Introduction

Charles Alfred Stothard's (d. 1821) Monumental Effigies of Great Britain contains some of the finest etchings of medieval tomb-effigies ever published. The superb quality of the prints, and the fidelity with which they were thought to represent the medieval effigies Stothard depicted, guaranteed the book's reputation throughout the nineteenth century.

In the last forty years, several major studies have stressed the book's great cultural significance in the early phases of the Gothic Revival. They have also highlighted its visual distinctiveness. Stothard's etchings have always been renowned for their intense artistic focus on the effigies alone. This concentration contrasts with the approach of most earlier British antiquarian draughtsmen, who usually showed the whole monument — that is to say the effigy within its architectural setting — even if they also included separate plates of the effigy by itself. Stothard's very different artistic emphasis has been attributed to his training in the Royal Academy Schools. However, it has also, more contentiously, been argued that he deliberately suppressed any visual evidence of the architectural contexts — the tomb-chests, canopies, or architectural settings — in which the effigies belonged. The reason he did this, it is alleged, is because he felt uneasy, as a nationalistic Protestant Englishman, about showing the medieval Roman Catholic contexts in which the effigies belonged. So, he edited them out.

This article forensically investigates why the effigies' original architectural environments should have been omitted from Stothard's prints. The results of this investigation are very surprising.