Nottingham alabaster is a term used to refer to the English sculpture industry, mostly of relatively small religious carvings, which flourished from the fourteenth century until the early sixteenth century. Alabaster carvers were at work in London, York and Burton-on-Trent, and many probably worked very close to the rural mines, but the largest concentration was around Nottingham. This has led to all the English medieval output being referred to as "Nottingham alabaster". Alabaster, a mineral composed of gypsum and various impurities, is much softer and easier to work than marble and a good material for mass production, though not suitable for outdoor use. Carvings were made as single figures, assemblies for tomb monuments, including full length effigies, but the most common survivals are panels, up to about 20 inches or 50 cm high, from sets for altarpieces, which could be transported relatively easily, and fitted into a locally made architectural surround of stone or wood on arrival at their destination. These were attractive for less wealthy churches, and for the private chapels of the nobility. Some complete ensembles survive, showing varied numbers of panels; the dimensions of the Nativity illustrated are typical. The subjects were the same as in painted altarpieces, often including short cycles of the Life of Christ, especially the Passion of Christ, or the Life of the Virgin. Since the sets were probably generally not made to a specific commission, unlike paintings, there are fewer local or patron saints. Throughout the period of their production Nottingham alabaster images were hugely popular in Europe and were exported in large quantities, some ending up as far afield as Iceland, Croatia and Poland. But by far the greatest export market for these images was in France, where even today some churches retain in situ their English alabaster altarpieces, unlike England, where survivals are extremely rare. The sculptures were normally brightly painted, sometimes all over, sometimes partially, but much of the paint has often been lost, and many pieces have had the rest completely removed by dealers, collectors or museums in the past. Most alabaster altarpieces and religious carvings other than church monuments remaining in England were destroyed in the English Reformation, after which the many workshops had to change their products to concentrate on church monuments.
History
The alabaster used in the industry was quarried largely in the area around South Derbyshire near Tutbury and Chellaston. The craftsmen were known by various names such as alabastermen, kervers, marblers, and image-makers. The tomb of John of Eltham, Earl of Cornwall, who died in 1334, in Westminster Abbey, is an early example, of very high quality. On 6 June 1371, payment was made to Peter Maceon of Nottingham, "of the balance of 300 marks for a table [altar piece] of alabaster made by him and placed upon the High Altar within the free Chapel of Saint George of Windsor." The execution of this order cost £200 and required 10 carts, 80 horses, and 20 men to transport it to its destination. The journey occupied seventeen days in the autumn of 1367, and the expenses of transport amounted to £30. The church at Tong, Shropshire, contains an especially fine sequence of tombs of the Vernon family spanning the 15th and 16th centuries.
Alabaster religious images in English churches may have survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, but most did not survive the reign of King Edward VI following the Putting away of Books and Images Act 1549 ordering the destruction of all images. Indeed, eight months after this act, in January 1550 the English ambassador to France reported the arrival of three English ships laden with alabaster images to be sold at Paris, Rouen and elsewhere. Whether these were new images, or ones removed from English churches, is not entirely clear. From the middle of the sixteenth century, workshops focused instead on sculpting alabaster tombs or church monuments, which were not affected by Protestant aniconism. Indeed, these were becoming larger and more elaborate, and were now taken up by the richer merchant classes as well as the nobility and gentry. Vertical monuments placed against walls generally replaced the older recumbent effigies. There is an elaborate relief panel of Apollo and the Muses, of about 1580, which is probably English, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The industry survived on a smaller scale supplying church monuments, increasingly produced by academically trained sculptors, until the falling price of marble and exhaustion of most English quarries made alabaster increasingly rare as a material for English sculptors by the late 18th century. Spain had the next largest medieval alabaster industry, whose pieces are not always easily distinguished from English work, but pieces were also produced in France, the Low Countries and elsewhere in Europe.
Forms
The sculpture industry evolved to produce two main forms, panels and statues. Thin panels carved in high relief, typically about 40 cm by 25 cm in size, usually come from series covering the Passion or Life of Christ which were mounted in a wooden framework as altarpieces, or used by the wealthy as domestic devotional works, set in a wooden triptych with closeable doors. The 15th-century Nailloux Altarpiece in south-western France is an example of a five-panel set that remains in situ. Many statues were smaller than this, but there are a number of larger ones. An example of a much larger statue, three feet high and free-standing but flat-backed, is Our Lady of Westminster, now in London but found by the art trade in France. The discovery in 1863 of a headless but stylistically almost identical alabaster image, buried in the churchyard of All Saints, Broughton, Craven, suggests that, as was apparently usually the case, the statue was a standard model repeated several times by the workshop, and probably produced for stock rather than upon receipt of a particular commission. Exports, as of the better documented contemporary export trade in icons of the Cretan school, were usually made in bulk for sale to dealers, who then found buyers locally.
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