The facade of the Victoria and Albert Museum
is a pantheon of the greatest names in British art.
The likes of JMW Turner...
John Constable...
William Morris.
But one figure is far less well known than these giants -
not a painter or designer, but a woodcarver.
His name? Grinling Gibbons.
From the decadence of 17th century Restoration London,
came a carver who was called our own Michelangelo...
..who transformed wood into pure art.
It's completely jawdropping.
Many people are completely blown away with the sheer technical skill.
How on earth could someone actually produce something like this?
When the capital was at its lowest ebb,
he made heavenly decoration.
His carvings adorned the greatest buildings in Britain,
his clients, the most powerful men of their age.
It became the blue-chip style of the day,
and came to dominate interiors
during one of the great periods of British building.
It's a clever bloke showing off to toffs,
but it overwhelms me with how beautiful it is.
He introduced new ways of working with wood,
his innovation's kept alive today by a select band of carvers.
I connected with Grinling Gibbons,
I connected with the 17th century. It was an epiphany, literally.
Gibbons' own career ended in failure.
His legacy is highly precarious,
surviving floods, fire
and the whims of fashion.
And yet Gibbons' work endures -
a unique window into this turbulent age,
created by the greatest woodcarver in British history.
The career of Grinling Gibbons
was born out of a national calamity.
On 2nd September 1666, as every schoolchild knows,
a fire began in a bakery here on Pudding Lane in the City of London.
It quickly spread out of control.
Within a few hours, London was engulfed in flames.
Over three days, the medieval city was almost totally destroyed
and a world of handcrafted wooden architecture was lost.
In the Victoria & Albert Museum, this ornate oak house facade,
belonging to a London merchant,
is a unique survivor of this inferno...
..a taste of what old, wooden London would've looked like.
The Fire of London was completely devastating.
It destroyed a third of the buildings,
about 80 churches, all the guild halls,
the great warehouses, stuffed with stuff down by the Thames.
And so, after the fire,
it was seen as a great opportunity for rebuilding.
The mammoth reconstruction of the capital
was an overwhelming task for London's craftsmen.
And for a young apprentice across the North Sea,
the fire was not to be a tragedy, but a glorious opportunity.
As the embers were still warm on the destroyed City of London,
a teenage Grinling Gibbons was busy learning his craft in Amsterdam.
Gibbons had English parents,
but he was brought up in the Netherlands.
His father, a draper, had travelled here to make his fortune.
This was a smart move.
In the 17th century, the Dutch people were enjoying a "Golden Age",
in terms of commerce and also art.
Gibbons was schooled by the most famous sculptors of the day,
the Quellin family, headed by Artus Quellin.
They created the classical statues that decorated Amsterdam Town Hall,
declaring the power and confidence of Holland's new merchant class.
Amsterdam Town Hall was a very impressive secular building,
which was for the citizens of Amsterdam.
So a middle-class, but a very grand, middle-class building.
The exterior was impressive,
but it was the carvings that Quellins created inside the building
that were to shape Gibbons' creative imagination.
It was very luxuriously decorated
with all sorts of figurative and non-figurative carvings in marble.
And the Quellins were the major artists in the city at that time.
That was a very important part of Gibbons' training
and there is no question he couldn't have become what he became,
without that background in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam.
Down-to-earth Dutch merchants liked their art to appear
as realistic as the goods they traded in,
and their tastes were catered to by carvers far more skilled
than any to be found in Britain.
Here you can see, in marble, objects that Gibbons was to spend
the rest of his career transforming into wood -
musical instruments...
sea shells and creatures from the sea...
cherubs, so lifelike, they look as if they might breathe.
But Gibbons was schooled in far more than just carving,
because the Dutch were also obsessed with botany.
This was a "Golden Age" of Dutch still-life painters
and their naturalistic rendering of flowers
and Gibbons' wood carvings were always imbued with this passion
for flowers, in their many varieties.
But, most importantly or the young Gibbons,
there was a great woodwork tradition in Northern Europe
that hadn't yet reached Britain.
While we painted our wooden sculptures -
raw wood was seen as vulgar -
in Northern Europe, artists revelled
in the natural textures of the medium.
And like them, Gibbons was to never paint his work.
