Details of Sculptor

Surname

Cibber

Alternative Surname

First Name

Caius Gabriel

Initial of Surname

C

Year of Birth/Baptism

1630

Flourished

Year of Death

1700

Biographical Details

The son of a Danish royal cabinet-maker, Cibber was a sculptor to two English kings, Charles II and William III. He was born in Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein and travelled to Italy around 1647 with a grant from Frederik III of Denmark and there studied classical art. Returning home through the Netherlands he may have come into contact with the sculptor Peter de Keyser, for when he arrived in London c1655, he joined the workshop of John Stone, de Keyser’s kinsman, in Long Acre. Cibber worked as a journeyman and then foreman to Stone and when Stone suffered paralysis in Breda in 1660 while petitioning for a royal appointment from Charles II, Cibber brought him back to England. He ran Stone’s workshop until his master’s death in 1667 and then set up on his own.
Cibber married twice. Nothing is known of his first wife, but in 1670, while living in Southampton Street, Bloomsbury, he married Jane Colley, an heiress from Rutland, who ‘had 6000 pounds fortune’ (Vertue I, 99). Some of this was set aside for their three children, Veronica, Colley, who later became an actor, dramatist and poet laureate and Lewis, who went to Winchester College, where his father presented a statue of the founder on his son’s behalf (12). Cibber gambled away the balance of his wife’s fortune and insolvency dogged his mature years: he was periodically imprisoned for debt and twice, in 1680 and 1689, had to re-assert his standing with the Crown in order to continue work.
His independent career began with a flourish, when on 20 June 1667, he was appointed a member of the Royal Household and a sculptor to the King. This provided status but no guarantee of employment and he realised that his best opportunities lay in the City of London, where rebuilding was under way following the Great Fire of 1666. In 1668 Cibber joined the Leathersellers’ Company, which gave him the right to work within the City Liberties, but characteristically, he was unable to find the fee of £25 and eventually paid in kind, presenting the Company with a fountain (20). In 1668 also, he was appointed Surveyor to the Steelyard and carved the arms of the Hanseatic League for the entrance to their headquarters in Thames Street (21). He was willing to make ephemeral structures for the City fathers, including decorations for the hustings at the lord mayor’s banquets in the 1670s and the figures of Gog and Magog for the Guildhall, which he twice showed in 1672 to his frequent dining companion, Robert Hooke, one of the commissioners for rebuilding the City (6).
Meanwhile Cibber had already turned his attention to one of the most prestigious new building projects, the Royal Exchange. In December 1667 the Lord Chamberlain recommended him as sculptor for a sequence of 27 statues of English monarchs for niches in the inner courtyard and he submitted models which apparently pleased the King (4, 5). The Gresham Committee, who controlled the building project, evidently considered his submission premature, for they refused to consider commissioning statues when the foundations were barely laid and told him to apply again in due course. The statues were carved many years later by other sculptors while he was working in the Midlands. In 1668 Cibber was among those seeking the post of Surveyor of the New Exchange but was again unsuccessful.
The sculptor was an active member of the German Lutheran community. In 1672 these ‘strangers and foreigners residing in London’ obtained a charter from the King allowing them to build their own church in the City by private subscription (Guildhall MS 8358). Cibber, who offered his services as architect without fee, probably designed the severe, rectangular building in Little Trinity Lane, London.
In 1673 he won his first important public contract, for a large relief for the Monument, the memorial column commemorating the Great Fire (23). This brought him into contact with Sir Christopher Wren, Surveyor of the King’s Works. The sculptor was given day release from the Marshalsea debtors’ prison in Southwark to carve the ambitious allegorical tableau presenting the King as the benign force controlling the rebuilding programme. He earned £600 between 28 June 1673 and 8 September 1675, paid ‘out of the cole money’ for his ‘hieroglifick ffigures’ in relief (Guildhall MSS 184/4, fol 31) and also prepared estimates for several ideas for the finial above the column (Guildhall MS 5761). Edward Pearce, who carved the City griffins, emblematic swags and armorials, is not named in the accounts, which suggests that he worked in sub-contract to Cibber. The first English edition of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, 1709, edited by Isaac Fuller the Younger, has a frontispiece showing the arrival of the Romans on British shores and pointing at Cibber’s relief on the Monument. Several of the engravings are signed ‘C.G.C. Deli.’
Soon after the Monument’s completion Cibber won a second pivotal London contract for statues to flank the entrance to Bethlem Hospital for the Insane at Moorfields. He carved a pair of writhing near-naked figures of Raving and Melancholy Madness (7), whose bold and disturbing naturalism, which transcended all the sculptural conventions of the time, gives credence to the tradition articulated by George Vertue, the diarist and engraver, that they were modelled from life.
Cibber’s monument to the 13-year old Thomas Sackville is another dramatic tableau (2). The twisting effigy reclining on a tomb-chest looks heavenwards, his hand on a skull, and is attended by life-sized figures of his grieving parents kneeling either side of the chest. The contract drawn up with Sackville’s mother, the Dowager Countess of Dorset, made the unusual stipulation that the completed work must be approved by Sir Peter Lely, Principal Painter to the King, before a final payment would be authorized
