A STATUE RESTORED

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 69, 23 March 1938, Page 10

A STATUE RESTORED

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, February 26.

i Statues are supposed to "moulder into. worth," but there is one in London which simply has not had the chance to do so. A figure of Charles II by Caius Gabriel Cibber, it was set up during the reign of its subject on a fountain in the centre of the garden of Soho Square. Time and man—chiefly the latterworked havoc with it. By 1876 it carried the marks of many injuries, and in that year it was taken down and moved to the house of F. A, Goodall. R.A., at Harrow Weald. This residence eventually passed' into the possession of W. S. Gilbert. was ample evidence to show tlTat many years ago somebody made determined efforts to restrain the statue from mouldering into worth. It was tarred, washed with cement, and painted. Finally, it was placed in fee middle of a pond. There it remained for sixty years, fossilising, until the detail of the carving was entirely lost to view. Fortunately, however, the Portland stone in which it is carved is amenable to restoration, and now, through the will of the late Lafly Gilbert, Charles II goes back in triumph to his pedestal in Soho Squar*.