So, an optimistic teenage Gibbons, armed with all this training,
arrived in London, hoping to make his fortune
as the capital rebuilt itself after the Great Fire.
To a young Dutchman - and Gibbons is only 19 -
it must've seemed that there was a real opportunity for joinery,
but also for this decorative woodwork that he's been studying,
he's been an apprentice - this would be just the place.
Everybody wants overmantels, they want fireplaces,
they want doors and door lintels,
so he must've thought it was THE place to be.
But if he expected to be an overnight success,
the young Gibbons was in for a shock.
He spent his early years in England
living in penury in the port town of Deptford,
carving decoration not for fine houses, but boats!
Fortunately for the young carver, in 1671,
he was discovered at work here, in what was described as a
"poore, solitary thatched house",
by one of the most influential men of Restoration London.
The story of Gibbons' discovery is legendary.
It's told by that great diarist, John Evelyn.
And Evelyn tells this wonderful story
of how he's walking, one afternoon, through Deptford,
and he sees, through a window of a cottage, this young man
working at this piece of wood, carving it away.
And he recognises it's a completely extraordinary piece of art.
The piece that astounded Evelyn was this crucifixion,
now in a country house in Cheshire.
It's based on a scene by the Italian artist Tintoretto,
and the piece has the drama of a great Renaissance painting,
with its figures of Mary, swooning in agony...
..the torture of crucifixion
and its array of callous onlookers.
But with this design, the young Gibbons was playing with fire.
In Protestant England,
this would've been an extremely shocking artwork.
This was only a few years after the English Civil War,
when Puritans consigned this kind of art
to the bonfire as "idolatrous".
But the art-loving Evelyn was clever enough to realise
this was a new kind of sculpture, not seen in Britain before.
I think to understand why Gibbons was so revolutionary,
you need to understand what woodwork was like before Gibbons.
The carvings are relatively flat, they're oak.
So they blend in with the background.
And you're working with very hard material, so you can't cut it
back so much, you've got a very flat decoration, however hard you try.
But this is the period of the Baroque,
and people want lots of decoration.
The British loved oak - it was seen as being robust, proud,
a part of our national character.
But to the Dutch-born Gibbons, oak was old-fashioned -
he chose a different medium - the much lighter limewood.
The American woodcarver
and the world's greatest authority on Gibbons, David Esterly,
only works in limewood,
bringing a modern twist to Gibbons' style of carving.
And so he has a unique insight
into the properties of this special material.
There's no wood like limewood. It's remarkably crisp and firm -
soft enough to be easily cut,
but strong enough to be radically undercut.
It has a terrific zip to it.
Which comes from its close, crisp grain.
In fact, you can see
if you look at the chip I'm producing, it's really a curl.
You see, I managed to get a whole huge curl of wood with one stroke.
By contrast, oak, which was in use by the British carvers
before Gibbons's arrival,
I don't know if you can hear, it's a crunchier sound.
It simply doesn't have the wonderful...
..zip and closeness of the grain.
Limewood allowed Gibbons to transform wood
into three-dimensional forms.
He could create scenes like this depiction of the martyrdom
of St Stephen.
Gibbons captures the drama of the precise moment
when Stephen is about to be stoned.
Evelyn described Gibbons' talent as "incomparable" and he secured
a meeting for this obscure carver with the Stuart monarch, Charles II.
It should've been the perfect opportunity to finally launch
his carving career.
But sadly, for Gibbons, Charles rejected his work
on their first meeting.
It had an aura of Catholicism about it,
and this was positively radioactive in Britain in the 1670s.
Charles had the sensitivity to understand
that any show of the outward trappings of the religion
would be utterly politically unacceptable.
With his gloomy, serious Biblical subjects, Gibbons badly misjudged
the fun-loving mood of Restoration England.
Charles became famous for being a "merry monarch".
His reign was about flamboyance and theatricality.
Cromwell had closed the playhouses but one of Charles' first actions
was to reopen them, as all of London became a kind of grand theatre.
The ambitious Gibbons abandoned his religious work.
Realising the prevailing tastes in England, he found a job
working as a carver on the interior of the grand Duke's Theatre.
And now, at last, Gibbons' luck was about to turn.
