Chapter 2 - ‘Such a man as Tallis’: Tallis the man

Summary

In November 1861 Prince Albert died, and discussions about the construction of an appropriate memorial began almost immediately. By the mid-1860s sculptor Henry Hugh Armstead had begun construction of his share (the Poets and Musicians) of the 169 figures forming the Parnassus of the fine arts that surround the four sides of Gilbert Scott's Victorian Gothic memorial. The Parnassus was, in the words of Stephen Bayley, ‘encrusted with all mankind's eternal geniuses of the fine arts, suggestive of the timeless basis upon which the arts in England presently flourished or, at least as they were supposed to’. Tallis was one of twenty-five musicians represented. Armstead went to a great deal of effort to ensure the accuracy of likeness in these sculptures, drawing upon portraits, death masks and personal acquaintances of the composers, yet no such models were available for Tallis. The well-known engraving of Tallis by G. van der Gucht (see Figure 3) is believed to have been produced for an illustrated history of music roughly 150 years after Tallis's death, and there is no reason to believe that it is anything other than an artist's fancy. It is moreover unlikely that Armstead was familiar with this portrait, which bears no resemblance to the Tallis of the Albert Memorial (see Figure 4). Armstead had, literally, to invent the figure of the composer.