English 18th Century Portrait Sculpture: Statue of George II and Weavers Hall, Dublin redux and a few notes on Benjamin Rackstrow of the Fleet Street.

The Statue of George II and Weavers Hall, Dublin (redux).

George II in Garter Robes.

1750.

Attributed to John van Nost III.

but possibly by Benjamin Rackstrow (doubtful in mho).

Formerly in a niche on Weavers Hall, The Coombe, Dublin.

Architect Joseph Jarret of Dublin, 1747.

The figure of George, holding shuttles and other implements relating to the weaving trade, was removed and destroyed in November 1937 - it was feared by the owners of the building that the IRA might attempt to blow it up.

The Irish Times (17 November 1937) covered the story as follows:

STATUE OF KING HACKED TO PIECES

“BETTER TO HAVE IT BLOWN UP”

What is described as “the last British King in the City of Dublin” was beheaded in Dublin yesterday morning. Immediately afterwards men set about the task of hacking off his legs and arms. This was the fate which met the bronze statue of King George II, which has stood over the entrance of the Weavers’ Hall, in the Coombe, since 1750, and the reason is that the present owners of the premises, Messrs S. Fine and Co., Ltd., thought it better to have the statue peacefully removed than to have it blown up.

An Irish Times reporter was told that it had been necessary to dismember the statue in order to take it down without damaging the face of the building. It was fitted into the front of the house with iron stays, and to have removed it en bloc would have defaced the masonry. Some idea of the weight of the statue may be gathered from the fact that the head alone weighs almost 50lb.

Although described as bronze I suspect it was actually made of lead and originally gilded

This is probably rather disingenuous - it was probably much easier to hack it apart and then sell it for scrap rather than to hire a crane and remove it carefully - a great loss..

Fine and Company were house furnishers but a watercolour by Flora Mitchell painted in the 1950's shows a very down at heel building. There are photographs of it in its final stages of disintegration before it was demolished in the Irish Architectural Archive on Merrion Square, Dublin which I publish below.

Weavers Hall itself was finally demolished in 1965.

During the seventeenth century a number of French Huguenot weavers arrived in Dublin. They settled manly in the Liberties area of Dublin, west of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where they became part of the existing weaving fraternity. Many of them were experienced silk weavers and their expertise contributed to the establishment of a thriving silk and poplin industry.

A weavers’ hall had been built by the Guild in the Lower Coombe in 1682 and by 1745, when the building of a new hall was required, it was a Huguenot, David Digges La Touche, who advanced the £200 needed. The main room of the new hall is described as being fifty-six feet long by twenty-one feet wide, wainscoted, and hung with portraits of kings and notabilities, and included a tapestry portrait of King George II, woven by John van Beaver (see below).

This image from The Dublin Penny Journal, vol. 4 - 12 December, 1835.

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Image Courtesy the South Dublin Libraries.

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Cropped from above photograph.

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The above 7 images from the excellent Irish Architectural Archive, Merrion Square, Dublin.

Photograph from the Dictionary of Dublin, 1908.

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From the Joseph Jarratt scrapbook.

Irish Architectural Archive

Chimneypiece design from the Joseph Jarratt scrapbook.

Irish Architectural Archive.

Another more austere chimneypiece from the Jarrat Album.

Possibly representing a chimneypiece from the ground floor of the Weavers Hall.

All photographs of the interior of the Weavers Hall from the Irish Architectural Archive.

Photographed by the author 6 October 2016.

I am extremely grateful to Colum O'Riordan and all at the Irish Architectural Archive for making me welcome and in particular for allowing me access to the Jarratt scrapbooks.

It is possible that the interior fittings of the Weavers Hall were saved.

The Irish Archive files suggest that some of them were moved and were in The Cottage, Kanturk in 1987. A Google search could find no mention of it.

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Design from the scrap album and signed by Joseph Jarratt.

Tapestry weaving by van Beaver of George II originally in the Weavers Hall

now Metropolitan Museum, New York.

It has been suggested that this frame was also designed by Jarratt given the similarities.

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A Marble bust of David Digges La Touche II (1671 - 1745).

by John van Nost III.

Huntington Library, California.

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This image from the Art Chicago.

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The Pediment of the door case on the floor of the first floor room in the derelict Weavers Hall

shortly before demolition in 1965.

Not quite the End.

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Benjamin Rackstrow of Fleet Street, (d.1772).

The Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660 -1851 pub Yale, 2009 ed. Ingrid Roscoe et al notes.

In Entry under Rackstrow - Dublin Courant, 17th October, 14 November 1749, and 18 September 30 October 1750 quoted from Blacks guide to Ireland c. 1872.

His will PRO - PROB 11/978/152 - he leaves everything to Mrs Catherine Clarke

There seems to be an urge in some recent scholarship (Craske) to promote the idea of Rackstrow as a sculptor of portraits but I remain to be convinced.

The bust of Colley Cibber at the NPG has been suggested as his because of a reference to him in relation to the bust by Horace Walpole of Strawberry Hill.

Whilst research the portraits and sculpture of Anne Seymour Damer I came across a reference to the bust by Rackstrow

Horace Walpole wrote in an undated letter? of c. 1770's to the father of Anne Seymour Damer "Good-night to you, to her Ladyship, and to the Infanta (Miss Conway), whose progress in waxen statuary advances so fast that by next winter she may rival Rackstrow's old man" from Anne Seymour Damer by Percy Noble 1908.

Certainly he was one of the greatest London showmen of the mid 18th century.

