Richards, James

London; joiner, sculptor, carver and Master Sculptor and Carver in Wood at the Office Works (fl.1726-1736) 

Born in 1671, Richards was the son of James Richards, a mariner from Brockwood, Gloucestershire, apprenticed through the Joiners' Company in 1688 and made free of the Company in 1698. In 1717 he apprenticed his son, also called James. 

Between 1726-36 Henry Hoare paid £560 for specified work carried out at Stourhead. In 1730 he supplied woodwork and furniture for Raynham Hall, Norfolk. He executed carving work at Kew for Frederick, Prince of Wales, receiving £60 3s in 1731, £150 in 1732, and £130 in 1733. A further payment in 1733, totalling £467 13s 5¾d included carving settees, chairs and frames, chimneypieces and architraves. 

In 1732 Richards was paid £150 16s 6d for carving work done on the Royal Barge, designed by William Kent, and Kent later employed Richards for carving at the Horse Guards and at Lord Pelham's house at 17 Arlington Street. Although there is no positive proof, Richards may also have been employed to carve a pair of tables that were probably designed by William Kent at the time that Kent was a member of the Board of Works and Richards was the Sculptor and Master Carver at the Office of Works. They are now in Sir John Soane’s Museum, one in the Ante room, the other in the Monk’s Parlour (illus. Thornton, Furniture History (1993), figs 1 and 2). These were bought by Soane from a building known as Yarborough House, Chelsea, around the time that it was taken down in 1810 to allow the expansion of the Royal Hospital. Robert Walpole, the future Prime Minister lived there from 1714 until his death in 1745. The accounts for Houghton Hall, Walpole’s seat in Norfolk, confirm Richards’s employment by Walpole on other commissions.

The overmantel in the King's Gallery at Kensington Palace is said to be by Richards to Kent's design of 1726. Colen Campbell also employed Richards at Burlington House.

Richards and his men were employed at Compton Place, Eastbourne, until 1731, when he received the balance of his bill for £290. The carved work in the Gallery, Dining Room, Library and Great Staircase is all presumably his.

James Richards worked as a carver at Cleveland House, London, in 1752.

Richards, carver, is recorded in several notable country house archives of the period and is most probably James Richards. Some of these commissions are noted in Burlington, October 1985. In November 1722 he is named in the accounts of Sir John Chester ‘for carving ye Tabernacle & ye Frontispiece for ye Hall’ at Chicheley Hall, Buckinghamshire. This was a niche in the Hall, built to house a painted statue made by William Kent, and described in a letter from Sir John Chester to Massingberd on 29 February 1723/24. The account books of Sir John Dutton of Sherborne House, Glos., refer to Richards, probably of London, on 2 November 1731, being paid £19 for carving, painting and gilding two table frames made by James Moore jnr for a garden banqueting house at Sherborne. He also received £53 8s 6d for supplying six carved and fluted Corinthian columns. Richards also worked for Earl Fitzwalter of Moulsham Hall, Chelmsford. On 6 March 1740 ‘Mr. Richards, carver in wood’ was paid £12 2s for carving the chimneypiece in the drawing room above stairs in the Earl's Pall Mall house. On 11 December 1749 he received £56 19s, the last payment of his bill for £106 19s. 

He died in 1759.

Source: DEFM; Thornton, Peter, ‘Soane's Kent Tables’, Furniture History(1993); Dodd, Dudley, ''A brush With the Goddess: Fox or Hound Tables by William Kent', Furniture History (2024).