In the 1670s, Charles II rebuilt the medieval Windsor Castle
as a pleasure palace, in the new continental baroque style.
And because of his work at the Duke's Theatre,
Gibbons was commissioned to work on it.
This is the King's Dining Room,
decorated with images of feasting - a visual celebration designed
to glorify the Restoration of monarchy.
But the room's tour de force were the carvings by Grinling Gibbons.
Drawing on his Dutch training, he created flowers, fruit,
and sea creatures good enough to eat.
Nobody in Britain had seen anything like it.
Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a spectacular form of carved ornament
burst on the scene.
Wood that was carved with extraordinary realism and fluency.
It became the blue-chip style of the day and came to dominate
interiors during one of the great periods of British building.
Visitors were bewildered at how Gibbons could transform solid wood
into these forms.
It was because he'd introduced a new technique for carving.
Gibbons never worked just from a single piece of wood.
His decorative pieces were constructed from many blocks
or layers that he'd stick together at the end of the process.
Steve Bisco, like Gibbons, also uses this layering technique
to create his limewood sculptures.
The first stage in carving is to trace the pattern onto
the block of wood and cut it out.
So we have to start separating the various flowers.
It's really just a case of working things down to the level you want.
We eventually get to the point where
we've separated the individual elements.
So we now need to start putting the details on the crocuses,
and this is where it starts to get more skilled
and you have to take your time
and be patient with this because you can easily remove wood
that you wanted to keep.
Unlike a lot of carvers, who kept the things fairly stylised,
with Gibbons you've got to carve it as close to nature
as you possibly can.
Which is where you the benefit of Gibbon's method of
separating his carvings into layers.
Because although we can shape a lot of this from the front,
what we really need to do is turn it over and get at it from the back.
So with it turned it over, we can pare down to create
nice sharp edges, and I have to be careful not to press too hard,
because the carving is getting increasingly more fragile now,
and you have to be patient and not rush it
otherwise you hear a sickening crack.
And this is a finished section of a Gibbons-style carving,
which would then be attached to the rest of the carving
to create a whole floral spray.
Because of his work at Windsor,
Gibbons was now very much in Charles II's favour.
Gibbons created this spectacular bronze statue of the monarch,
now in the Royal Hospital in Chelsea.
It showed the king as a pagan Roman emperor, a work that displays
the power but also the gilded glamour of the monarchy.
MUSIC: "Gloria" by Handel
# Gloria, Gloria. #
And Charles' patronage meant that Gibbons' woodwork
was now to reach an international stage.
The king commissioned the carver to create
a panel for his political ally Cosimo III of Florence.
It was supposed to be a simple diplomatic gift.
But Gibbons went well beyond his brief to create his most complex
and beautiful piece to date.
This is the Cosimo Panel.
It shows art triumphing over hatred and turmoil.
Here you can see arrows safely put out of harm's way in their quiver,
and a medallion of Pietro da Cortona, Cosimo's favourite painter.
Gibbons even signed the piece,
showing that he too should be judged as a great artist.
But not everything is as it seems about the Cosimo Panel.
It was recently dismantled to undergo restoration in this
Florentine conservation studio.
This celebration of peace has been in the wars
since its creation.
In the 1960s Florence was almost destroyed
as the River Arno broke its banks.
The panel was covered in putrid water and mud
as floods poured into the museum that housed it.
And having survived water, the next peril was fire.
The work was nearly blown up during a gas explosion in the 1980s.
Shane Raven is a carver whose work is imbued
with the spirit of Gibbons' Cosimo Panel.
Shane's Augustus Panel,
in the Carpenter's Company building in London,
has many visual nods towards Gibbons' masterpiece.
Shane creates grand fantasies in limewood - like this horn of plenty.
His life and work changed for ever when he saw the Cosimo Panel
when it came to the V&A in the late '90s.
I found it quite emotional - it was like childbirth,
when my daughter was born.
I just went in. Being a grown man, I just wanted to cry.
I just looked at this thing and thought
"My God, this is phenomenal".
And the piece that struck me the most was the cravat that was carved
which was hanging underneath one of the crowns.
And it was unbelievably beautiful. It was so tactile. It almost moved.
And also, one of the nicest things for me was actually looking
to the side of the Cosimo Panel. I actually saw chisel marks.
