Details of Sculptor

Surname

Chapman

Alternative Surname

First Name

Joseph and Son, of Frome

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

Flourished

1805-63

Year of Death

Biographical Details

The firm was established about 1805 by Joseph Chapman I. He was succeeded in about 1840 by his son who considerably increased the family business. An advertisement in Cuzner’s Handbook to Frome,1866-7, described the younger Chapman, who had a ‘marble and stone works’ in Portway, as ‘architect, architectural and monumental sculptor.’ It added that Chapman had ‘a collection of designs for monumental erections, from the simplest to the most elaborate, such as can scarcely be surpassed in any provincial town.’
Cuzner extolled the sculptor in the text and listed some of his ‘exquisite’ works (11-14). He described how Chapman had visited cemeteries in Europe and America in order to keep pace ‘with the improved and improving taste of the age’. Monuments from his yard were sent to the Cape of Good Hope, India, the West Indies and New Zealand. Cuzner mentions a mural monument of Purbeck marble and mosaic design in Westminster Abbey, which has not been identified, and an altar monument in Ambleside, which is probably to be the one to Captain Lutwige (9).
Gunnis recorded several other tablets by the firm, which he described as ‘not very exciting’. These included the monument to John Smith, which features a small obese putto sitting on an urn (4). In his entry for the firm Gunnis also took the opportunity to deliver a scathing judgement on Joseph Chapman III, an architect who ‘utterly destroyed’ in 1863 the ‘magnificent and untouched example of a fifteenth-century manor-house’ known as ‘King Ina’s Palace’ at South Petherton, Somerset. Built by Sir Giles Daubeny in the reign of Henry VI, Chapman rebuilt it in ‘Cockney Gothic’ (Gunnis 1968, 97).
Literary References: Cuzner 1866-7, 137-8; Gunnis 1968, 97