The same treatment, with mouldings perhaps even heavier still, is found in the interiors of Sir Christopher Wren. That great man must be mentioned here as the employer of the incomparable carver, Grinling Gibbons, to whose decorative genius the architect was so much indebted. Grinling Gibbons is the first of whom we can definitely say that such and such a piece of interior work was by his hand. The charming story of his discovery by John Evelyn is told in the latter's diary, under date of January 18, 1671. A bare month later he records that there dined with him 'Mr. Surveyor Dr. Christopher Wren, and Mr. Pepys, Cleark of the Acts, two extraordinary ingenious and knowing persons, and other friends.' He carried them to see the piece of carving by Gibbons which he had recommended to the king, and secured Wren's faithful promise to employ Gibbons.

Grinling Gibbons or Gibbon was born in 1648 at Rotterdam, and came, fortunately for us, to England in 1667, the year after the great fire of London. In Horace Walpole's time there was some doubt as to his origin. 'An original genius, a citizen of Nature,' he says, ' consequently it is indifferent where she produced him. . . . There is no instance of a man before Gibbons who gave to wood the loose and airy lightness of flowers, and chained together the various productions of the elements with a free disorder natural to each species.' This rather stilted panegyric, by which Walpole means that birds and flowers and fishes and fruits all find a place, with the human figure, in Gibbons's carving, is no more than his due. The wonderfully executed mirror-frame in the Victoria and Albert Museum (No. 1833) shows his astonishing power of intricate combination (Plate lxxil). Here are the vine-leaf and the grape, the wheat-ear and the hop-blossom, the pea-pod and the poppy-head, the sunflower, the guelder-rose, and other blooms and fruits and foliage too numerous to mention. The lower side of the frame shows a crab and sea-shells of the most complicated shapes, as if they were chosen for their difficulty of execution. But the carver's hand has gained an easy triumph over all.

In this frame Gibbons has shown more technical skill than artistic breadth of treatment. The little table (Plate lxxiv.), belonging to Mr. Seymour Lucas, R.A., shows him at his best. The same admirable technical capacity is there - in fact, more still is shown in the masterly treatment of the cherubs' heads. There is besides a finer sense of breadth and proportion and grace of line, which in the mirror has been somewhat frittered away. Amongst the decorations of St. Paul's Cathedral, which are proof that Sir Christopher Wren kept his promise to Evelyn, there is a string-course by Gibbons of running scroll-work. It has for basis those convex and concave curves which, apart from the superadded fruits and draperies, form the main lines of the legs of Mr. Seymour Lucas's table, though in this case the curves are flattened. This familiar decorative motive is found, as we have seen, again and again upon the chairs of the end of the seventeenth and commencement of the eighteenth centuries. As a rule, with all his naturalism, Gibbons has a very sane underlying groundwork of well-balanced constructive lines. Such free, nervous carving, in which the sharp tool does without the aid of much after-smoothing, was best executed in soft wood, and lime was the favourite species which he employed.

Plate LXXIV. Table Grinling Gibbons

LXXIV. Table. Grinling Gibbons, 1648-1721. Of small size, with new marble slab. Seymour Lucas, Esq., R.A. .

Gibbons had, of course, many assistants to help him in his ecclesiastical work, for of the city churches built by Act of Parliament in 1708 Gibbons is said to have had to do with most ; but his own handiwork is best seen in mirror-frames, wall-panels, chimneypieces, and over communion tables in churches. St. James's, Piccadilly, is a case in point. Of that Evelyn says, 'there was no altar anywhere in England, nor has there been any abroad, more handsomely adorned.' Windsor extorts the diarist's greatest praise. On June 16, 1683, he went thither and writes : 'I liked the contrivance of the unseene organ behind the altar, nor less the stupendous, and beyond all description the incomparable carving of our Gibbons, who is, without controversie, the greatest master both for invention and rarenesse of worke, that the world ever had in any age.' 1