Nicholas Stone - Sir William Paston at Oxnead

Sir William Paston At Oxnead

A consistent private patron over a period of many years was Sir William Paston, who was modernizing his Elizabethan seat at Oxnead, Norfolk. Paston commissioned from Stone the monument to his mother (died 1629) in the church at Paston, the family's ancient seat; in Stone's note-book, the price came to £340, and Stone remarks that in setting it up he was "very extreordenerly entertayned thar" by the genial Paston. The simpler monument by Stone of Sir Edmund Paston (died 1633), without the effigy and achievement of arms, stands beside his wife's. Oxnead was emptied of its treasures, sold off and all but demolished, but in 1809 its long-term tenant, John Adey Repton, made a conjectural drawing of it, based on the foundations and recollections of local inhabitants, which was illustrated in W.H. Bartlett and John Britten's Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain 1809, following p. 98. his view is centered on the terraced parterres, in the lowest of which, he says, stood the fountain of two tiers of bold opposed scrolls supporting a shallow basin, re-erected after the Oxnead sale at the rival Norfolk house, Blickling Hall. Repton's drawing showed the banqueting house constructed as a wing; its style was so advanced for its date in the 1630s that the younger Repton concluded that it had been "erected by the first Earl of Yarmouth, to receive King Charles II. and his attendants, who visited Oxnead in 1676; it was a lofty building, with sash-windows, called the Banquetting-room. Underneath this was a vaulted apartment, which was called the Frisketting room, probably from the Italian 'frescati', a cool grotto." Repton's drawing shows a building of three bays articulated by a giant order, with large rectangular windows over the basement windows and oval windows, recalled by local people, in a mezzanine above. Stone provided a magnificent chimneypiece that cost £80 and another for the banqueting house, a balcony with two door surrounds and an architrave in Portland stone, a "copper branch"— probably a cast bronze candelabrum— weighing 166 pounds, and an achievement of the Paston arms. There were many miscellaneous carved furnishings, picture frames and stands for tables, balustrades and paving-stones, and busts of Marcus Aurelius and Faustina. For the gardens he provided figures of Venus and Cupid, Jupiter, Flora, and, to guard the garden front door, a large figure of Cerberus on a pedestal, all long gone, but Stone's Hercules— and perhaps others— are preserved in the gardens at Blickling. In the garden Stone erected a large iron pergola painted green, surmounted by eight gilded balls. In 1638, he sent his son, Nicholas Stone the younger, to Italy, whence there returned an elevation of a new garden house just built in the Villa Ludovisi, Rome, "for Mr Paston", and marbles, architectural books (Vignola, Vitruvius, and Maggi's Le fontane di Roma), and plaster casts sent home from Livorno. With the onset of the Civil War, commissions from Sir William abruptly ceased in 1642; five years later, his outstanding account was settled, for £24.