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Rackstraws Biography below from

https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/research/programmes/conservation/directory-of-british-framemakers/r

*Benjamin Rackstrow, ‘The Crown and Looking-Glass’, the lower end of the paved stones, St Martin’s Lane, London ?1720s-1737?, ‘Sir Isaac Newton’s Head’, the corner of Crane Court in Fleet St 1738-1748 or later, 197 Fleet St by 1768-1772. Cabinet maker, sculptor, picture framemaker, figure caster etc.

Benjamin Rackstrow (d.1772) led a varied career, from picture frame making to sculpture and to opening a museum of waxwork figures. He is presumably the Benjamin Rackstrow who married Hannah Bonruc or Bourne at St Luke Old Street, in 1733, and who had a son William by Sarah (his second wife?) in 1737, baptised at St Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet St, and three further children between 1740 and 1744. He was made free of the Joiners’ Company in July 1737 (information from Robert B. Barker, quoting Guildhall Library MS 8051/4, f.56 verso), probably to meet requirements for working within the bounds of the City at his new premises in Fleet St.

Rackstrow issued his first trade card, perhaps in the 1720s, from St Martin’s Lane, advertising ‘all sorts of Cabinet Work, Looking-Glasses, Coach-glasses, Window Blinds, Picture-frames &c. after the newest fashion and at the most Reasonable Rates. He likewise cleans and repairs all sorts of Cabinet work, Exchanges New Glasses for Old ones and makes Old ones fashionable, NB.

He also cleans Pictures in the best manner and takes off Busto’s, Basso Reliev’s, and Figures of any Size in Wax, Metal, or Plaister of Paris’ (repr. Heal 1972 p.153).

He issued a further impressive trade card, dated 1738 and engraved by Henry Copland, from the corner of Crane Court in Fleet St, calling himself a cabinet and picture framemaker, and advertising a very similar range of services to before, also offering to hang bells after the new manner (repr. Heal 1972 p.154).

In a publication of 1748 he described himself as a ‘figure maker and statuary’ (Miscellaneous observations, together with a collection of experiments on electricity).

As a picture framemaker, we know very little of his activity.

As a sculptor we know a little more, including the supply of a figure of the piping Faunus to Lady Luxborough in 1742, ‘three bustos and a group’ in 1748 for Arbury in Warwickshire, a statue of George II for Weaver’s Hall, Dublin, in 1749-50 (no conclusive evidence), and two busts in 1752 and a figure of Edward VI to the Ironmongers’ Company (Gunnis 1968 p.314; Roscoe 2009).

From a court case in 1759, we learn that Rackstrow stocked a little figure of Shakespeare, about 12 ins high, which he sold for about 12s (Proceedings of the Old Bailey). He exhibited a coloured plaster figure and busts at the Free Society of Artists in 1763. His former apprentice, William Wynn, statuary, advertised from Shakespeare’s Head, Henrietta St, Covent Garden, in 1758 (Public Advertiser 31 May 1758; see also trade card, Banks coll., 106.33).

In later life, Rackstrow was known for his museum of waxwork figures and other curiosities which he maintained on his premises in Fleet St; these exhibits included life-size anatomical models (see Richard Altick, The Shows of London, 1978, pp.55-6; see also Matthew Craske, ‘ “Unwholesome” and “pornographic”: a reassessment of the place of Rackstrow’s Museum in the story of 18th-century anatomical collection and exhibition’, Journal of the History of Collections, vol.23, 2011, pp.75-99).

In his will, made 14 October 1769 and proved 1 June 1772, Benjamin Rackstrow, of St Dunstan-in-the-West, Temple Bar, left much of his estate to Catherine Clarke, including his busts, skeletons and moulds. His moulds, casts, figures and busts, from the antique, were sold shortly thereafterwards (Daily Advertiser 25 September 1772).

Sources: Information kindly provided by Robert B. Barker, 2011, on Rackstrow’s freedom and posthumous sale, and on William Wynn’s advertisement.

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In the 1730s, Londoners could view wax anatomical models made by the French surgeon Guillaume Desnoues (d. 1735), a preserved body of a real woman "gone nine Months with Child," and surgeon Abraham Chovet's (1704-1790) model of a pregnant woman, fitted with a mechanism that replicated respiration and circulation. Red liquid moved through glass veins and arteries that connected mother, fetus, and placenta (Daily Journal; Daily Post).

When Chovet's model was exhibited at the Fleet Street museum of Benjamin Rackstrow (c. 1707-1772), an advertising pamphlet warned men and women of this virtual vivisection, for she appeared to be a woman "opened when alive," an act that if real would be "of the highest Barbarity and Cruelty".

Rackstrow bequeathed his collection to the midwife Catherine Clarke, under whose administration it became a much expanded "anatomical exhibition" in the 1780s.

Shapira notes that Benjamin Rackstrow's longtime partner and eventual successor, midwife Catherine Clarke, ran a lying-in facil it y adjacent to the museum.

Amongst rooms of curiosities, audiences could see preserved specimens of "diseased wombs," stillborn children, "monstrous births" and wax models of pregnancy.

A 1790s catalogue described one of Desnoues's wax models: "Agony" was "beautifully expressed in the Face," while veins could be seen "creeping under the white Skin" and the "minutest Branches" of blood vessels across the "largely distended" womb.

Bibleography -

Rackstrow, Benjamin. An Explanation of the Figure of Anatomy. London: 1747.

Rackstrow Museum. A Brief Description of Those Curious and Excellent Figures of the Human Anatomy in Wax. London, 1790.

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The handbill below shows that he exhibited a statue (probably wax) of George II in Royal Robes.