The Tradescant family tomb
The hard sandstone sarcophagus of John Tradescant and his family sits in what was formerly the churchyard of the Church of St Mary (Image 1) in South Lambeth. The building now houses London’s Garden Museum, which reopened in the spring of 2017 with new exhibits including a reconstruction of part of Tradescant’s Ark. The tomb was commissioned by Hester Tradescant after the death of her husband, the younger John Tradescant, in 1662, and contains his remains along with those of his like-named father and son.
The east face of the sarcophagus (Image 2) features a finely carved shield with crest bearing the Tradescant arms. On the west face (Image 4), a hydra is carved in high relief, with seven bird-like heads, bat-like wings, female breasts, and a long, forked, reptilian tail. At the monster's feet is a skull, a reminder that the original hydra of Greek mythology presided over the lake of Lerna, an entrance to the underworld. The longer north and south faces (Images 3 and 5) depict ruined buildings in the background and architectural detritus in the foreground, along with a crocodile and shells or fossils. The corners are formed by gnarled and stunted trees with heavy foliage.
The message of vanitas – the inevitability of death for all human beings, and decay for all human achievements – is borne out by the history of the tomb itself. Roger Bowdler of English Heritage has described it as ‘very important as an early example of an outdoor churchyard memorial with allegorical sculpture’. The reason that major funerary monuments had previously been housed inside is all too evident in its rapid deterioration. In 1773, Ducarel noted that 'This once beautiful monument hath suffered so much by the weather, that no just idea can be formed of the North and South sides.' Its lid carries an inscription (Image 6) stating that the tomb was originally erected in 1662, repaired in 1773, and entirely restored in 1853 by the sculptor G.P. White.
Comparison with the drawing commissioned by Pepys (Image 7) and the engraving derived from Hollar (Image 8) suggests that, while the east and west faces and the four corners have remained essentially unchanged, the details of the north and south faces have been altered in the process of restoration. The drawing more clearly depicts Greek and possibly Egyptian ruins on the south side, including Tuscan, Ionic, and Corinthian capitals, obelisks, and perhaps a pyramid. The reconstructed north side more clearly suggests a Romanesque ruin. More interesting, however, are allusions to the Tradescant collection itself within this ruined landscape.
The most incongruous element is the large reptile lumbering along the lower margin of the north panel. Its presence may be explained by reference to the 'Alegator or Crocodile, from Aegpt' listed amongst the exhibits of the Museum Tradescantianum. Another such beast hangs so prominently from the ceiling in the oldest depiction of a cabinet of curiosities, the museum of Ferrante Imperato, that it has become an image of the early modern culture of collecting itself. Shells, of the kind strewn along the lower right margin of the north panel, also feature in depictions of early museums and in portraits of the Tradescants, both elder and younger.
Moreover, while visiting their collection in 1638, a German visitor's attention was attracted to 'a number of things changed into stone'; and the possibility that some of these shells, scattered on or below the ground, might be fossils adds another dimension to the theme of disaster and decay. According to one seventeenth-century theory, the petrified shells found far above sea level were thought to have been deposited by Noah's Flood; and as such they could be regarded as ruins of even greater antiquity than the pyramids and obelisks of Egypt. Hence the description of the Tradescants, on this tomb's lid, as 'famous antiquarians'.
This allusion to the Deluge also adds other levels of meaning to the very notion of 'Tradescant's Ark'. On the one hand, it is a microcosm of art and nature collected within a small space, rather like Noah's Ark: 'a world of wonders in one closet shut', in the words engraved on the tomb itself (see below). Yet Tradescant's Ark was also intended as a vessel in which to preserve that collection from the ravages of time.
The tomb's north panel thus conveys the family's awareness of the vulnerability of their collections to dispersal and decay. In this, they were prescient. By the time their final resting place was first restored in 1773, the house which had displayed their collections was abandoned, and their imprint on the garden which adjoined it had largely disappeared, aside from a few gnarled trees, not unlike those in the corners of this sarcophagus. Hercules had rendered himself immortal by slaying the Lernaean Hydra. The Tradescants therefore sought to achieve immortality by ensuring that their collection passed into the safe-keeping of one of the most enduring of English institutions.
The following verses, traditionally attributed to John Aubrey, composed as an epitaph, are lacking from the original lid, but added to the restored lids added in 1773 (subsequently transferred to the Ashmolean) and 1852:
Know, stranger, ere thou pass, beneath this stone
Lie John Tradescant, grandsire, father, son
The last dy'd in his spring, the other two,
Liv'd till they had travelled Orb and Nature through,
As by their choice Collections may appear,
Of what is rare in land, in sea, in air,
Whilst they (as Homer's Iliad in a nut)
A world of wonders in one closet shut,
These famous antiquarians that had been
Both Gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen,
Transplanted now themselves, sleep here & when
Angels shall with their trumpets waken men,
And fire shall purge the world, these three shall rise
And change this Garden then for Paradise.
Sources
Image 1: St Mary’s churchyard, Lambeth (before redevelopment): by Candy Blackham, 28 July 2015. Image 2: Tradescants’ tomb, east face: The John Bargrave Collection, The Digital Ark, no. 2158. Images 3-5: Tradescants’ tomb, south, west, and north faces: tpHolland, 2 May 2009, flickr.com, CC BY-SA 2.0. Image 6: Tradescants’ tomb, top: Hester Coley, 1 Oct 2016. Image 7. Tradescant's tomb, 1662, a drawing commissioned by Samuel Pepys, Magdalene College, Cambridge, Ms. PL 2972, fol. 226. Image 8. The Monument of the Tradescants, by Nathaniel Smith, after Wenceslaus Hollar, etching, published 15 July 1793; 8 3/4 in. x 6 3/4 in. (222 mm x 172 mm) plate size; 11 1/4 in. x 8 1/8 in. (285 mm x 207 mm) paper size. Licence: CC by-nc-nd/3.0. Source: National Portrait Gallery D12268.
'Church of St Mary, Lambeth', in Survey of London: Volume 23, Lambeth: South Bank and Vauxhall, ed. Howard Roberts and Walter H Godfrey (London, 1951), pp. 104-117, from British History Online. Arthur Macgregor, 'The Tradescants: Gardeners and Botanists', in Tradescant's Rarities (1983), pp. 14-15 and plate CLXXV.
Credits: Howard Hotson (February 2017)