Woodcarving so fine it seems to flutter before your very eyes
Grinling Gibbons: Centuries in the Making
An exhibition marking the tercentenary of the death of the woodcarver Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) may sound like a lovely idea, but how, practically, can it be done? After all, Gibbons, who, in 1693, was appointed master carver to King William III, decorated the interiors of palaces, churches and stately homes, and many of his ensembles remain in situ. Will you carefully prise off a few of his carvings from St James’s Piccadilly? Teleport visitors to the Orangery at Kensington Palace?
There is work by the master in Grinling Gibbons: Centuries in the Making, the new exhibition at Compton Verney in Warwickshire seen last month in smaller form at Bonhams on New Bond Street: coats of arms from the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge; the famous limewood cravat, imitating soft Venetian needlepoint lace, so delicate and realistic that it once fooled the guests of the aesthete Horace Walpole, who wore it as a party piece. Yet the show has the feel of one of those big exhibitions about the ancient world: lots of fragments that we must piece together in our imagination. If this sounds disappointing, it is also unavoidable – clearly, the choir of St Paul’s Cathedral isn’t going to travel, though, in fairness, the cathedral has lent four carved cherub brackets from Gibbons’s original design.
Still, the curators do a decent job of dramatising Gibbons’s story, animating his times and assessing his legacy. The final room, for instance, contains Gibbons-inspired wallpaper, as well as intricately carved wooden prosthetic legs worn by the Paralympic sprinter and double amputee Aimee Mullins to open an Alexander Mcqueen fashion show in 1999. Gibbons, who favoured creamy, close-grained limewood (which the Victorians, sacrilegiously, often darkened with brown varnish), was blessed with inordinately dexterous skill – the sort of prodigy to whom myth and hyperbole accrue as easily as dust upon a shoe.
For instance, there’s the story of his discovery by the diarist John Evelyn, who stumbled upon him in 1671 in a lonely thatched cottage in Deptford: Gibbons was carving a relief after Tintoretto’s Crucifixion (now at Dunham Massey) that so dazzled Evelyn he brokered a meeting with the King. Or the (apocryphal) notion that Gibbons included ornamental peapods in his foliage: open if he had been paid for a commission; closed when waiting for his fee. Some of his carved flowers were said to be so delicate that coaches passing outside caused them to shake.
Patiently, the curators strip away all the hype. Charles II, it turns out, did not make much of Gibbons on that first meeting – certainly, nothing came of it. Moreover, Gibbons wasn’t much cop at carving in stone. The show places great emphasis on his Dutch origins: he was born in the port town of Rotterdam in 1648 – so perhaps he learned his trade in the shipbuilding industry there. I find the idea compelling: a pair of works on paper reveal how warships at the time were lavished with splendid ornament by skilled carvers. (This would explain why he ended up in the naval centre of Deptford.) Dutch flower painting influenced Gibbons, too.
A display of 17th-century instruments (treble recorders, violins and bass viol) reminds us that Gibbons was fascinated by music – so much so that he replicated sheet music in his compositions with such accuracy that scholars can use it to pinpoint a work’s date. Evidently, he considered himself a suave, cultivated artist rather than a sawdust-smothered craftsman – a copy of the portrait he commissioned from Godfrey Kneller positions him, aged 42, as Britain’s Bernini, without a wood carving in sight.
If Gibbons, who eventually ran a workshop with 50 assistants, had a high opinion of himself, who could blame him? It isn’t his subject matter that is so distinctive (festoons of flowers, game, even lobsters), but his technique: ingeniously utilising shadow by undercutting motifs with such daredevilry that they appear to spring to life with the force of a small firework. His silhouettes are crisp, his contours fluid and every sprig and leaf so thin that, yes, it seems to flutter before our eyes. Everyone, from the snootiest connoisseur to those with little interest in art, invariably reacts to his work in the same way: with delight.
If Gibbons had a high opinion of himself, who could blame him?
From Sat until Jan 30 2022. Details: comptonverney.org.uk; grinling-gibbons.org