Contributions
Born in Arras as Maximilian Poultrain, this sculptor from the old Low Countries settled in London at the very close of Elizabeth's reign. His career turned on 4 March 1605, when he signed with the Lord Treasurer, Robert Cecil, the contract for the great monument to the dead queen in Westminster Abbey. Finished late in 1606, the white marble tomb raises Elizabeth's recumbent effigy in coronation robes, orb and sceptre in hand, beneath a columned canopy — coloured by the painter Jan de Critz. In the same abbey Colt carved the affecting small monuments to Princesses Sophia and Mary, infant daughters of James I: a stone cradle for one, a reclining child for the other. For Robert Cecil he also executed the tomb at Hatfield. Appointed the King's Master Carver on 28 July 1608, he thereafter supplied the effigies for state funerals — Anne of Denmark in 1619, James I in 1625 — and decorated the royal barges.
Significance
Colt embodies the Flemish relay that, after Torrigiano, gave England its great royal tombs of the early seventeenth century. His monument to Elizabeth, commissioned by James I to secure his own legitimacy by honouring the queen he had succeeded, became one of the most reproduced images of the English monarchy: it is this marble figure that comes to mind when one pictures the face of the Virgin Queen. As Master Carver he held a key post at the hinge of art and power, official craftsman of Stuart dynastic memory. His children's monuments, by contrast, reveal a tenderness rare for the age, a feeling that cuts against the heraldic stiffness of court tombs. His fortunes were not without reverse: in old age he suffered a brief imprisonment in the Fleet, a sign of the financial straits that threatened even artists of the Crown. He trained his son John, also a sculptor, ensuring the continuity of the workshop.
Influence
He fixed the type of the painted marble royal effigy that dominates Jacobean funerary sculpture, and passed his craft to his son John Colt. The wax-and-wood effigies he supplied for state funerals shaped the ceremonial of royal death under the early Stuarts. He belonged to the wave of Protestant craftsmen whom religious strife drove from Arras and Flanders to England, where they renewed the art of the tomb — working in the Southern Netherlandish mannerist tradition, with its taste for alabaster and coloured marble.
Anecdote
For the monument to the little Princess Sophia, dead at three days old in 1606, Colt carved a stone cradle in which the swaddled child lies, her face barely formed — an image of such poignant realism that it still moves visitors to Westminster four centuries on. The detail captures the man's double nature: official craftsman to a court obsessed with dynastic splendour, he could also, before an empty cradle, find the most human note. A Calvinist from Arras, naturalised English in 1607, he had anglicised his name from Poultrain to Colt the better to root himself in the country that employed him.