The caryatids of Montpellier

Heading back home after a lovely week in Cornwall. Just stealing and extra day in Cheltenham on the way. These caryatids have always fascinated me so I thought it was time I found out what they were and blipped them (naturally!).

"Montpellier Walk is undeniably the most attractive of the more intimate terraces in a town that, in architectural terms, usually went for the triumphant sweep. Here is a short two-storey terrace, faced in ashlar, with square-headed windows, and attics behind a serpentine, balustraded parapet. At ground-floor level, a run of white-painted, heavy-robed caryatids support the Walk's stepped and equally serpentine cornice with its frieze of oak leaves. Today, it is caf society that lingers here beside the armless ladies that characterize Montpellier. These caryatids date from 1843 when three of them, sculpted in terracotta, were brought by Montpellier spa owner Pearson Thompson, and set up as attractions in the new shopping terrace. Nottingham sculptor John Charles Felix Rossi (1762-1839), who had worked in Rome and had a penchant for classical Greek art, executed the originals. He also favoured terracotta as a working medium. Thompson set up the first three outside what was the National Westminster bank, facing towards the promenade.

Four more of Rossi's caryatids, based on those of the temple of Erechtheum at the Acropolis in Athens, adorn William and Henry Inwood's St Pancras church, built 1819-22, in Marylebone Road, London. His ladies of Montpellier Walk were made of Coade Stone - from the Lambeth factory where the sculptor worked for some time, and which was almost wholly contemporaneous with his life. They are said to also have been modelled on statues at the Acropolis, but those in Montpellier were done with a lightness of touch and a gentility of proportion, and were given a spirit of enigmatic girlishness that was not accorded to the sombre caryatids of the London church.

Now Montpellier has many more of these Grecian ladies, and it has always been said that the majority were created in stone from the originals by William Giles Brown of Tivoli Street. He was an established builder and stone carver, who was involved in a good many of Cheltenham's public buildings that had been put up since the 1840s. However, researcher and Tivoli historian Fr Brian Torode has very recently uncovered evidence that it was W.G's father, James Brown (1804-71) who was given the contract by Pearson Thompson. James was the head of a building firm of six employees including his son, William, who assisted his father in carving some of the caryatids. By the time of his death in 1926, at the age of 98, William Brown had achieved a not entirely correct local reputation as 'the man who carved the caryatids'. In the event, the Browns made eighteen caryatids between 1845 and 1850, and each was added to its allotted place in Montpellier Walk as it was finished. Two were subsequently removed to private gardens, and their whereabouts have never been ascertained." Cotswold Life