to the original colours, traces of which he might still be able to see.”
In his _History and Antiquities of Stratford-on-Avon_, {182a} Mr. Wheler
tells us that this was what Hall did. “In the year 1748 the monument was
carefully repaired, and the original colours of the bust, &c., as much as
possible preserved by Mr. John Hall, limner, of Stratford.”
It follows that we see the original monument and bust, but the painting
is of 1861, for the bust, says Wheler, was in 1793 “painted in white,” to
please Malone. It was repainted in 1861.
Mrs. Stopes, unluckily, is not content with what Hall was told to do, and
what, according to Wheler, he did. She writes: “It would only be giving
good value for his money” (£12, 10_s._) “to his churchwardens if Hall
added (_sic_) a cloak, a pen, and manuscript.” He “could not help
changing” the face, and so on.
Now it was physically impossible to _add_ a cloak, a pen, and manuscript
to such a stone bust as Dugdale’s man shows; to take away the cushion
pressed to the stomach, and to alter the head. Mr. Hall, if he was to
give us the present bust, had to make an entirely new bust, and, to give
us the present monument in place of that shown in Dugdale’s print, had to
construct an entirely new monument. Now Hall was a painter, not (like
Giulio Romano) also an architect and sculptor. _Pour tout potage_ he had
but £12, 10_s._ He could not do, and he did not do these things! he did
not destroy “the original monument” and make a new monument in Jacobean
style. He was straitly ordered to “repair and beautify the original
monument”; he did repair it, and repainted the colours. That is all. I
do not quote what Halliwell-Phillipps tells us {183a} about the repairing
of the forefinger and thumb of the right hand, and the pen; work which,
he says, had to be renewed by William Roberts of Oxford in 1790. He
gives no authority, and Baconians may say that he was hoaxed, or “lied
with circumstance.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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