Details of Sculptor

Surname

Fisher family

Alternative Surname

First Name

of York

Initial of Surname

F

Year of Birth/Baptism

Flourished

Year of Death

Biographical Details

Richard Fisher I c1705-c1770
John Fisher I 1735-1804
Samuel Fisher I b1738
John Fisher II 1771-1839
William Fisher 1776-1815
George Fisher 1788-1815
Samuel Fisher II 1780-1812
Richard Fisher II 1784-1819
Charles Fisher 1789-1861
John Fisher III 1823-1884
Richard Fisher III active c1830 (?)
Richard Fisher appears to have arrived in Ripon around 1716, perhaps from Scotland, though apparently he spoke fluent French. He assumed the name of Fisher, learnt to carve in the Ripon area and married a local girl, Alice Bradley of Sharow. The couple had 2 sons who became sculptors, John Fisher I and Samuel Fisher. The workshop was active over 4 generations.
Richard’s first recorded patron was Sir Henry Slingsby of Scriven Hall, Knaresborough, who made payments totalling £54 12s to ‘Fisher, the Carver’ between June 1729 and April 1731 (223). He worked on chimneypieces and decorative carving for Sir John Aislabie and his son William at Studley Royal, near Ripon, between 1732 and 1753 (214, 224, 225, 227) and in 1737 won his first known contract outside Yorkshire, for eight chimneypieces ordered by Sir Horatio Walpole at Wolterton Hall, Norfolk (212). At this time he had one unnamed apprentice and perhaps also employed Robert Doe as his assistant. Fisher was dismissed by Walpole after a year for breach of contract, since apparently he had been making moulds that were outside his brief. In a letter to the architect Thomas Ripley seeking payment for his work, Richard disputed the cause of his dismissal, which may have been engineered by jealous Norfolk craftsmen.
Fisher and ‘his man’ worked on chimneypieces for the 7th Viscount Irwin at Temple Newsam House, near Leeds, between 1740 and 1742 (213). Commissions in York may already have been coming his way, for on 15 July 1746 he placed an advertisement in the York Journal informing potential clients that he was ‘now fix’d in the Minster Yard, York, where all sorts of Carved and Statuary work, both in wood, Marble and stone, either for Household Furniture, or Monumental and Sepulchral Ornaments, are performed in the Neatest Manner and at moderate Prices’.
In 1752 Sir Rowland Winn paid Fisher for carved work at Nostell Priory (234). By this time his sons John I and Samuel must have been working for Richard. Since the workshop was within the Minster precinct their apprenticeship did not need to be registered, just as Richard did not have to be a freeman of the City to engage in employment. By the early 1750s the Fisher name began to appear on funeral monuments.
A letter in the Studley Royal archives relates that between 1755 and 1761 the Fisher family ‘left the country’, perhaps for London (Aislabie Papers, letter from Doe to Aislabie, 3-4 April 1755). In 1761 Richard Fisher showed two marble statuettes at the Society of Artists’ exhibition, Christ carrying the cross and Jupiter with an eagle (194).These works attracted the attention of the Marquess of Rockingham, who perhaps encouraged him to return to Yorkshire.
During the 1760s the Fishers supplied at least two chimneypieces for Rockingham at Wentworth Woodhouse, for which they charged £164 and £88 (218). This sum suggests they were of marble. The workshop also provided an elaborate overmantel at Burton Constable, for which they were paid £42, including £4 for packing (215) . Various architects were content to use the Fishers to provide chimneypieces. Their work at Studley Royal and Temple Newsam, under the architects Colen Campbell and Daniel Garrett, has already been noticed. They may also have been involved in commissions at houses designed by the architect John Carr, who was employed by the Chomleys of Whitby and Howsham Hall, and Sir Charles Sheffield of Normanby Hall. The Fishers made monuments for these families (4, 5, 16, 64, 25). It is thought that the Fishers carved the parapet figures for John Carr's York Assize Courts between 1773 and 1777, but documentation is lacking since Carr’s name is attached to all payments for the building.
It is not certain when Richard Fisher died and his sons inherited the workshop, but his wife was a widow in 1773 when her death was recorded in the registers of St Michael-le-Belfry, York. For a decade after their father’s death John and Samuel worked from their shop in North Street, York, collaborating on chimneypieces, architectural ornaments and particularly church monuments: the relief tablet to Sybil Wilson, 1773, in Lancaster, which depicts the child’s parents in classical costume, mourning by her death-bed, was particularly admired by Gunnis (24). He also praised the figure of Hygeia on the memorial to John Dealtry in York Minster and the personification of Religion on the memorial to Sir Charles Sheffield at Burton-on-Stather (27, 25).
In 1780 Samuel and his wife Ann (née Sanderson) left York for London, perhaps because Ann’s brother James had established himself in the City, where he took an active role in civic affairs, earning a knighthood and eventually becoming lord mayor in 1792-3. Samuel and Ann were beneficiaries in her brother's will.
