Art: The Forgotten Alabastermen

No English art has vanished more completely than that of the Nottingham alabastermen. Once, throughout Europe, their work was literally worshiped; today, London’s man-in-the-street finds it less familiar than Congo carvings, Chinese jade, or Henry Moore’s pinheaded women. Now a wealthy U.S. expatriate, Dr. Walter Leo Hildburgh, has set out to remind England of its alabastrine past.

Hildburgh, a shy, spry antiquarian who has the jutting, chiseled features of a grandfatherly Dick Tracy, has spent 30 years astride his hobbyhorse, hunting English alabasters, recently presented some 200 of them to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum on his 70th birthday. They were on exhibition in London last week.

When the Black Death swept England in 1348, it was the Nottingham alabaster men who supplied the new-found piety of the survivors with miniature bas-reliefs and statuettes of the Passion, Thomas à Becket, the lives of the saints, and the bleeding head of John the Baptist (see cut). The panels were carved from soft, creamy alabaster quarried at Tutbury and Chellaston Hill, then were painted, gilded, and generally built into wooden boxes with hinged doors for private worshipers to part.

Combining as they did the sparkling intimacy of a lady’s jewelry box and (at their best) the monumental force of Gothic cathedral sculpture, Nottingham alabasters were sought after from Italy to Iceland—until “idolatry”-hating Oliver Cromwell put an end to the art in 1653.

The puritanical Roundheads had smashed every alabaster they could lay their hands on, so Hildburgh had to do most of his collecting in Spain, France and Germany. Now that he had brought the once sacred, once banned alabasters home again, Hildburgh hoped that modern Britishers would appreciate them as art.