They were almost my chisel marks. I remember doing things like that.
I thought "Yes, that's how he's done it". It was so personal.
And then I connected with Grinling Gibbons,
I connected with the 17th century.
That was the moment for me that I just thought was phenomenal.
It was an epiphany, literally.
I carve because it's a passion, I love to create things from wood.
I love to make furniture, but with this, it's almost living,
it's almost organic, it's very, very tactile
although hopefully, people won't go touching it.
But you WANT to touch it.
People want to go up and run their hands over it, and "Does this move?
"Does this move?" It's a great feeling. It's almost...
Especially things like the music sheet - it's going to be carved
so thin, that you're hoping somebody will blow it, and flick it up.
The Cosimo Panel is a joyous celebration
but it's also a kind of elegy, marking the end of the golden age
of Charles II.
It was to be the final piece Gibbons completed for the "merry monarch",
who died in 1685, to be succeeded by his brother.
James II was the polar opposite of the clever, political Charles.
Dictatorial, arrogant, James was openly Roman Catholic
at a time when the religion was feared by his subjects.
But like his brother,
the new monarch did recognise Gibbons' talents.
Impressed by the Cosimo Panel,
James commissioned the carver to create a gift for another
Italian aristocrat, the Duke of Modena.
But the Modena Panel,
housed in the city's museum, was to be a far darker
and almost prophetic piece of work.
Gibbons made this extraordinary panel for James II.
And it's what we call a memento mori, a classical piece
with the skull and the fruit.
You can see that it's going. Everything is transient.
There is a wonderful detail which is a song, in the middle, by Shirley,
which says "The icy hand of death doth lay on kings
"Septer and crown must tumble down."
So, it's a very gloomy,
modest piece for someone who has just become king.
As if to say "I will only be here for a short while."
The piece displays Gibbons' growing confidence.
It even includes a self-portrait.
But the imagery is so morbid, it seems to prefigure the downfall
of his new patron.
James couldn't help but display his Catholicism.
He commissioned Gibbons to make another object.
One that would've utterly appalled his Protestant subjects.
It can now be found in the church of St James's, Piccadilly.
This grand, Italian-style organ loft was originally constructed
by Gibbons for James's private Catholic chapel -
itself an inflammatory statement in a protestant country.
It's full of angels and cherubs heralding the glory of God...
and the crown.
But also, within this church, is one of Gibbons' finest masterpieces.
This reredos - a decorative screen behind the altar.
It contains a beauty even hard-line protestants could enjoy.
He avoided controversial pictures of the saints
and instead drew on images from the natural world.
Finna Ayres has managed St James' since 1999,
and feels a special affinity for this type of religious sculpture,
going back to being a child.
My father was a sculptor in almost all materials you can imagine.
He used to work in ivory, brick, stone and wood,
so, yes, I think I knew about Grinling Gibbons
before I knew about Enid Blyton, you know.
We didn't have children's books at home,
we had books on Grinling Gibbons!
It is so abundant.
It's air flying with the bird,
it's the sea with the shells, grain to eat, it's flowers to enjoy.
It's trying to keep alive
and give immortality something which is perishable.
You know, they will all be consumed and will rot away,
but they're here now for ever, we can all see them.
There's an intellectual part of me that doesn't like it
because it's so excessive.
And you know, it's a clever bloke that's showing off to toffs,
so there are a few bits of it that I don't like at all.
But it overwhelms me with how beautiful it is,
how incredibly abundant it is, how rich it is.
I like very much, something we don't do now, which, if you look at that,
it's not at all symmetrical, and yet it's perfectly harmonious
one side with the other and the top with the bottom.
There's no repetition, there's no boring old symmetry.
It's just very strong, terribly clever.
James II's pride knew no bounds.
Like his brother Charles,
he commissioned Gibbons to create
a bronze statue of him as a Roman emperor,
which today stands outside London's National Gallery.
But this statue was in stark contrast to political reality -
there was nothing triumphant about James' reign,
as his Protestant court plotted to overthrow him.
In 1688, a desperate James was forced to flee to France,
at midnight - a coup which came to be known as the Glorious Revolution.
And for Gibbons, this had to be a terrifying moment.
