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Nicholas Stone

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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NICHOLAS STONE (1586-1647), English sculptor and architect, was the son of a quarryman of Woodbury, near Exeter, .and as a boy was apprenticed to Isaac James, a London mason. About 1603 he went to Holland and worked under the sculptor Hendrik de Keyser (1567-1621) and his son Pieter, and married his master's daughter. Stone is said to have made the portico to the Westerkerk at Amsterdam. Returning to London about 1613 with Bernard Janssens ( fl. 1610-1630), a fellow pupil,' he settled in Southwark and obtained a large practice; in 1619 he was appointed master-mason to James I., and in 1626 to Charles I.; and he died in London on the 24th of August 1647. Stone, whose work is associated with Inigo Jones's introduction of Renaissance architecture into England, ranks as the great sculptor of his time and the rejuvenator of the art in England. He is best known by his monuments, notably those to Sir Francis Vere, the earl of Middlesex, and Francis Holies in Westminster Abbey; Sir Dudley Digges at Chilham church, Kent; Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, in Dover Castle (removed to Greenwich); Sir Thomas Sutton, at the Charterhouse (with Janssens); Sir Robert Drury at Hawstead church, Suffolk; Sir William Stonhouse at Radley church, Berkshire; Sir Thomas Bodley at Merton College, Oxford; Sir William Pope, in Wroxton church, near Banbury; Sir Nicholas Bacon, in Redgrave church, Suffolk (with Janssens); Dr John Donne (winding-sheet), at St Paul's Cathedral; and Sir Julius Caesar, in St Helen's, Bishopsgate.

He had three sons: John (d. 1667), a sculptor; Henry (d. 1653) - commonly known as "Old Stone" - a painter, whose copies of Van Dyck were famous, and whose portraits of Charles I. and others are in the National Portrait Gallery; and Nicholas (d. 1647), a sculptor, who worked under Bernini at Rome and left a sketch-book, which, with a note-book of his father's (giving a list of his works between 1614 and 1641), is in the Soane Museum.

See an article by A. E. Bullock in the Architectural Review, 1907, and the same author's illustrated monograph Some Sculptural Works of Nicholas Stone (Batsford, London, 1908).