English Gothic sculpture. Its beautiful West Front is covered
with tier after tier of heroes and saints; it was finished in 1242.
This is the year that Cimabue was three years old; Niccola Pisano
had lived during its building, Amiens was finished forty-six years
later, and Orvieto was begun thirty-six years later. It is literally
the earliest specimen of so advanced and complete a museum of sculpture
in the West. Many critics have assumed that the statues on the West
Front of Wells were executed by foreign workmen; but there are
no special characteristics of any known foreign school in these
figures. Messrs. Prior and Gardner have recently expressed their
opinion that these statues, like most of the thirteenth century
work in England, are of native origin. The theory is that two kinds
of influence were brought to bear to create English "imagers."
In the first place, goldsmiths and ivory carvers had been making
figures on a small scale: their trade was gradually expanded until
it reached the execution of statues for the outside ornament of
buildings. The figures carved by such artists are inclined to be
squat, these craftsmen having often been hampered by being obliged
to accommodate their design to their material, and to treat the
human figure to appear in spaces of such shapes as circles, squares,
and trefoils. Another class of workers who finally turned their
attention to statuary, were the carvers of sepulchral slabs: these
slabs had for a long time shown the effigies of the deceased. This
theory accounts for both types of figures that are found in English
Gothic,--the extremely attenuated, and the blunt squat statues. At
Wells it would seem that both classes of workmen were employed,
some of the statues being short and some extremely tall. They were
executed, evidently, at different periods, the facade being gradually
decorated, sometimes in groups of several statues, and sometimes
in simple pairs. This theory, too, lends a far greater interest
to the west front than the theory that it was all carried out at
once, from one intentional design.

St. Nicholas, the patron saint of Baptism, is here represented,
holding a child on his arm, and standing in water up to his knees.
The water, being treated in a very conventional way, coiling about
the lower limbs, is so suggestive of tiers of flat discs, that
it has won for this statue the popular name of "the pancake
man," for he certainly looks as if he had taken up his p