After Samuel’s departure John Fisher led the workshop alone. He returned to Wentworth Woodhouse, where he supplied more chimneypieces (219) and also pedestals in the Rockingham mausoleum, for which Fisher charged £203 10s, with an additional £8 for ‘horse hire and expenses’. The pedestal for Joseph Nollekens RA’s statue of the Duke was inscribed with 281 upper case letters. John’s other patrons included Walter Fawkes of Farnley Hall (220), Lord Carlisle at Castle Howard (238) and Viscount Lonsdale, for whom he made two elaborately framed memorial tablets, topped with sarcophagi and resting on lions’ paws (1, 90). A number of payments to him are also recorded in the Swinton Castle account books for 1793-94; he received £203 3s 10d for chimneypieces in the drawing room, library and perhaps other ‘new rooms’.
John’s most memorable achievement came in response to an advertisement in the York Courant on 6 January 1784, announcing the proposal to erect a statue in honour of the politician Sir George Savile by public subscription. This was originally intended to be sited in the courtyard of York Castle (62). Savile died three days later, but John, having sent ‘an accurate Drawing or design, together with an Estimate of the Expence thereof’ (York Courant, 9 March 1784 ) won the contract, and in 1789 the statue was erected in York Minster. The draped figure of Savile stands on a pedestal, holding in his right hand a scroll inscribed with the words ‘The Petition of the Freeholders of York’. John advertised his skills by commissioning Francesco Bartolozzi, engraver to the King, to provide prints of the statue, which sold at a guinea each. The subscribers included the Prince of Wales and a number of Dukes.
Only one of John Fisher’s workmen has been identified: the death of Abraham Swords as the result of ‘a melancholy accident in 1777’ happened in the yard in North street while watching the launch of a new brigantine. A gun was fired and a stray piece of wadding hit him in the throat (York Courant, 2 September 1777). In the 1770s the workshop was clearly prospering for he bought his and Samuel’s freedom of the City of York, and by the 1780s John had enough work to keep five apprentices, his two sons, John Fisher II and William Fisher, as well as Daniel Butterfield, Thomas Benet and Joseph Theakston.
Around 1790 the business floundered and in 1792 Fisher was declared bankrupt. A letter of 1795 from John Carr to Benjamin Hall, Lord Fitzwilliam’s steward, on the subject of a monument to Edmund Burke, gives a hindsight to the problems besetting the firm: ‘ All Fisher's best men have left him. They cannot get their wages of him’ ( Fitzwilliam archives, Sheffield, WWM Stw P (IV), (V), 6 ) His obituary, published in the York Courant on 2 July 1804, nonetheless saluted his achievement: ‘On Saturday last died, after a tedious illness, Mr. John Fisher, statuary of this City, whose abilities ranked him amongst the most eminent of his profession’. The Monthly Magazine praised ‘the purity and classic originality of his design, as well as the spirit and elegant chastity of its execution’ (Monthly Mag, XVIII, 1804, 173).
It is not known where John’s other sons, George Fisher and Richard Fisher II served their apprenticeships, but notices in the York Courant indicate that both were trained in London. Samuel Fisher II spent five years ‘studying sculpture under an eminent and most distinguished artist in London’ (York Courant, 10 Nov 1806), and Charles Fisher trained under ‘that eminent artist, Mr [John] Bacon [II]’ (York Courant, 11 Dec 1815). Of all John’s sons, William Fisher was the most ambitious: he exhibited at the Royal Academy on several occasions and also at the Northern Society exhibitions, held in Leeds. He also entered the City of London’s competition for a monument to commemorate William Pitt in the Guildhall, and in 1806 wrote that he ‘was engaged with Mr. [Joseph] Nollekens, Mortimer Street’ (Fisher Letters).
John II and Charles were the only two sons to live beyond their thirties. Charles ran the workshop until his death in 1861, after which his wife, Mary Anne (†1772), and son, John Fisher III, assumed control. The most important work carved by Charles is perhaps the memorial in Sowerby, executed in 1856 to honour men of the parish who had died in the Crimea (183). By the second quarter of the 19th century the business had changed: monuments had become less grand, but with the opening of York cemetery in 1837 came an increasing demand for gravestones and 143 signed by the Fisher workshop have been recorded.
The Fisher workshop was the most prominent sculpture business in 18th-century Yorkshire, at a time when craftsmen had the opportunity to capitalise on the extensive building work taking place in the county. The firm's monuments attained a high standard of craftsmanship: Gunnis particularly admired their ‘intelligent and sympathetic’ use of coloured marbles and the qualitative carving of neoclassical ornaments. Julius Bryant has suggested that John Fisher I’s finest works, particularly the statue of George Savile and the Hygeia on the Dealtry monument, can be ranked alongside the best monuments by Joseph Nollekens and John Bacon RA.
Corita Myerscough
Literary References: Gunnis 1968, 145-6; Aylmer 1977, 454, 456-60, 463; Fothergill 1984, 238; Beard 1986, 219; Whinney 1988, 256, 319; Grove 11, 138 (Bryant); Myerscough 1996, vol I, thesis; vol II, houses; vol III, monuments to 1799; vol IV, monuments 1800-1884 (unpag); Myerscough 2000, 24-33
Archival References: York App Reg, D14, 25 Sept 1784, 262 (John Fisher I), D14, 10 Aug 1786, 287 (John Fisher II), D15, 25 Oct 1793, 71 (William Fisher cleared of apprenticeship); letter from Doe to Aislabie, Aislabie Papers, parcel 301, roll 29/f/10; Fisher letters, 1806