Cibber experimented with lead sculpture and helped to popularise this material for garden statuary and other works, including the statue of William of Wykeham (12). His stone figures found favour with aristocratic patrons, perhaps because he was prepared to travel to their country estates and to economise by using local materials. In 1680 the 9th Earl of Rutland ordered seven pastoral figures in Ketton stone for Belvoir Castle, at a cost of £35 each (8). Cibber evidently also thought that he also had the prestigious contract for monuments to the 7th and 8th Earls in Bottesford church, for he wrote to inform his patron’s secretary that he had arranged freight of the necessary marble by river from Lyme Regis to Windsor and then by land to Stamford. In a postscript he sought to tempt the Earl with two colossal figures of gladiators, in preparation at Ketton. The monuments were carved two years later by Grinling Gibbons and the gladiators were not mentioned again.
From 1685-87 Cibber worked under the architect William Talman on a major commission for Lord Kingston at Thoresby Hall, Notts (43). His willingness to work in local materials is indicated by a memorandum inserted in the 1st Duke of Devonshire’s Building Accounts at Chatsworth, which ends ‘at this rate I will doe my endeavour to serva any Nobleman, in freestone’ (Devonshire Building Accounts, vol VIII, f.5A). Cibber and Talman then moved on to Chatsworth where Cibber began to receive modest but regular payments in December 1687, eventually earning £450. He supplied figures in local stone for the gardens including a magnificent Triton and sea-horses for a fountain (28), provided marble statues for the great staircase and others in alabaster, carved in the round, for the chapel altarpiece (9, 32). He may also have have been responsible for the design of the altarpiece, though the decorative elements were probably carved by Samuel Watson.
Cibber’s association with Wren was renewed in 1678, when the architect appears to have considered employing him as sculptor for a projected mausoleum for King Charles I in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle (Stewart, 1977, 1-56). Wren gave him the contract in 1681 for allegorical figures for the parapet of his library at Trinity College, Cambridge (25) and in 1682 tried unsuccessfully to get him the contract for a statue for Tom Tower, Christ Church, Oxford. From 1690-94 they were both working at Hampton Court Palace (30, 31, 34, 35). Cibber’s relief for the east front pediment of the palace was another patriotic tableau, Hercules triumphing over Envy (37), an allusion to King William III’s victories over Louis XIV of France. He was paid £400 for ‘the Great Frontispiece with Iconologicall figure, and for sevll. Journeys of himself witmen to look after the performance’ (PRO E 351/3464).
In 1693 he was appointed Sculptor-in-Ordinary to William III in succession to Peter Besnier. This office carried an annual retainer of £50, but involved routine duties including custody of the royal collection of moulds, statues and models. Minor payments were made to him in 1693 for repairs to statues in the Queen's Garden.
Cibber returned to architectural design in 1694, when he was appointed surveyor, without fee, to the Danish Church for Scandinavian merchants in Wellclose Square, Poplar, after the Danish Elders rejected their appointed architect’s plans. He also provided statues of Biblical figures in oak for the reredos (38) and probably the lead statues of Christian Virtues on the principal front (36).
During the last two years of his life Cibber worked under Wren once more, at St Paul’s Cathedral. He must have had a considerable workforce to carve the keystones for the arches supporting the dome (39) and the pediment relief of a rising phoenix for the south transept front (40). He died in 1700 and was buried beside his wife in the Danish Church.
Little is known of Cibber’s assistants. In April 1678 the Masons’ Company conducted one of their periodic searches and listed five men, all foreigners of whom nothing is known, working for the sculptor. In 1691, two other assistants, one of them named Pearson, were left at Chatsworth to complete Cibber’s contract. The only other clue to workshop members is George Vertue’s brief statement that Francis Bird worked for Cibber after leaving Gibbons’s employment.
Vertue described Cibber as ‘a Gentleman-like man & a man of Good sense but died poor’ (Vertue I, 39). His royal commissions attest to his contemporary reputation, but recent scholars, perhaps comparing his work with the virtuoso wood-carving of his rival, Gibbons, have dismissed him as no more than reasonably competent, a harsh judgment to pass on the author of the Sackville monument and the great Hercules relief at Hampton Court. Cibber’s work testifies to the extraordinary versatility of a leading late-17th century workshop.
IR
Literary References: Vertue 1, 39, 91, 99; II, 36, III, 34, IV, 64,178,165; Faber 1926; Robinson and Adams 1935, passim; Knoop and Jones 1935, 25; Thompson 1949, passim; Gunnis 1968, 101-3; Physick 1969, 24-7, 54-5; Colvin 1973-6, 29, 162,171,190, 297; Gold 1984, 93-113; Whinney 1988, 110-15; Davis 1991, passim; Colvin 1995, 248, 929; Grove 7, 1996, 297-9 (Physick) ; Stewart 1977, 1-56; Gibson 1997 (2), passim; Ward-Jackson 2003, passim, but esp 266-9, 455; Sackville 2003; ODNB (Gibson)
Archival References: Sackville 1677, U269 E 611; DLW/550 (agreement and receipt, Sackville monument); GPC
Additional MS Sources: London Met Archives, Tyrwhitt-Drake E/TD/943, assignment to Cibber of leasehold, 1673
Miscellaneous Drawings: Design for a plain mural tablet, 1670, Isham Papers, Northants RO IL.3079/A46; design for a statue of Neptune, perhaps for Chatsworth, nd, VAM E 668-1949, signed, (Physick 1969, 25); attrib design for a memorial to King Charles I, All Souls, Oxford, 2.95 ( Stewart 28); 44 drawings by Cibber for sepulchral monuments sold Sotheby and Wilkinson 27 Nov 1861, £1 3s (Builder 1868, 656)
Portraits of the Sculptor: Christian Richter, watercolour, nd, untraced, engraved J Bannerman (Faber 1926, frontispiece); Marcellus Laroon the Elder, canvas, formerly coll. Horace Walpole, untraced (Vertue VI, 85, 161); Oliver de Critz, miniature entitled Cibber the Carver, oil on copper, nd, Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia; woodcut, nd,unsigned, (Anecdotes 1876, II, 167)