Details of Sculptor

Surname

Cass

Alternative Surname

First Name

Christopher I

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

1678

Flourished

Year of Death

1734

Biographical Details

A conspicuously successful master mason whose team worked in London, Cambridge and at a number of large country houses, he was also apparently responsible for the remarkable monument to Jane and Edward Bray (1). Cass may have come from a family of masons since a Thomas Cass was master-mason at the Tower of London in 1668 (TNA, Works 5/145) and another Thomas Cass took an apprentice through the Masons’ Company in 1711. He was apprenticed to Henry Parker in 1692 and made free of the Masons’ Company on 8 July 1701. By 1704 he was one of the chief masons working under Edward Strong I and with Edward Strong II at Greenwich, where Cass was still employed on the west front of the Queen Anne building in 1725-6.
His work on London churches after the Fifty New Churches Act of 1711 included the completion of St John, Westminster, 1729-31, where he was responsible for ‘pointing the Joints of the 4 Towers making good Fractures to keep out the Weather’ (LPL MS 2701, fol 499, quoted by Friedman 2004, 43). He and Andrews Jelfe were responsible for the paving and other work at St Luke, Old Street, 1732-3. Cass built the tower of St Alphege, Greenwich, for which he received £3,043 and he worked as master mason at St Anne, Limehouse. Church commissions outside the Fifty Churches scheme included the building of St George’s Chapel, Red Lion Fields, completed in 1719, and St George, Hanover Square, where he succeeded Joshua Fletcher I in 1725 and was responsible for most of the carved stone work (3). He was the mason at St Martin-in-the-Fields, 1722-6, working under the architect, James Gibbs, and received payment for his work in 1733, a full seven years after its completion (4).
On 16 December 1719, Cass wrote to the Bishop of Carlisle offering himself for the post of master mason at Westminster Abbey in place of Edward Tufnell, who had recently died. He felt well qualified ‘having been bred in the buildings part of the Masons Trade in ye most considerable Publick Buildings lately advanced, which I have conducted where I have been concerned so farr as related to ye immediate executive part, and from that experience doubt not to do ye same work equally well at £20 pr. cent. cheaper than the Abbey have paid for ye same’ (WA Muniments 65615). Cass added that he had been ‘ye lowest Bidder among many competitors for ye Balistrades to St Paul's which I have just finished’.
Cass also worked on a large number of grand domestic buildings. He and Joshua Fletcher I were the principal masons at Blenheim from 1716, and in 1717 he was paid £159 for mason’s work at Chevening. Around 1719 he built Briggens, near Hunsdon, Herts, for Robert Chester, one of the directors of the South Sea Company. In 1720, when the ‘Bubble’ burst and the directors were arrested and forced to give an account of their financial position, Chester wrote that he was ‘indebted to Christopher Cass, mason, for stone and marble used, and work done, in building my house in Hertfordshire, £928 3s. 7d., as by his accompts, which not being according to agreement, I cannot adjust it at present’ (Chester Inventory 1721, 51). Cass and Fletcher were responsible for the stonework front of Burlington House, London, 1719-22. Cass was also employed at Canons, near Edgware, 1724; at the London house of the architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor, 1727, and at Lord Bristol’s house in St James’s Square, London, 1732. He was master mason at Wolterton Hall, Norfolk (5). Cass, who was Master Mason to His Majesty’s Ordnance, was employed at least twice on royal commissions: in 1727 he worked at the White Lodge in Richmond New Park and he was employed intermittently at Kew Palace in the years 1731-44, assisted by Andrew Jelfe (7).
Under Gibbs’s direction Cass worked at Cambridge University from 1721. He built the south-east and north sides of the Senate House, where he was responsible for all the carved stonework (6) and in 1724 he was mason for the Fellows’ Building, King's College. In 1727 he worked at Trinity Hall.
Cass provided much architectural ornament during his career but only one unsigned monument has been identified, to the children of Sir Edmund Bray (1). This is credited to Cass on the strength of a note on the back of the design which reads ‘To Mr Chri Cass to be left att the George Inn; in Woodstock Oxfordshire’. The monument has a simple architectural ground above a large pedestal on which is presented a touching and dramatic scene. An angel holds the hands of two young children in contemporary dress, a girl in front who looks up trustingly and a boy who is reluctant to move forward, so causing the angel to twist round, encouraging him on. Clouds envelop the feet of all three. The two effigies, the angel and the inscription are London work, but the monument was clearly assembled by a local mason using a freestone instead of white marble.
Cass bound several apprentices through the Masons’ Company: Jeremiah Bond joined him in 1714, Thomas Brooks and Henry Keble in 1717, James Prosser in 1718, his son Christopher Cass II in 1721 and Charles Pauling in 1732. His foreman at the time of his death was Thomas Gayfere I.
He died in London and was buried in the cemetery of St John, Westminster, under a heavy granite monument inscribed ‘Chr. Cass, master-mason to his Maj. Ordnance. Dy’d Ap. 21, 1734’. In a report to the RIBA ‘On the Mechanical Processes of Sculpture’ Charles Harriott Smith suggested that this monument was one of the earliest works in England to be executed in granite, and that ‘its mouldings, though such as would now be considered rude in form and execution, were highly esteemed in his (Mr. Smith’s) boyhood’ (Builder,1851, 215). In his will Cass originally expressed a wish to be buried in a vault beneath the portico of St Martin-in-the-Fields, but he substituted St John’s burial-ground in a codicil. To Edward Strong II, ‘my friend and benefactor’, he left £50, declaring that he owed him what ‘I and my family, under the good providence of God, have’. He named Andrews Jelfe his executor, and bequeathed him 100 guineas. Thomas Gayfere received £20 and ‘all his wearing apparel, linen and woollen of all kind’.
Cass’s widow survived him and died in 1742. Andrews Jelfe, writing in that year to William Dixon, tells him that ‘Mrs. Cass was buried last week. She had left all her part to Mr. Bright, a young lawyer, who married her daughter’.
IR
Literary References: Webb 1967, 115; Gunnis 1968, 88-9; Physick 1969, 27, 66-68; Colvin 1973-76, V, 232; Friedman 1984, 70, 234, 237, 293-5, 310-1; Colvin 1995, 542; Skelton 1994-1996, 111-128; Webb 1999, passim; Bold 2000 (2), 155; Friedman 2004, 43; BHO
Archival References: Masons’ Co, Freemen, fol 8 (1701); Company Members, 1708, 6 (working in Woodstock); Greenwich Hosp bills, 82, 85-90; Graham/Collier Accts (Burlington House); GPC
Additional MS Sources: LPL, Papers of the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches, Lambeth Palace Library, MSS/2690-2750; BM, Ad MS 27587 (Hawksmoor's London house)
Will: PROB 11/667 (24 Oct 1734)