The Sixth Fairfax House Symposium in Georgian Studies
The sixth Fairfax House Symposium in Georgian Studies, held in conjunction with the exhibition ‘The Genius of Grinling Gibbons’ at Fairfax House, and in partnership with the History of Art department at the University of York, aims to stimulate new thinking and new perspectives on the life, work, legacy, and significance of Grinling Gibbons, master carver of Restoration England.
Gibbons is a celebrated figure, yet much about his life and work remains obscure and contentious: not least, the difficulties of attribution have meant that the exact extent, chronology, and character of his oeuvre remain unclear. Similarly, as a ‘great figure’ of the Restoration, he has tended to be considered in isolation rather than placed in his social, political, scientific, architectural, and artistic contexts, while his position within the marginalized field of decorative arts has distorted the scholarly and antiquarian perspectives through which he has been viewed. Questions of patronage, politics, artistic influence, and the collaborative and workshop cultures of creation, as well as the national identity ascribed to this ‘English genius’ who was born and trained in the Netherlands, may all require reassessment. The 370th anniversary of Gibbons’ birth (and the 350th anniversary of his arrival in York) provide an opportune moment to draw together the knowledge gained from previous generations of scholarship, to stimulate new ideas and perspectives, and to rethink the perception and reality of ‘England’s Master Carver’.
OPENING ADDRESS
David Esterly, Master woodcarver and world-leading Gibbons specialist
Guest-presented in absentia by Mark Storey
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Ada de Wit, The Wallace Collection
English and Dutch woodcarving in the age of Grinling Gibbons
GUEST SPEAKER
David Luard, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Woodwork Conservator and specialist in the carving of Grinling Gibbons
Grinling Gibbons: Observations of a Conservator
PRESENTERS
Elin Bornemann, Collections Officer, Abingdon County Hall Museum
The Grinling Gibbons mirror at Abingdon Museum – what we know and what we don’t know
Dr Lucy Cutler, Independent researcher and art historian
Gibbons and Dutch Still Life Painting
Charlotte Davis, PhD candidate, History of Art, The University of York
Rediscovering the ‘inventor et sculpsit’ of Restoration carved art
Dr Claudine van Hensbergen, Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature at Northumbria University
‘That Matchless Statue of His Majesty’: Gibbons’ statue of Charles II for the Royal Exchange, London (1684)
Dr Sally Jeffery, Independent architectural and garden historian
Grinling Gibbons’s chimneypiece commissions for the Duchess of Buccleuch
Harriet Lewars, City & Guilds of London Art School
The colour and discolouring of wood carving
Emelia Quinn, DPhil candidate, University of Oxford
Still Life and Still Live: Grinling Gibbons’s Struggling Birds
Dr Jeanne Nuechterlein, Reader, University of York
‘Subject’ and ‘ornament’ in the work of Grinling Gibbons and 16th-century German sculptors
Dr Frances Sands, Curator of Drawings and Books, Sir John Soane’s Museum
Grinling Gibbons as a master of two dimensions
Dr Lynda Sayce, Lutist and musicologist, Birmingham University
‘Notes from the carver’s bench’
Dr Greg Sullivan, Independent Researcher in British sculpture
‘The first British name of any eminence in sculpture’: Allan Cunningham’s Life of Grinling Gibbons (1830)
Tony Webb, Retired Master Carver of St Paul’s Cathedral
The last of the big studio workshops
Dr Cordula van Wyhe, Senior Lecturer in History of Art, The University of York
Dead Meat in Focus: Gibbon’s garland in the drawing room at Sudbury Hall, Staffordshire