ONE of the finest portrait busts carved in England during the late 17th century can be seen in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Made in 1673, it shows Christopher Wren at the age of 40, with rich curly locks tumbling to his shoulders and a loose shirt beneath the classical robe in which he’s swathed. The features are alert, mobile, determined; high eyebrows suggest scepticism, with Wren’s somewhat bulging eyes seemingly trained on a distant object that only he can see. Edward Pierce, the stone carver and mason who made this tour de force, perhaps after a lost French original, worked with Wren on several projects and must have been in his company many times. He knew his subject well and brilliantly captures the quality for which Wren has always been known: genius.
Every contemporary description of Wren confirms the evidence of the bust. Although diminutive in stature, he was a handsome man, whose dazzling gifts were recognised from childhood. As an adolescent at Oxford, he would be called ‘that miracle of a youth Mr Christopher Wren’. Unlike some other prominent figures in the Royal Society—the uncouth Isaac Newton, the distinctly peculiar Robert Hooke—he was invariably courteous and frequently to be seen in Hooke’s company in the coffee houses around Whitehall, where he lived and worked.
In architecture, his immense oeuvre, from St Paul’s Cathedral and the City churches to Hampton Court, Kensington Palace and the Trinity College library in Cambridge, seems to reflect the balance and reasonableness of his personality. As a mathematician and astronomer, he sought to achieve the ‘natural beauty’ (as he called it by his son, also Christopher), which belonged to geometry and ideal proportions. ‘Customary beauty’ might be attached to things we have grown up with, ‘as familiarity breeds a love to things not in themselves lovely’, but was a snare and a delusion (although he was capable of designing in Gothic for associational reasons: see the great Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford).
