English leadwork : its art & history / Lawrence Weaver.

  • Lawrence Weaver
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: English leadwork : its art & history / Lawrence Weaver. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    50/294 (page 28)
    Amongst other early dated heads there is (or was, it may have disappeared recently) one of 1583, at Chard, with simple battlemented cresting and four pendants. At Burton Agnes are some fine heads bearing date 1603, and there are simple battlemented examples of 1609 on the east side of the tower at Langley Marish, Bucks, and of 1631 on a gabled house at Swindon. At Haddon Hall the lead heads are numerous, and like most things there, a liberal education. The continuous building which enables us, as we move from one room to another, to step from one century to another, and to see the development of treatment and feeling, say of wood panelling, in its best expressions, does us the same kindness with the leadwork. The heads range from about 1580 to 1696, and begin¬ ning in work of purely Gothic feeling run on to the stiff vase-shaped heads which are the common form of the eigh¬ teenth century. The later heads are illustrated in the next chapter. Among the earlier ones some are direct descend¬ ants of the stone gargoyles. Indeed, the gargoyles have been disestablished in their favour. The lead spouts from the stone figures which originally discharged clear of the building were shortened, and now discharge into pipe-heads. In two cases the craftsman manifestly has been influenced by the gargoyle idea, and has fashioned the front of the heads as more or less human faces, one of a settled melancholy (Fig. 40), the other expressing a slightly humorous dissatisfaction (Fig. 39). They are altogether a pretty jest in lead, and save for the two laughing masks, prophetic of Dr Johnson, on an example of 1699 at Durham Castle, there are few heads which are frankly amusing. The spirit of the mediaevalist was evidently abroad when they were conceived (about 1600). We have here a grim pleasantry very different from the polite wit which suggested the arabesque masks of a few years later (see Fig. 84). In Fig. 45 is shown a head on the Great Hall, Lower Court. A I0110- embattled gutter discharges into one end. The head has a fleur-de-lys cresting and a tracery disc on the front, but no trace of Renaissance treatment. Dr Charles Cox, in a paper on Derbyshire Plumbery, has illustrated a head similar to that of Fig. 45, but without a gutter, and with a circular