. l-iG. I.âBUST OF WREiN. By Pierce. Ashmolean Museutn, Oxford. Photographed by kind permission of C. F. Belt, Esq., Departmen* of Fine Arts, AshnioUau Mtiseitm, has apparently remained, but its contents may be said to revolutionise our knowledge of such men as Rysbrack and Scheemaker; and it is these contents, ' To George Vertue, engraver and antiquary (1684 1756) we owe almost all our biographical knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-centur^⢠artists, sculptors, and engravers. Walpole avowedly " offers to the public the labours of another person," and appends the life
. l-iG. I.âBUST OF WREiN. By Pierce. Ashmolean Museutn, Oxford. Photographed by kind permission of C. F. Belt, Esq., Departmen* of Fine Arts, AshnioUau Mtiseitm, has apparently remained, but its contents may be said to revolutionise our knowledge of such men as Rysbrack and Scheemaker; and it is these contents, ' To George Vertue, engraver and antiquary (1684 1756) we owe almost all our biographical knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-centur^⢠artists, sculptors, and engravers. Walpole avowedly " offers to the public the labours of another person," and appends the life of Vertue to the Anecdotes ; but in deaUng with the sculptors he was handicapped by Ver- tue's wish of secrecy about much of his material; he was an old man when the later volumes appeared; and, his own chief interest being in painting, sculpture received less attention than w-as its due. Vertue's information on the subject was first systematically used by the present w-riter in a series of articles on the British Sculptors from Pierce to Chantrev, which have appeared in The Architect during 1921 and 1922, and are still uncompleted. together with other matter in the unsealed \olumes, here presented in inverted commas, which form the basis of the present study. Fully to understand the sculpture of the period in C|uestion, we must know something of the opportuni- ties that lay before the sculptors. When the Restora- tion came in 1660, the older generation of artists had almost disappeared during the twenty vears of Civil War and Commonwealth rule; Le Sueur was dead; !⢠anelli had gone abroad ; Stone was dead ; though his sons, the younger Nicholas and John, were still :it work. There were cogent reasons for the employ- ment of new men. The Court had been and long remained in close touch with \'ersailles, where roval patronage of art and artists was already a tradition, and where the influence of Bernini and his followers was supreme; the nation overflowed with loyaltv, and
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