Charles Alfred Stothard - Death & Burial

Death & Burial

While engaged in tracing a portrait from one of the windows of the church of Bere Ferrers, Devon, he fell off a ladder and died. His grave is at Bere Ferrers. A later fellow antiquarian, W. H. Hamilton Rogers, who also made studies of the Ferrers family in the same church, wrote 70 years later:

"A gifted student in the pursuit we also at humbler distance love, made pilgrimage here, and was engaged in making a drawing of its interesting painted story, when death suddenly stayed the work of the artist, snapping the very pencil in his fingers, and instantly translated him, from picturing the earthly image of the Founder of these courts below, into his immortal presence in the great temple above... His cunning fingers are mouldering in the dust below, and moss and decay are stealthily obliterating his record outside, but the fidelity and truth of his works remain bright and undimmmed, forming his best and most enduring monument".