Charles Alfred Stothard

He studied at the Royal Academy from 1807, and began his first historical picture, the Death of Richard II in Pomfret Castle three years later.

[1] In that year he was appointed historical draughtsman to the Society of Antiquaries, who sent him to Bayeux to make coloured drawings of the tapestry for publication in the series Vetusta Monumenta.

On the first of these he also discovered the location of the monuments of the Plantagenets, which had been moved when the chapel at the abbey of Fontevraud in which they were housed was demolished during the French Revolution, and made accurate drawings of them.

[1] He made copies of the medieval paintings discovered in the chamber of the House of Lords, and prepared a paper discussing their date.

A later antiquarian, W. H. Hamilton Rogers, who also made studies of the Ferrers family in the same church, wrote 70 years later:[4] A gifted student in the pursuit we also at humbler distance love, made pilgrimage here, and was engaged in making a drawing of its interesting painted story, when death suddenly stayed the work of the artist, snapping the very pencil in his fingers, and instantly translated him, from picturing the earthly image of the founder of these courts below, into his immortal presence in the great temple above... His cunning fingers are mouldering in the dust below, and moss and decay are stealthily obliterating his record outside, but the fidelity and truth of his works remain bright and undimmmed, forming his best and most enduring monument.The "founder of these courts below" was Sir William Ferrers, founder of Bere Ferrers church, whose image appears in the stained glass window Stothard was drawing at the time of his death.

Stothard's principal publication was The Monumental Effigies of Great Britain; selected from our cathedrals and churches for the purpose of bringing together, and preserving correct representations of the best historical illustrations extant, from the Norman Conquest to the reign of Henry the Eighth, a folio volume containing many etched plates.

[5] The focus of the published work is firmly on effigies, but Phillip Lindley has shown that this was a consequence of Stothard's premature death, and that his intention was to record more of their monumental and architectural contexts.

[7] They show the complete tapestry, and were described by the art historian Eric Maclagan as "exquisite plates [which] still provide what is in many ways the most adequate representation of the original".