He'd spent nearly two decades
celebrating the glories of the Stuart kings.
By now he was 40 years old,
with a large family and studio to support -
would his work fit in with the new regime?
However, favour was to smile on the carver once more.
Because after the fall of James,
William of Orange took the throne -
a Protestant but, just as importantly, a Dutchman.
This was a monarch who was about the same age as Gibbons,
who'd also imbued the spirit of the Dutch Golden Age.
They spoke the same language, both literally and artistically.
When William and his wife Mary chose to transform
the palace of Hampton Court,
Gibbons found his services in demand once again.
William and Mary, from 1688, are the good Protestant monarchs.
And everything must be a contrast to the Catholic James,
who has now left. And when they remodel Hampton Court,
it's plain, it's formal, and yet they want to employ
the best of current craftsmanship,
and Gibbons comes in there.
And it's interesting, because the things that we love about him,
some of the things, absolutely fall away -
I mean, there are no lobsters and there's no drapery
and there are no musical instruments -
the playfulness and elaborate design has gone.
And he uses this much simpler vocabulary, really,
of fruit and flowers and swags.
It's taking the best of the past,
but it's not looking decadent or overdone any more.
Gibbons created some of his most beautiful carvings
for King William - but as a decorator,
he wasn't above cutting a few corners,
as you can see if you get up close and personal with his work.
This is designed to be seen from below,
and when you come up on the scaffolding,
what you look at is what you shouldn't be seeing.
So if you look at the top of this angel's head, for example,
if you look at it from below, it is absolutely perfect.
Lovely mouth, lovely nose, beautiful hair.
And as you get towards the top where nobody sees it,
you can see where the chisel has been.
This is a carver who really knows what he's doing.
And if you have at look round at the back of the bird,
in order to make it light, can you see the little cuts inside,
with a very tiny chisel - can you see that?
And as a conservator, you can see that,
and nobody else sees it,
which is, I think, the reason we all become conservators,
so we can look at stuff nobody else can!
To achieve these kinds of effects,
Gibbons had literally hundreds of tools.
He amassed them over a lifetime of carving,
far more than any of his contemporaries.
David Esterly has spent decades building up
a collection of the kinds of implements
that Gibbons would've had at his disposal.
Why so many tools? Well, with wood...
you slice through it, and it leaves behind on the wood
the shape of the blade. Therefore, if you're doing
something as complicated as the sort of very high relief,
very naturalistic foliage carving that Gibbons is doing,
then you need to have a multitude of tools to get the various shapes.
You would have back-bent tools
and front-bent tools for deep excavations
and he would have had some really very sophisticated tools,
for example, a front-bent veiner,
a small tool which you would use
for putting a vein of a leaf in at a very low level.
One of the reasons why I'm sure
that this is what Gibbons' tool bench would have looked like
is that some of these tools go back almost halfway to Gibbons' era,
and some of the old carvers wrote their names
or stamped their names on their chisel handles.
A Gordon. I wonder who he was.
It's sort of like shaking hands with the old fellow
whenever I use it, so there's a romance about these tools
which affects me, even after all these years.
And in the 1690s, Gibbons would've needed every one of his tools
and tricks to please his most demanding patron yet.
Because the most difficult client Gibbons ever had to deal with
wasn't a monarch, but a duke,
the owner of Petworth House in Sussex.
One of the most influential men in Britain,
and a close ally of King William, was Charles Seymour -
and he was fully aware of his own importance.
He was so famously vain, people called him the Proud Duke.
There are all sorts of anecdotes about Charles Seymour,
the Proud Duke, and why he was so proud.
For a start, there's the one where he docked his daughter's inheritance
by some 20-odd thousand pounds
because she sat down in his presence.
He was actually asleep at the time.
There's another famous one where he dismissed one of the servants
for turning his back upon him, forgetting the fact
that the servant, poor chap, was actually fanning the fire
with bellows and it's very difficult to do that
without turning your back.
So this is the sort of man we're talking about.
But he was a very cultured man, and brought in
many of the finest craftsmen in England
to work at Petworth House,
one of whom, of course, was Grinling Gibbons.
This is Gibbons' masterpiece -
a magnificent carved room,
full of ingenious nods towards the Proud Duke's obsessions.
