville 1938, 394; Gunnis 1958, 334; Gunnis 1959 (1), 72; Gunnis 1963, 1174-6; Oswald 1964, 175; S of ., vol 33 (1966), 166; vol 36 (1970), 264; Gunnis 1968, 84-5; Potterton 1975, 39; Guinness 1981, 896-905; Whinney 1988, passim; Bindman and Baker 1995, 48, 214, 373; Baker 2000, passim; Craske 2007, passim
Archival References: Datchet parish registers ; IGI; Poor Rates St George, Hanover Square, WCA C120-1 (1734), C240 (1751), C297 (1756); Carter/Okeover MS; Atholl Accounts; Carter I/Kay; Carter I Bank Account; GPC
Will: PROB 11/824 f313-5
Miscellaneous Drawings: Projections and design for a chimneypiece in the Pillar Parlour at Bolsover, pen, ink and wash, Welbeck Abbey 010720 (Turberville 1938, 397). On loan RIBA library
Portraits of the Sculptor: ‘Mr Carter, Statuary,’ bust, plaster, untraced. Roubiliac’s sale, 12 May 1762, lot 12 (Bindman and Baker 1995, 364)