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V.—The Earlier Royal Funeral Effigies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2011

R. P. Howgrave-Graham
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Extract

The well-known paper on the Funeral Effigies of The Kings and Queens of England by Sir William St. John Hope (Archaeologia, lx, 1907) is a splendid documentary and factual source of information about the effigies themselves. Comparatively little, however, is known about their homes throughout the ages, though it is on record that after the funeral of Elizabeth of York in 1503 her ‘pikture’ was ‘had to a secret place by St. Edward's shrine’. Henry Keepe, writing in 1682, shows that they were then in the upper part of the Islip Chapel, and this is corroborated by J. T. Smith's amusing account of a conversation between Nollekens the sculptor and an abbey verger named Catling in 1786.

Type
Research Article
Information
Archaeologia , Volume 98 , 1961 , pp. 159 - 169
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1961

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References

1 After the author's death this paper was prepared for publication by Mr. Martin Holmes, F.S.A. The illustrations are from the author's own photographs.

Note: A word may be said here as to the methods adopted in the reparations.

In general, all replacements of lost plaster and colour have been extremely conservative ; the lost areas on Edward III, and all the noses, were coloured to harmonize with the rest of the faces, but were left with a surface which could not deceive a person making careful examination. Small areas of surface-injury, holes made for injection and filled, and the stoppings of worm-holes, were coloured to match their surroundings.

Special care was taken in the highly necessary completion of the painted eyeballs where the black paint had partly flaked. The eyeballs, left with the centre partly flaked away, looked vague or even sinister, and one or two lips were most unpleasantly crooked without recolouring of small denuded places. Only a small fraction of the whole area of colour, however, is not original. In short, there is no restoration in the bad sense, and the heads are authentic.

A diary covering the whole work is in the abbey library.

page 161 note 1 In two sets of accounts for the ‘picture’ of James I there are charges for ‘Periwiggs, Beardes and eybrows’.

page 162 note 1 Sir Henry's first remark, on coming to see the effigies, was ‘These are real people!’