Nicholas Stone - Legacy

Legacy

Nicholas Stone died at Long Acre, London, on 24 August 1647, and was buried in the parish church at St Martin-in-the-Fields. The sculpted memorial tablet, to the man who had created so many memorials for others, has been lost; only a drawing of it (above) remains to indicate his likeness.

Ironically, despite being Master Mason to the Crown, and his revolutionary works being for and commemorating the most eminent in the land and being displayed in the country's most prominent buildings, Stone was always thought of as a craftsman, and accorded that status. It was to be his contemporary and less accomplished rival, the French sculptor Hubert Le Sueur, working in bronze, who was to cause the status of a sculptor to be elevated to that of an artist.

Evaluated today, Stone's architecture combines the sophisticated classicism of Jones with an uncouth artisan Mannerism popular at the time. The architectural historian, Howard Colvin's assessment of Stone's architecture is that he "partly absorbed the new classicism of Inigo Jones, but without accepting its full discipline and without rejecting some of the mannerist or baroque features that he had learned in London and Amsterdam. The result was a vernacular classical architecture, of which regrettably little remains today." Stone, as an architect, was at the cutting edge of modernity, his work in the Baroque style while Inigo Jones' was still promoting Palladianism was at odds with contemporary fashion, it was to be almost fifty years from Stone's death before William Talman's Chatsworth House, completed in 1696, was to be hailed as England's first Baroque house, while England's truest Baroque house, Castle Howard, was not completed until 1712.