Sculpting reality

This year is the tercentenary of Grinling Gibbons, a sculptor whose proverbial skill in wood carving has never ceased to command admiration. John Goodall looks at his career and art

- John Goodall

ON May 11, 1769, Horace Walpole wrote to his friend George Montagu to report on the reception of a glittering array of English, French, Spanish and Portuguese guests at Strawberry Hill: ‘At the gates of the castle I received them dressed in the cravat of Gibbons’s carving, and a pair of gloves embroidered up to the elbows that had belonged to James I. The French servants stared and firmly believed this was the dress of English country gentlemen.’

The cravat that Walpole wore survives. Carved of close-grained limewood in about 1690, it resembles with almost disconcerting exactitude a piece of knotted and starched lace. The natural effects are yielded so exactly in three dimensions that the eye can suspend its disbelief and mistake the artificial work of sculpture for the real thing.