Details of Sculptor

Surname

Cartwright

Alternative Surname

First Name

Thomas I

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

c1617

Flourished

Year of Death

1702

Biographical Details

Cartwright was one of the foremost London mason-contractors in the latter part of the 17th century and was responsible for several fine funerary monuments. Nothing is known of his family background, but he was apprenticed to Daniel Chaloner in 1631-32 under the auspices of the Masons’ Company and was turned over to Christopher Kingsfield in 1637-38. Cartwright took an active part in the affairs of the Masons’ Company throughout his mature years: he joined the livery by 1663, became an assistant in 1668, a warden in 1671 and was twice master, in 1673 and again in 1694. Two sons, Thomas Cartwright II and Joseph Cartwright both followed their father’s profession and took a part in Masons’ Company affairs.
Cartwright’s professional activities in the first 40 years of his life are a mystery, but he was evidently considered a reliable contractor for in 1656-7 he was given £53 1s as a part-payment for paving the Temple church and in 1659 he was involved in masons’ work at the Middle Temple. He was also working on a number of sculptural commissions. An account book covering the period from January 1657 to November 1659 details 3 monuments and 10 gravestones sent out of London, as well as a number of chimneypieces and architectural ornaments, all for clients not certainly identified (1-4, 11, 12, 17, 18).
His business expanded after the restoration of Charles II in 1660 and particularly after the Great Fire of 1666. In 1667 he provided chimneypieces for Whitehall Palace (13-15) and that year received the first of several contracts from the City’s livery companies, for masonry work at the new Weavers’ Hall and two houses nearby. In 1668 he was commissioned to rebuild Drapers’ Hall in Throgmorton Street, where he also supplied a chimneypiece and a pair of carved gate-piers which so pleased the Company that they paid him £6 instead of the £4 he had requested (16, 22). The minute book for the Drapers' Hall rebuilding programme records sums totalling more than £1,100 paid to Cartwright between July 1668 and January 1672. He was also issued with a warrant for £250 on 11 November 1672 for work on Bridewell prison (City Lands Rough Minutes 03/001). Cartwright was also a developer: on 19 August 1670 he was granted the lease of a plot of the company’s land with kitchen buildings that he was already converting for other use.
In the years 1667-71 he was the contracting mason for the new Royal Exchange, responsible to the surveyor Edward Jerman. In December 1667 he received a first payment of £200 for work to date. The keen pace slackened in 1668 for Jerman, who was losing control of the enterprise, appeared on site less regularly, and that autumn he died. Cartwright took charge of the ailing scheme: he ‘declared himself master of the wholle designe intended for that building; whereupon the Committee desired him to proceed vigoerously in the work’ (MC, GR, II, 340). On 26 March 1670 his design for the frontispiece and cupola was accepted by the Joint Gresham Committee and the building was finished a year later. Cartwright negotiated with John Bushnell for statues of Charles I and Charles II for the Cornhill frontispiece and he paid Bushnell £300, later reimbursed by the Committee. Cartwright was given ‘the City moiete’ of his fee for Bushnell’s statue of Gresham in November 1671. He was involved again in the sculptural programme in 1685, when he made the payment and perhaps sub-contracted the commission to Arnold Quellin for a statue of Edward IV, ordered by the Ironmongers for the line of kings in the quadrangle.
Cartwright’s proved managerial skills brought major contracts during the 1670s, for he was employed as mason for the rebuilding of Haberdashers’ Hall, 1671, Tallow Chandlers’ Hall, where he was paid £150 in 1672-3, and Mercers’ Hall, completed in 1672. In 1673 he and John Young received £500 from the Mercers for ‘stone and workmanship about the porch and columns’ and other work. Payments for masonry work are recorded in the Guildhall restoration accounts for the years 1671-1675 at Poultry Compter, Fleet Ditch and Holborn Bridge (paid jointly with John Young) and he was also employed in rebuilding Moorgate (£1,400) and Ludgate (£1,160), where he may have provided the statue of Queen Elizabeth. In 1676, he supplied statues of the cardinal virtues for Newgate (24). He was Master Mason at London Bridge for the short period from August 1672 to July 1673, when he passed on the post to his son, Joseph. Cartwright was also the contractor administering large sums at three of Wren’s churches, St Benet Fink, 1670-81 (£1,838), St Mary-le-Bow, 1670-81 (£3,488) and St Antholin, 1678-82 (£3,524). In all three he was responsible for carved stone work (19-21). Robert Hooke, who