Contributions
The son of a Devon quarryman, Nicholas Stone was the greatest master sculptor and mason of early seventeenth-century England. Apprenticed in London to the Dutch-born Isaac James, he left in 1606 for Amsterdam to work under Hendrick de Keyser, the city's master mason, whose daughter he married before returning to London in 1613. From then on both sides of his genius unfolded. As mason to the Crown — master mason to James I in 1619, to Charles I in 1626, then Master Mason to the Crown from 1632 — he built, with Inigo Jones, the Banqueting House at Whitehall, the first great classical building in England, and designed in his own right the Goldsmiths' Hall, the Danby Gateway at the Oxford Botanic Garden and the Baroque porch of St Mary the Virgin. As a sculptor he left funerary monuments of unrivalled invention, foremost among them the effigy of the poet John Donne. His surviving account book and notebook offer a precious and rare record of the craft.
Significance
Stone stands at the hinge of two worlds: he links the Northern mannerism learned in the Low Countries to the nascent classicism Inigo Jones imported from Italy. No one better illustrates the moment when English art wavered between the decorative gusto of Artisan Mannerism and Palladian rigour. His effigy of John Donne — the only monument of old St Paul's to survive the Great Fire of 1666 almost intact — is the most unforgettable image in English funerary sculpture: the poet stands upright, wrapped in a shroud knotted into ruffs at head and feet, caught at the instant of Judgement. His workshop notebook, an exceptional document, has allowed scholars to attribute his work with certainty. Yet his age ranked him among craftsmen, not artists — the paradox of a man who ran the most sought-after studio in the kingdom. Loyal to the king, he was sequestered and imprisoned during the Civil War, and died in 1647, in the thick of the turmoil.
Influence
His London workshop, the largest in the kingdom, trained a whole generation of sculptors and masons, including his own sons. The standing, shrouded effigy of Donne spawned a line of monuments, and his union of decorative richness with classical design opened the way to the English sculpture of the Restoration. He himself drew on two inheritances: the mannerism and realism of the Low Countries, learned under Hendrick de Keyser, and the classical vocabulary passed to him through Inigo Jones and, beyond him, Palladio and Italian architecture.
Anecdote
The Donne monument was born of a staging of death willed by the poet himself. Dean of St Paul's and obsessed with his own end, the dying Donne had himself draped in a burial shroud to pose before a draughtsman; from that macabre portrait Stone drew the marble effigy in which the poet seems to rise from his urn on the Day of Judgement. Nothing in the story is invented: it is attested by Donne's contemporary biographers. The detail sums up Stone's art, able to turn a man's dread into one of the most powerful images of the Anglican faith.