We can certainly get a sense of his interest in gardening,
which, of course, was very fashionable,
in the wonderful floral arrangements represented by Gibbons.
There are the great Grecian urns -
there's very much an allusion there to the Proud Duke's interest
in classical culture and so on and so forth.
As we might expect, the Proud Duke was a Knight of the Garter.
We can see very clearly the George hanging from a ribbon,
as carved by Gibbons.
But also music is represented very firmly here.
Amid the violins in Gibbons' great musical group
is an open manuscript of Purcell's Fairy Queen,
which was hot off the press -
it had only just been performed on the London stage in 1692.
So it's a very important celebration
of not only the Proud Duke's cultural sensibility,
but also his connection with the royal court.
It's completely jaw-dropping. Every time I walk into this room,
I am completely overwhelmed by the brilliance of what surrounds me.
Many people have just never really experienced
anything like this before, and for a start,
they are completely blown away with the sheer technical skill.
It's something which is frequently remarked upon -
how on earth could someone actually produce something like this?
This room was a tribute to a Proud Duke.
But if you look closely enough,
you can see Grinling Gibbons' "GG" initials,
facing away from each other in this great swirl.
And by now, Gibbons could've been forgiven
for displaying a fair bit of pride himself.
You have to have a Gibbons if you've got a great house.
You have to have a Gibbons surround.
It's the piece to have to show off your wealth,
your understanding of art.
The must-have piece of decoration.
And so he's risen way beyond being an artisan.
He's now an artist.
The dark days of Deptford were now well behind him -
as early as the 1670s,
he'd established premises inside the City of London,
in the fashionable Ludgate Hill area.
And throughout his career,
a number of portraits were completed of Gibbons.
They were all to have one thing in common -
they NEVER showed him in the role
for which he was most famous - as a wood carver!
I think he wanted to project an image of himself as a gentleman.
There's a marvellous engraving of Grinling Gibbons and his wife,
and they could almost be a duke and duchess.
There's another marvellous painting of Grinling Gibbons
holding compasses with a head - and very interestingly,
that head is from a sculpture by Bernini,
so he clearly saw himself in the footsteps
of the great sculptors of the past.
Having a studio in Ludgate Hill,
Gibbons would also have seen first-hand
the gradual rebuilding of the most potent symbol of London itself -
St Paul's Cathedral.
Designed by Sir Christopher Wren in the aftermath of the Great Fire,
this was the most important building project of the 17th century.
And every craftsman,
especially one as ambitious as Gibbons,
was desperate to be a part of it.
Gibbons had a big problem, though -
Wren was decidedly not a fan of his work.
Wren met Gibbons very early on,
but he was singularly unimpressed
and didn't actually use Gibbons for a good decade.
Wren's architecture is always quite severe -
he's always worried about being accused of being popish.
This wildly over-decorated stuff is just too close to Italian baroque.
But eventually, Grinling Gibbons becomes so famous
that he cannot not employ him.
And, of course, it is at St Paul's we see this most dramatically.
At last, Wren fully embraced the exuberant style of Gibbons,
and his work decorated the most important part of his cathedral.
The choir is where everything is going to happen.
So this has to be the grandest, the most dramatic,
the most splendid piece of the whole cathedral.
And so this has to be the bit
where you use the greatest carver of the age.
You have to use Grinling Gibbons.
This is Gibbons' most personal work.
Many believe the faces of the putti are based on his own children.
This is a wonderfully rhythmic design,
with the putti, and the lovely swags going along.
And the light limewood reliefs that we associate with Gibbons
sort of merge into the darker oak surrounds,
so that too is like tradition,
because the oak is the absolutely central British wood.
As spectacular as Gibbons' work appears in St Paul's today,
we can only really glimpse a little of the splendour
the carver intended for the cathedral.
He constructed a grand organ case,
separating the choir stalls from the rest of the church,
that now only survives in old drawings.
In the Victorian era,
worshippers turned against Gibbons' baroque work -
it was broken in half, and pushed to either side of the choir stalls,
much of it lost on the way.
And the destruction at St Paul's
gives a clue to the strange downfall of Grinling Gibbons.
Even as he was putting the finishing touches to the cathedral,
his elaborate form of woodcarving was falling out of favour.