worked closely with Wren as co-surveyor under the Act for rebuilding London, records that he ‘agreed with Cartwright for Bow tower for £2,500’ (Hooke Diary, 1 March 1676, quoted by Robinson and Adams, 219). Cartwright also worked under Hooke at Bethlehem Hospital in Moorfields. Hooke’s diary has the cryptic reference ‘At Bedlam governors, Cartwright foold’ on 19 October, 1674, and the architect laconically records on 28 September 1675 ‘To Cartwright saw his statues, for Bedlam Gates’ (23; Robinson and Adams, 127, 183). On 7 December 1677 he submitted a bill of £31 5s 7d to the Corporation of London for masonry work at ‘Lady Dacre’s Hospital’ in ‘Tuttle Feilds’ (the Emmanuel Hospital in Tothill Fields, Westminster). In 1675 he completed work on his only known domestic building, Sir William Turner’s house in Warwick Lane.
In the mid-1670s he was responsible for two commissions of greater sophistication than his other known works of sculpture, the elegant monuments to Sir John Langham and to Sir John Lewys (5, 6). Payments for both were itemised in the ledgers at Clayton and Morris’s bank. The Langham has two recumbent effigies in contemporary dress on a tomb chest carved with bold, fleshy cartouches. The sculptor received £290 for the monument in 1676. In the following year Cartwright completed the Lewys, which is now free-standing, and has a pair of semi-reclining figures one above another on a stepped base. It was originally against a wall, and the top part of the monument, a moderate-sized architecturally-framed inscription tablet, remains on the wall. He advertised the metropolitan origins of the work with the words ‘Londini sculptore’ appended to his name and was paid £180 in two instalments.
Cartwright supervised the rebuilding of St Thomas’s Hospital in Southwark, London from about 1680 to 1702. In 1681 he presented the governors with a design for a frontispiece on the Borough High Street ‘containing pillars and the Kings Armes and the effigies of King Edward the Sixth and fower cripples to be carved in stone to be executed in Purbeck marble’ (25; Court Minutes, 11 Nov 1681). His tender for the contract was £190 and he was eventually paid £206 ‘for the frontispiece of stone at the forecourt, graving and other work’ (Cash Book, Nov 1681, June 1682). By the early 1720s the gateway had become too narrow and the structure was moved to the hospital's central quadrangle over a passage leading to the inner square. The statues have been relocated a number of times since. The timidly posed figure of the king is now on a pedestal on the hospital’s river front and the cripples are inside the hospital. They are four lively figures of patients, a woman with her arm in a sling, another leaning on a stick, a poor man on crutches and a well-dressed man with a wooden leg.
He continued to accept contracts until shortly before his death, perhaps helped by his son,Thomas. In 1701 he was engaged on masons’ work at Christ’s Hospital School, Ware and in 1700 he was employed in building St Thomas, Southwark.
The names of several of Cartwright’s apprentices are recorded in the Masons’ Company apprentice bindings book, but little is known of them. Samuel Ward, the son of an Oxfordshire mason, joined him in 1668, Bostock Knight became his ‘husbandman’ in 1678 and John Porter his mason in 1687. His son, Thomas Cartwright II, was apprenticed to him in 1673 and Thomas Davis, who may be the sculptor employed at Chatsworth and Hampton Court in the 1690s, became his clerk of works in 1668. Thomas Green of Camberwell served with Cartwright as a journeyman.
Cartwright’s work as a sculptor was integral to his career as a leading mason contractor in the City's rebuilding programme. His workshop had the skills to provide competent architectural ornaments and monuments, but the Lewys and Langham memorials are of another order. Gunnis pays tribute to the ‘great artistic importance’ of the ‘magnificent’ Langham monument, which ‘proves conclusively that its creator was one of the foremost sculptors of the seventeenth century’ (Gunnis 1968, 87).
IR
Literary References: Inderwick II, 1898, 325; Weaver 1915, 18, 19, 21, 27, 37; Knoop and Jones 1935, 38; Robinson and Adams, 1935, 127, 183; Gunnis 1968, 86-7; Colvin 1995, 232; Grove 13, 614 (Friedman); Saunders 1997, 129-33; Gibson 1997 (2), 148, 161; White 1999, 17-18; Webb 1999, 10, 20, 26, 34; Smith 1999, 14-25; Ward-Jackson 2002, 67, 68, 69,129, 349
Archival References: Cartwright Accounts, 1657-1659; Whitehall O/E 1666-67; Weavers Subs, p 58; Turner Misc Accounts; Guildhall restoration, Poultry Compter, 29v, 29 June 1671, Holborn Bridge, 37r, 7 Feb 1675, Bridewell Prison, 46v, 30 Nov 1671, Moorgate, 52r, 31 Oct 1673; Tallowchandlers, WA, vol 3; St Thomas’s Hospital, Cash Book, 26 August 1681; St Thomas’s Hospital, Court Minutes, 11 Nov 1681; Masons’ Company, Apprentice binding book (1); Corp of London, Emmanuel Hosp, CLA/071/AD/01/007; GPC