To Be Shaped by the Wood

8 ART HISTORY To be shaped by the wood ending over the carvings of Grinling JENNY UGLOW himtocastasideplanstostudyinGermany;six Gibbons, taken down for restoration years later, gazing out over the Fens, after fin- Bafter the fire at Hampton Court in 1986, ishing a dissertation on Yeats and Plotinus, he David Esterly the wood-carver David Esterly noticed how feels “desperate to swim back to shore, to meticulously executed they were, even in THE LOST CARVING clamber out of the mind and into the body places that were hidden to a viewer. Such care, A journey to the heart of making again”. Back in the United States he works as he acknowledges, is a mark of diligence in a 288pp. Duckworth Overlook. Paperback, £9.99. a truck driver and in a Boston ear-plug factory carving – you can never be sure “what angle 978 0 7516 4919 0 (“the machine was so loud you had to wear the world will take on it”. It is also a matter of US: Penguin. $16. 978 0 14 312441 2 ear-plugs to operate it”.) Then comes the daring: ultimate, awe-struck moment, when he sees paring stems to an ever more dangerous thin- ing the writing of this book in his home in the Gibbons’s miraculous cascading swags of ness. Undercutting yet more radically beneath Adirondacks as the seasons change and fruit and flowers over the altar at St James’s, them, even at risk of hearing that appalling Esterly works on a variety of carvings. Beside Piccadilly, and decides that he must write crack. Excavating farther and farther down, so him on the workbench are his tools, 130 chisels about him. This, however, is not enough: to that you make full use of the full thickness of the and gouges, their place memorized over time understand Gibbons’s art he must work the board. Continuing a spray of forget-me-nots into so that his hand goes out instinctively to the wood himself. He learns to carve. still gloomier depths, into corners where they’re one he needs. He gives it a “little gunslinger’s The Hampton Court story, too, contains unlikely to be seen. twirl” and the handle drops into his palm. Now these moments of surprise, jumps in perspec- Esterly’s own engrossing memoir follows comes the first stroke, the action, the sound of tive, sudden accidents. Standing on a scaffold this model, excavating the layers of time in his the wood, the twist of the body. This is the first on his first day of work, examining the arching own career and that of Gibbons, plunging into stage of several parallel journeys into the art, tulips and crocuses, he reaches out to hold a the obscure corners of aesthetic debates, play- and heart, of making. stem – a little wiggle, he thinks, will reveal ing with images and ideas in an attempt to The second narrative moves back in time to that these are nowhere near as delicate as they translate the craft of carving into words, as the point in his career, after fifteen years of try- look. “At first pressure, a quiet snap. Gib- Gibbons translated the ripeness of a peach into ing to emulate Gibbons, when he had reached bons’s twig came away in my fingers.” For wood. And just as Gibbons’s static ropes and international renown but was beginning to see David Esterly years the memory could put him into a sweat, swags and sprays twist and overlap and seem his hero less as a master than a monster, an but he comes to see it as “the casualty of a to move, so Esterly’s linked narratives curl and incubus, a threatening figure blocking his way. ton Court’s South Wing is ablaze. Flames greedy desire to make the carving yield up its return, while propelling the reader onward. A prophetic dream of fire is followed the next ripped through the King’s Apartments, built secrets as quickly as possible”. Breakages, he The first timeline is seemingly simple, follow- day by the news that the upper floor of Hamp- for William III by Christopher Wren, and continues, among the casualties were Gibbons’s late are powerful pedagogical devices. If you pene- masterpieces, overmantels and door drops, trate the bitter rind of these disasters you can rel- shimmering lime-wood against dark oak. ish them for the instruction they provide. That Eventually, after a frustrating row over whe- sickening snap is a cry from the wood: Don’t do ther only British carvers should restore British this! Do you think you can get away with it? You treasures, Esterly not only provided the brief don’t understand me. The wood is teaching you fortherestoration,but–settingasidehisbanon about itself, configuring your mind and muscles reproduction – carved the replacement for the to the tasks required of