Nicholas Stone

During his career he was the mason responsible for not only the building of Inigo Jones' Banqueting House, Whitehall,[2] but the execution of elaborate funerary monuments for some of the most prominent of his era that were avant-garde by English standards.

In 1613 he returned to London with Bernard Janssens, a fellow pupil of de Keyser and settled in Long Acre, St Martin-in-the-Fields, where he established a large practice and workshops and soon became the leading English sculptor of funeral monuments.

In 1616 Stone was contracted by the depute-treasurer of Scotland Gideon Murray to decorate the chapel at Holyrood Palace with a wooden screen, stalls, and organ case.

[7] This involvement with the royal works led to the spectacular contract for building Jones's Banqueting House, that placed him in the forefront of London builders.

[4] A consistent private patron over a period of many years was Sir William Paston, who was modernizing his Elizabethan seat at Oxnead, Norfolk.

Oxnead was emptied of its treasures, sold off and all but demolished, but in 1809 its long-term tenant, John Adey Repton,[15] made a conjectural drawing of it, based on the foundations and recollections of local inhabitants, which was illustrated in W.H.

[16] his view is centered on the terraced parterres, in the lowest of which, he says, stood the fountain of two tiers of bold opposed scrolls supporting a shallow basin,[17] re-erected after the Oxnead sale at the rival Norfolk house, Blickling Hall.

There were many miscellaneous carved furnishings, picture frames and stands for tables, balustrades and paving-stones, and busts of Marcus Aurelius and Faustina.

In 1638, he sent his son, Nicholas Stone the younger, to Italy, whence there returned an elevation of a new garden house just built in the Villa Ludovisi, Rome, "for Mr Paston",[20] and marbles, architectural books (Vignola, Vitruvius, and Maggi's Le fontane di Roma), and plaster casts sent home from Livorno.

[21] With the onset of the Civil War, commissions from Sir William abruptly ceased in 1642; five years later, his outstanding account was settled, for £24.

[10] Stone was greatly influenced by the new classicizing fashion for art derived from the Italian Renaissance and the Roman Arundel marbles, and this is reflected in two of his works, both in Westminster Abbey, the memorial to Sir John Holles and his brother Francis both dressed Roman armour reflecting classical influence, something new to England.

"[25] A taste for realism, in part the product of his training in the Netherlands, informs the floor tomb of Sir William Curle (died 1617) in the church at Hatfield, Hertfordshire; Sir William is sculpted lying in his grave coat, his knees drawn up in his last agonies: "in its sad and poignant realism," observes Colin Platt, "it was as much a culture shock as the Whitehall Banqueting House".

The Duke rebuilt and modernised the house and, in 1623, commissioned the building of a water gate to give access to the Thames from the gardens, at that time the river being a favoured method of transport on London.

In this highly ornate arch, Stone ignored the new simple classical Palladian style currently fashionable, which had just been introduced to England from Italy by Inigo Jones, and drew his inspiration from an illustration in Serlio's book of archways.

The obvious European, and thus Catholic, design of the porch was later to cause problems for the porch's patron Archbishop Laud because at the centre of the scrolled pediment was placed a statue of the Virgin and Child, a composition considered to be Roman Catholic idolatry, and later used against the Archbishop at his trial for treason in 1641 following the grand Remonstrance.

[37] Stone designed and built Goldsmiths' Hall, Foster Lane, in 1635–38, which has provided an example of the manner in which Inigo Jones' ideas on architecture were disseminated in England.

Stone's appointment as surveyor in charge of all the workmen in the design and erection of the new hall, came after a committee of the company had voted on competitive plans offered by ad hoc partnerships of workmen, appears to be the first instance outside the King's works in which a "surveyor", the predecessor of an architect, was engaged to oversee every detail, a process that seems to have been unfamiliar to the members of the Goldsmiths' Company.

The year after his marriage Stone returned to England with his wife, settling in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, where they remained throughout their lives.

[10] Nicholas Stone died at Long Acre, London, on 24 August 1647, and was buried in the parish church at St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Despite being Master Mason to the Crown, and his revolutionary works being for and commemorating the most eminent in the land and being displayed in the country's most prominent buildings, Stone was always thought of as a craftsman, and accorded that status.

[25] Evaluated today, Stone's architecture combines the sophisticated classicism of Jones with an uncouth Artisan Mannerism popular at the time.