Nearly as entertaining is Roubiliac’s memorial of an obscure General
Hargrave, close by: a wonderful piece of execution, and which would be
as attractive as the Nightingale one were it placed lower. The general,
an excellent, spirited figure, but grotesque, is seen starting out of
his bath we had almost said--but it is his tomb, his sheet falling away
from his naked form, one attenuated leg lifted timorously over the edge.
He has been roused by the Judgment: a little angel is sounding the trump
aloft in the marble clouds. There are drums and cannon, a marble flag;
whilst, on the right, a spirited Time is seen thrusting down Death,
holding him in fact on the ground, a grisly skeleton, done with infinite
art and reality--bones, cartilage, etc., all complete. As a sort of
pictorial background, we see the Pyramids, dislodged and tumbling to
pieces, the stones falling in all directions: altogether one of the most
elaborate _tours de force_ in marble existing. But the whole is placed
so high that details are lost. It is astonishing to think that an artist
of such power and taste should have condescended to this vulgar and
ineffective realism, which was, moreover, beyond his material. Near is
Fleming’s, another military tomb; two figures, one seated on an arch,
with a pyramid behind, over which are spreading trees with a cleverly
imitated drum and a flag. The memorial to Sir Peter Warren, in the north
transept, has great merit. It consists of a spirited bust of the
admiral, bluff and dogged, yet good-natured, in which “realism” is
carried so far as to furnish marks of small-pox on the cheeks! The
mourning female figure beside him has been admired, and is graceful
enough; whilst a vigorous Hercules bends over him. The legs and arms may
be noted for their muscularity, and it is said the sculptor obtained his
pattern legs from those of a stalwart Irish chairman; the arms were
compounded from another herculean specimen of the same race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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