them. To carve is to be most severely damaged piece, a seven-foot- shaped by the wood even as you’re shaping it. long “drop” framing a door. In this intensely This passage segues into a meditation on acci- physical, almost tactile, book, Esterly’s time at dent, on trial and error, on the virtues of trans- Hampton Court inhabits its own physical form, gressing limits, on bad design and the way that enshrined in three yellowing notebooks kept at follies and breakages can also lead “to their the time, “rafts on the sea of memory”, carry- own kind of redemption”. Disaster can be a ing Esterly back. “In the notebooks,” he writes, fine designer: the loss of a petal can give space “time has stopped and I can dawdle in it.” and air, “An injection of realism, the kind of His literary return to this time, however, has damage that might happen to a living plant in begun much earlier in the memory of his flight the real world”. to England to undertake the restoration. As the At Hampton Court the discoveries con- plane swoops in over Sussex, curving up to the tinue, giving rise to new, obsessive quests and Thames estuary and then west over London, he hunts and arguments. First comes the “spine glimpses particular places that allow him to go tingling” revelation that the “drops”, the back still further, sketching Gibbons’s career swags that flow down each side of the door, in the late seventeenth century and his own in are misplaced. Some are not only in the wrong the twentieth. Both are stories of sudden turns, position, but actually upside down. “Bunches checks and balances, spurts of fortune. Born of of berries were thrusting upward in defiance British parents but brought up in Amsterdam, of gravity”, and had been for years, unnoticed Gibbons was spotted through a cottage by scholars, curators and visitors. The reali- window in Deptford by John Evelyn, who saw zation that lime-wash was used to lighten the him working on a detailed wood relief of wood in the late eighteenth century leads to Tintoretto’s “Crucifixion”. But Evelyn’s much debate as to whether this should be used introduction to Wren and Charles II proved again. Then Esterly’s long-held and loudly fruitless, since the King refused to buy work proclaimed belief that Gibbons used no abra- that might link him to Catholicism. In sive to smooth his work is embarrassingly response, Gibbons turned from incendiary negated by the discovery of distinct striations. religious themes to the safer vegetable world. What abrasive could Gibbons have used, as Ten years later he was back at court, providing sandpaper had not yet been invented – was it intricate decorations, of fruit and flowers, dogfish skin, or the dried plant “Dutch rush”? shells and swirls, so delicate that they seemed Yet another intense, dogged quest begins. to tremble in the breeze. The book bristles with energy. There are Cunningly, Esterly presents his own trajec- moments of rapturous physical delight, at the tory in terms of similar moments when life fine sheen on a Gibbons leaf, at the mist rising turns on its head: a day at Cambridge drives from a river in the snow, the moon disappear- TLS APRIL 10 2015 10 ARCHITECTURE ing behind a hill, the hot summer sun through the workshop window. There are moments Still a living language of quiet, as Esterly carves while his wife Marietta restores porcelain figures, or when he talks to old carvers, or plunges happily into technical shop-talk with his colleagues in the J. MORDAUNT CROOK Hampton Court workroom. But these are bal- anced by outbursts of tetchiness. He bridles Paul Binski with a craftsman’s dismay at conceptual artists who employ untrained workers and conde- GOTHIC WONDER scend to skill: “the adjective ‘mere’ attaches to Art, artifice and the decorated style, 1290–1350 it like a barnacle”. He remembers the anger he 448pp. Yale University Press. £40 (US $75). felt when the guest list for an opening party 978 0 300 20400 1 omitted the carvers. He still fumes against the Michael Hall officials who seemed to block his way. My favourite among these – and there are many – GEORGE FREDERICK BODLEY is when he comes across Simon Thurley, then And the later Gothic revival in Britain and America 508pp. Yale University Press. £50 (US $85). working for Historic Royal Palaces, standing 978 0 300 20802 3 in a trench searching for medieval kitchen foundations, and bombards him with his latest ideas. Thurley’s response – that he can’t enter- tyle in architecture is simply a way of tain such ideas while standing in a ditch think- building codified in imagistic form.

Load more