A mezzotint after a portrait of Grinling Gibbons and his wife Elizabeth (d. 1719). The print is based on a painting by John Closterman, untraced and possibly destroyed when Gibbons’s house collapsed in 1702 (the date of the print is known from Smith’s annotations on an album of his prints in the New York Public Library). It is a celebration of Gibbons’s success and affluence. Gibbons and his wife dressed in the finest lace and silks and she idling with a string of pearls, recline amid draperies and Classical architecture: the pictorial vocabulary is of court portraiture of the highest level. Only the sculptural relief hints at Gibbons’s craft, for his workshop also produced work in limestone, marble and bronze – and it is a marble relief on which he leans, with allusions to Antiquity, not the more humble wood with which he made his name. Inscribed below: J. Closterman pinx: / M:r Gibbons & M.rs Gibbons / J. Smith fecit. et ex.

Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721), the greatest of decorative woodcarvers, was born in Rotterdam of English parents (and christened after his mother’s maiden name). He moved to England after completing his training, possibly in the workshop of Artus Quellinus in Amsterdam, and worked from the beginning in boxwood or limewood, finely grained and thus better able to hold detail than traditional English oak. John Evelyn claimed to have ‘discovered’ Gibbons carving a relief copy of a Tintoretto Crucifixion while working in a shipyard in Deptford, and introduced him to Charles II, for whom he produced some of his finest work in the remodelling of Windsor Castle (1677–82).

Text adapted from Portrait of the Artist, London, 2016