Biography
Cibber was born in Flensburg in the province of Schleswig in Denmark. His father was a cabinetmaker, supposedly to King Frederick II of Denmark. He travelled to Italy to study art, where he may have changed his name from Sieber to Cibo. The Cibos were an old and noble Italian family to which Pope Innocent VIII had belonged. Cibber later emigrated to London, England, probably via the Netherlands. At first, he worked for the mason-sculptor John Stone, who had a workshop on Long Acre, until he set up his own studio after Stone's death in 1667.
In 1668 Cibber became a Freeman, by Redemption, of the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers, and in 1679 he became a Liveryman of the same Company, remaining so until his death. He carved a stone mermaid pump for the Company, which stood outside Leathersellers' Hall in Little St Helen's, off Bishopsgate. The mermaid's head survives, having been discovered in excavations at St Helen's Place in 1925.
A decade or more after his arrival in London, Cibber married (as his second wife—his first wife had died) Jane Colley on 24 November 1670 at St Giles in the Fields, London. Jane came from a family of English gentry who claimed descent from the sister of William of Wykeham, and her grandfather, Sir Antony Colley, had been a prominent Cavalier during the English Civil War. They had three children: Colley, Lewis and Veronica. Between 1673 and 1678, Cibber was detained in Marshalsea prison for unpaid gambling debts, though he was able to continue his work, and borrowed substantial sums from Edward Colley, his brother-in-law.
Many of his works were, or are, on public display in London, including his statue of Charles II (1681), which still stands (rather worn away) in Soho Square. He made two lifelike human statues in Portland stone entitled "Melancholy" and "Raving Madness" for the gates of the 17th century mental hospital, known as Bedlam (currently Bethlem Royal Hospital), which can currently be seen in their museum (modelli in V&A). They were said to be modelled on two inmates of the asylum, one of whom was Oliver Cromwell's mad porter, Daniel. The two statues became his most famous work, and were mentioned in Alexander Pope's satire The Dunciad. He also created the bas reliefs on the base of the Monument to the Great Fire of London; his reliefs at the Royal Exchange have been destroyed. He produced sets of sculpture for Trinity College, Cambridge, and for the Danish Church on Wellclose Square, where he is buried.
Read more about this topic: Caius Gabriel Cibber
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