Fashions changed.
A plainer style came into play.
Famously, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough
talked about how she didn't want a single thing carved in her house -
she wanted her wainscoting as plain and simple as a lady's face -
and gradually the taste for elaborate baroque carving faded.
It was a very sad thing for Gibbons,
because he had an extraordinary workshop
and no work, really, for them.
Even at Hampton Court, the writing is on the wall.
That was a very low profit operation for Gibbons.
He was paid very, very little for his grand overmantels there -
I think it's 28, 30 pounds,
that sort of price, which was not enough, not enough -
he clearly did it at a loss to keep his workshop together.
And thereafter, work just began to dry up for him.
For Gibbons, this change of fashion was a professional disaster.
At the end of the 17th century, the 50-year-old carver
could no longer make a living just from wood.
His workshop had always worked in other mediums,
but now the only way to make ends meet
was by constructing marble tombs.
But Gibbons' peers were absolutely scathing about his efforts in stone.
He was constantly harried by complaints during these years.
Some of his sculptures were sent back to be reworked.
With some, he was urged to take a reduction in the price.
He never did master the human figure.
The energy which there might've been in the human form,
he was only able to express somehow in his foliage.
In the early 18th century, his reputation was fatally breached
by a damning review of this work in Westminster Abbey,
the tomb of the naval officer Cloudesley Shovell.
The influential critic Joseph Addison
wrote it was a matter of "great offence"
that the manly Shovell should be depicted as a dandy,
"reposing himself on a velvet cushion."
When Gibbons died in 1721 at the age of 73,
he was buried not in St Paul's Cathedral,
but the less prestigious St Paul's, Covent Garden.
This great craftsman was yesterday's man.
He was given no monument at the time of his death.
This limewood carving was only placed here,
at the back of the church, in the 1960s.
Gibbons might have been written out of history,
but for one eccentric art collector and taste-maker
who was three years of age when the carver died.
Horace Walpole loved going against the grain.
In the mid 18th century,,
when the taste was for classical architecture,
he constructed a gothic mansion, Strawberry Hill -
and he used the house to celebrate the unfashionable Gibbons.
This carving of a cravat, once owned by Walpole,
is now in the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Walpole prized this piece very highly.
He kept it in a glass case
in the Tribune Room at his Thameside villa Strawberry Hill.
It's essentially a virtuoso demonstration
of the carver's skill. He's portrayed a length
of super-expensive Venetian needle lace,
the most opulent and expensive dress accessory of its day,
and Walpole even mentions this cravat
as "an art which arrives even unto deception,"
and he describes in a letter
how he'd received a party of foreign guests at the villa,
and he met them at the gates wearing the cravat around his neck.
And he describes the visitors staring at him,
presumably incredulous that an English gentleman
would dress like this. We can also see -
it's perhaps easier looking at the back -
the way that a number of these pierced loops
have actually been broken off, and I can't help but speculate
how many of those loops might've been broken off
during Horace Walpole's practical joke.
Gibbons' work was honed in the service of the royal court,
and delighted eccentrics like Horace Walpole.
But does this decoration of grand houses and baroque ornamentation
have any relevance to the modern world?
Why should we care about a woodcarver who fell out of fashion
even within his own lifetime?
In the 17th century, Gibbons' woodcarving was valued
for its triumphal relationship to the natural world.
In other words, this showed the great families' command
over earth and ocean and sky.
But that sort of triumphalism is something
that's likely to make us nervous these days.
Gibbons' carvings are all about the beauty of the natural world,
which we're in the midst of laying waste to now.
So there's a kind of poignancy.
Looking at Gibbons' work, partly you look at it and think,
"How did he do it?"
It draws you in like a painting,
and yet you know, it's so tactile,
you know that someone has actually worked that with their hands.
It's something that schoolchildren should be taught.
It should become a national curriculum, to learn to wood-carve.
If children were taken to museums to see work like this,
it would inspire people. I'm sure it would.
I don't think somebody like me needs to tell you to go and see Gibbons.
I think if you come across Gibbons, it's breathtaking.
It is...just like nothing else.
In the next episode,
we'll see how medieval carvers and carpenters transformed wood
into images of the divine that still astound us today.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd