English: Danish sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630-1700) by William Camden Edwards (1777-1855) after an unknown original. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The foremost sculptor in London during the first two decades of the 18th century, Bird was later described by George Vertue as ‘the most famous statuary, that this Nation ever bred’ (Vertue III, 49, 1730). Vertue, who was a fellow Catholic and a close friend, provides the fullest record of Bird’s life. Both men became members of the circle of artists around Edward, Lord Harley, later 2nd Earl of Oxford (1689-1741) and his wife, Henrietta, the daughter and heiress of the 1st Duke of Newcastle.
Bird was born in London to recusant parents, probably in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Nothing further is known of his background. He was unique among British sculptors of his generation in having an extensive Continental training, first in Flanders, where he was apprenticed at about the age of 11 to an obscure sculptor named Cozins, and then in Rome, where he remained until about 1689. He returned to London and worked briefly under Grinling Gibbons and then Caius Gabriel Cibber, before going back to Rome for a further nine months, where he studied under Pierre Legros (1666-1719), who was carving sculptural ornaments for Rome’s great baroque churches. Bird finally settled in London shortly after 1700. In 1706 he married Hester, the daughter of Edward Chapman, another recusant and a successful stonemason and contractor. The couple had several daughters, educated by the Blue Nuns, and a son, Edward Chapman Bird, who made his living principally as a marble merchant, one of his father’s secondary activities. In 1708 he was obliged to take the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown. Bird travelled to Rome a third time in 1711, when John Talman, the antiquary, recorded meeting him.
His cosmopolitan training brought him to public attention soon after his second return from Italy. This coincided with the death of Cibber, who was working on architectural sculpture for St Paul’s Cathedral shortly before1700. Bird’s knowledge of contemporary sculpture in Roman churches put him in a prime position to succeed Cibber at St Paul’s and he enjoyed a virtual monopoly of the figurative work over the next two decades. His first contract, a relief panel of St Paul preaching to the Bereans, was set above the west door before March 1706 (47). This was followed immediately by the enviable but daunting order for a large tympanum relief representing the Conversion of St Paul for the west front (46). Two designs for the elevation had been prepared by Sir Christopher Wren’s office in 1685, perhaps drafted by Gibbons or Cibber, and these formed the starting point for Bird’s terracotta model, which incorporated all the features later realised in stone. Bird’s relief has a sense of drama never before achieved in England on this scale: Saul of Tarsus is presented in the centre of a group of horsemen, surprised by the rays of light penetrating through a cloud in the apex of the pediment. He has fallen from his horse and looks up, blinded, while horses rear to either side of him. It is not known what assistance Bird received with the work, but a final payment of  £650 was recorded in the building accounts in December 1706. Two further reliefs for the west front illustrating episodes in the life of St Paul were probably carved between 1706 and 1712 (48, 49)  and another six panels on the same theme were added by about 1713 (50-55). The later panels appear to have been charged at £75 each.

Base of Queen Annes statue outside St. Paul’s cathedral

Bird was also responsible for a statue of Queen Anne, which became the focal point of the paved enclosure outside the west front (35). Her standing image in coronation robes is mounted on a circular pedestal with personifications of her dominions grouped radially below her. The composition is indebted to baroque fountains in Rome and Paris, but also to Cibber’s group of King Charles II surrounded by the four great rivers of England, carved for Soho Square in 1681. Bird’s group was conceived as an integral part of the Cathedral complex and Wren was involved in its design and in the choice of sculptor. It is not known when Bird received the commission, but a warrant for the provision of three blocks of marble for the Queen’s statue, given at her instruction from the royal store yard, is dated 14 April 1709.  The building accounts for St Paul’s include a large number of payments to Bird in connection with the statue.  The figure of the Queen ‘with all enrichments’ cost £250, the four ‘kingdoms’ came at £220 each and the Queen’s sceptre at £4. The work was erected in 1712 to celebrate the completion of St Paul’s, but kept inside a hoarding for many years, probably because of work in the vicinity. At an appropriate moment, the thanksgiving service for the Peace of Utrecht on 7 July 1713, it was revealed for public scrutiny. Vertue merely called the work ‘noble’, a modest tribute in his vocabulary. The Opposition critic, James Ralph, considered ‘the whole modell’d in a tolerable taste, and executed as well’, but condemned the stolid effigy of the Queen as stiff and affected (Ralph 1734, 20). For a short while it seemed likely that  many other statues of the Queen would be ordered from Bird’s workshop, for in 1713 the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches in London resolved that a statue of Queen Anne by Gibbons or Bird should be set up in a focal point at each of the churches. The scheme came to nothing, partly because the Queen died the following year.
Bird’s obituary made mention of ‘many lofty tombs and magnificent monuments in Westminster Abbey and other churches’(GM, 1731, 83) and he was a subscriber to Dart’s Westmonasterium, 1723, which included designs for monuments. Several works in the Abbey have been attributed to the sculptor solely on  stylistic grounds and are not included in this account, but ten are signed and a score can be identified as Bird’s work since he passed the inscriptions to John le Neve for publication in Monumenta Anglicana, 1717-19 (1-6, 9, 11-22, 29). Le Neve had applied to several London sculptors for transcripts of their epitaphs and he paid tribute to Bird’s helpful response in his publication. The most remarkable of the sculptor’s early monuments, that to Dr Richard Busby, a noted headmaster of Westminster School, was carved with the assistance of his father-in-law, Edward Chapman, and erected in 1703 (10). It was singled out as the finest monument of the period in Westminster Abbey by Whinney, who noted Bird’s disciplined sense of design and particularly admired the relaxed pose of the effigy, leaning on one elbow with a book in the other hand. Other early monuments introduced European patterns to a nation hungry for Italian novelties: the wall-monument to Sir Orlando Gee at Isleworth (12), a virtuoso work with a garlanded architectural frame and an apron carved with a gloria of cherubs, is an early example in England of a memorial with an effigy truncated just below the waist. The monument to Admiral Priestman in Westminster Abbey (21) makes use of another novelty, a portrait medallion suspended from a ribbon. This motif became popular for monuments in Augustan England.
By 1711, Bird was a leading figure in the artistic Establishment and that year he became the only sculptor of note among the 60 founder members of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s prestigious but short-lived Academy of Painting. Another member was the architect James Gibbs, who was also a Catholic and who worked with Bird a little later.
After the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, Bird and his father-in-law were obliged to register their estates as recusants. Bird’s practice might have been in jeopardy, but for the continuing support of Tory patrons. In 1719 Alexander Pope, another fellow Catholic, whose means were relatively modest but whose literary reputation was second to none, gave Bird a prestigious order for a white marble tablet to commemorate his family at Twickenham (26). By this time Bird had also become a close associate of Lord Harley. In January 1720 Humfrey Wanley, Harley’s librarian, noted Bird’s offer to lend Harley, a noted bibliophile, any book Harley might want from his library. Bird also offered to ‘assist my lord in buying … . antique bustos’ from a Mr Austin (Wanley Diary 1, 21, 20 Jan 1719/20).
The Harleys commissioned the monument in Westminster Abbey to Dr John Ernest Grabe (†1711), a Prussian-born theologian with High Church leanings (29). The finely carved, relaxed effigy perches on a sarcophagus in his Geneva robes, a book in one hand and a pen in the other. Grabe’s epitaph was published by Le Neve in 1717, so work on the monument must have been well in hand by that date. There were to be long delays before its erection. On 27 August 1724, Wanley noted that ‘Mr Bird came, desiring me to look over his copy of an inscription for Dr Grabe’s monument; which I did & found to be faulty’ (Wanley Diary, 2, 311). Wanley made minor changes and returned the inscription. Nearly two years later, on 25 May 1726, Wanley noted ‘Mr Bird came, & having made Dr Grabe’s monument, desired me to call at his house to see if the epitaph be rightly laid-down with black lead, before it be graven’ (Wanley Diary 2, 424). The fee for its erection was paid early in 1727.
Bird’s largest and least successful monument is the towering edifice commissioned by Lady Harley for her father, the Duke of Newcastle, in 1721 (31). Gibbs provided a design for a convex architectural structure inspired by a recent altarpiece in the Gesu church, Rome, to be carved in polychrome marbles. Bird’s knowledge of Roman sculpture and his ‘great dealings in Italy for Marbles’ (Vertue III, 49), as well as his contacts with the Harley family, made him the obvious choice as sculptor, though John Nost II submitted an alternative design. Bird made the model, now lost, in pearwood and clay. Newcastle reclines on a sarcophagus in contemporary armour, flanked by personifications of Wisdom and Charity. He looks upwards to heaven and to his own armorial bearings, which are flanked by angels and cherubs on the attic storey. Ralph was merciless in his condemnation of the showy monument: ‘it gives no pleasure to the elegant and knowing, and is only the admiration of the vulgar … the figure of the Duke himself is full of absurdities … the two statues on each side are equally tame and unmeaning’ (Ralph 1734, 69). Lord Harley, however, was evidently satisfied, for he employed Bird and Gibbs again in 1728 on the monument to members of the Cavendish family at Bolsover (32).
In 1718 Bird was selected as sculptor for a statue of William III at Greenwich, but although a block of marble was purchased by the Hospital, the project came to nothing. Between 1717 and 1721 he provided a number of portraits of founders and other statues for collegiate buildings in Oxford (37, 38, 41-43) and in 1718 he returned to St Paul’s Cathedral, where his team was active for the next six years. During this period Peter Scheemakers and Laurent Delvaux were employed briefly by him at St Paul’s, but no other workshop members have been identified.
Bird’s knowledge of Italian architectural sculpture again came into play at the Cathedral as he worked on an extensive series of parapet figures, a novel setting for statues  in  England (56-59). Negotiations for seven statues for the west front, each about 11 feet in height, began in 1716, when Bird and a Mr Carpenter, probably Andrew Carpenter, were asked to provide estimates for figures in marble or Portland stone, which was the material eventually chosen. In February 1718 a contract was drawn up with Bird by John James, the assistant surveyor of the Cathedral, for seated statues of the four Evangelists, all in the act of writing their gospels, with their symbolic companions, an angel, a lion, an ox and an eagle, beside them. These groups were sited at the feet of the west towers. Standing figures of St Peter looking upwards with a crowing cock on a stump at his feet and St James with a pilgrim flask and bottle were placed in the corners of the pediment and St Paul, holding a sword and the gospels, on the apex. All seven were painted in oil. Bird was paid the balance for these figures in 1721.
In 1720 his team began work on  statues  for the pediments on the north and south fronts. Each pediment had seated figures on the outer corners and three standing ones on the centre gables (57-9). The standing figures, which were between 11 and 12 feet in height, cost £140 each and the seated images, of the saints Simon, Matthias, Barnabas and John the Baptist, totalled £500. Several of these are lost or heavily restored and the untouched survivors are severely eroded.
Bird produced little in the last years of his life. He assisted Giovanni-Battista Guelfi with the monument to James Craggs, 1724-7 (30), very likely on the recommendation of Alexander Pope who supervised the work, but the partnership between the two sculptors was uneasy and on 30 October 1727 Guelfi wrote twice in one day to Alexander Pope, to complain about Bird. Guelfi then took to his bed, leaving Pope in a state of anxiety about the monument’s completion. Bird must have carried on without Guelfi, for a month later the statue on the monument was in place and Bird had only to cut an inscription for the urn. His last known work is the monument in Westminster Abbey to William Congreve (33). Bird ignored the new taste for classicism, instead carving a medallion portrait of  Congreve in modern dress after the Kit Kat portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller. The playwright is shown surrounded by attributes of his art.
In 1729 Bird’s father-in-law, Edward Chapman, died, leaving the greater part of his considerable estate, including a property in Windsor, to the sculptor and his wife. They did not have long to enjoy the windfall together. That Christmas Bird had a serious accident. He was coming out of a tavern near his home one frosty night when he slipped and broke his leg, which was badly set by the surgeon. In January 1731, ‘he became swelled, his body and legs like a dropsy and this continued until he died on 27 February, l731, aged sixty-five’ (Vertue III, 49). He was buried in the vault at St Andrew, Holborn. It was 20 years before his collection was auctioned.
Bird’s work varies in quality. His finest achievements are his architectural sculpture for St Paul’s and some of the smaller monuments in Westminster Abbey (10, 14, 21, 29). In stylistic terms his major contribution was the introduction and popularisation of Italian baroque fashions into English sculpture.
IR
Literary References: Le Neve, passim; Vertue III, 18-19, 34, 49; Farington 7, 2494; Esdaile 1938, 164-9; Esdaile 1942, 176-97; Wren Soc VI, 71 (extract from the minute book for the building of Greenwich, 5 April 1718), XV, 146, 165, 207, 208; Sherburn 1956, II, 456-7; Wanley Diary, 1966 ed, vol 1, 21, vol 2, 311, 314, 414; Physick 1969, 69; Rendel 1972, 206-9; Friedman 1984, 40, 80; Whinney 1988, 150-6; Grove 4, 1996, 79 (Physick); Ward-Jackson 2003, passim; ODNB (Craske); Craske 2007, passim
Archival References:  GPC
Additional MS Sources: Talman Letter Book
Wills and Administrations: Francis Bird (admon) PROB 6/1-7 sig 55 (March 1731); Edward Chapman PROB 11/633, 114r-115r
Miscellaneous Drawings and Models: Design and model for the monument to Sir Godfrey Kneller in Westminster Abbey, executed by Michael Rysbrack, untraced (Vertue III, 43); model for Queen Anne’s coronation medal, c1702, untraced (Vertue V, 47)
Auction Catalogue: Bird 1751
Bird’s Collection of Sculpture: Vertue refers to several artefacts that suggest that Bird collected with discrimination. He owned a cast of Bernini’s lost bust of Charles I which had been at Whitehall Palace  (Vertue II, 50); a Laocoon and an Apollo and Daphne by Nicholas Stone the Younger, modelled in Rome (perhaps the Daphne and Apollo offered in Bird’s sale on 30 April 1751, lot 4) (Vertue  I, 90);  a counterfeit gold medal of Oliver Cromwell (Vertue II, 50) and a Faun after the Antique, bought at the 1st Earl of Oxford’s sale (Vertue V, 7). Three works ‘by Bernini’, a Neptune and two reliefs of angels, were sold at the 1751 auction (lots 44, 52); ‘A large flying boy, by Algardi’  formed lot 47 and there were several works by Duquesnoy (‘Fiamingo’), including a head of Christ (lot 59) and a Flora, a Farnese Hercules and an Antinous (lots 59-61).

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