The internal evidence of the wooden figures themselves--nothing
analogous to which, it should be remembered, can be found in the
chapel of 1687--points to a much earlier date. I have met with no
school of sculpture belonging to the early part of the eighteenth
century to which they can be plausibly assigned; and the supposition
that they are the work of some unknown local genius who was not led
up to and left no successors may be dismissed, for the work is too
scholarly to have come from any one but a trained sculptor. I refer
of course to those figures which the artist must be supposed to have
executed with his own hand, as, for example, the central figure of
the Crucifixion group and those of the Magdalene and St. John. The
greater number of the figures were probably, as was suggested to me
by Mr. Ranshaw, of Lowth, executed by a local woodcarver from models
in clay and wax furnished by the artist himself. Those who examine
the play of line in the hair, mantle, and sleeve of the Magdalene in
the Crucifixion group, and contrast it with the greater part of the
remaining draperies, will find little hesitation in concluding that
this was the case, and will ere long readily distinguish the two
hands from which the figures have mainly come. I say "mainly,"
because there is at least one other sculptor who may well have
belonged to the year 1709, but who fortunately has left us little.
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