Nathaniel Hitch

Nathaniel Hitch (1845–1938) was a successful South London owner of a stonemason and sculpture practice and worked with John Loughborough Pearson regularly from the 1880s. He had worked as a carver to the designs of Thomas Nicholls at Cardiff Castle, showing the deep links among our Makers.

Hitch’s work includes the benches in the Great Hall with their wonderful mermaids and lions and the Ivanhoe figures. He also produced the portraits on the Great Hall frieze so one assumes, given how particular that selection is, that he would have taken considerable personal direction from Astor. In Pearson’s ecclesiastical work he was given great leeway to work directly with clients. Hitch is one of the Makers where we do have some contextual record. The Henry Moore Foundation hold his photographic archive, although Hitch very much records the work and not the studio life. The archive includes an annotated photo of the Great Hall heads showing us the originally intended names for each head. Some can easily be traced from earlier portraits but others are of course literary characters, generally tragic heroines. Were they taken from models or from William Waldorf’s idealisations?