London sculptor. He was apprenticed to Edward Marshall in 1632/33 under the auspices of the Masons’ Company of London, which he joined in 1657/58 and of which he became upper warden in 1673. He is recorded from c.1649 as living in Drury Lane, Covent Garden, with his wife Rebekah. Although he suffered financially during the Commonwealth (1649–60), his business picked up after the Restoration and by the time of his death he had acquired a considerable amount of property and was running a workshop with at least five apprentices. If the notebooks of George Vertue (1684–1756) are to be believed, Burman was a man of questionable morality. Vertue records that he seduced a nurse brought in to tend his wife and, on discovering that she was pregnant, compelled one of his apprentices, John Bushnell (1636–1701), to marry her. It being near the end of Bushnell’s apprenticeship (1656 or 1657), Burman entrusted him with the erection of a monument outside London. On completion of the job, Bushnell used the payment to fund his escape to the Continent where he worked for at least ten years, the nurse evidently dying while he was away. On his return to London, his sculpting skills now much enhanced, he set himself up with great success in Hatton Garden. Burman, ‘offended’ at his former apprentice’s ‘good fortune’, then sued him for breach of contract and for the loss of his fee. Only four of Burman’s surviving works are authenticated. Three are church monuments, that to John Dutton in St Mary Magdalene, Sherborne, Gloucestershire (1661; signed); that to the Revd. Bartholomew Beale and his wife, Katherine, in St Michael, Walton, Buckinghamshire (commissioned by their son, Charles Beale, and Charles’s wife, the painter Mary Beale, 1672); and that to Frances, Lady Chandos, in St Michael, Chenies, Buckinghamshire (for which Rebekah Burman, her husband being by then dead, was paid £90 in 1675). Burman’s other surviving documented work is the statue of Mary, Countess of Shrewsbury, in a niche over the gateway to the second court at St John’s College, Cambridge (1671). In addition to these few authenticated works, Adam White lists a further 12 which he attributes to Burman on stylistic grounds and 11 whose attribution he rejects. Absent from either of White’s two lists is the monument to John Ashburnham in St Peter’s, Ashburnham Place, East Sussex, which is attributed to Burman in Public Sculpture of Sussex. Although uncredited, this attribution probably derives from Antram and Pevsner who in turn cite Geoffrey Fisher. Without the corroboration of other authorities, this attribution must remain in doubt. As to the quality of Burman’s accepted work, opinions differ. A contemporary, Sir Ralph Verney, considered him ‘one of ye best stone cutters … in London’ and Vertue, nearly a century later, ‘a good Mason & Carver of that Time’. More recently, Rupert Gunnis’s judgement that Burman’s surviving works ‘show him to have been an artist of considerable merit’, is countered by Margaret Whinney’s, who considered his treatment of the shrouded figure in his Dutton monument ‘rather insipid’. Burman died on 17 March 1674 and was buried in the churchyard at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. His workshop was continued by his wife who also practised as a sculptor in her own right. Their son, Belthasar Burman (fl. 1674–80), was also a sculptor.
Bibliography: N. Antram and N. Pevsner, Sussex: East (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, 2013, p. 39, 94, 549; K.A. Esdaile, English Church Monuments 1510–1840, London, 1946, pp. 49–50, 80, 94; R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1951, London, [1968], p. 71; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 169–70; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 3–4; Walpole Society, Vol. I8, ‘Vertue Note Books: Volume I’ (1929–1930), pp. 86, 89, 90, 94, 128; Walpole Society, Vol. 24, ‘Vertue Note Books: Volume IV’ (1935–1936), pp. 34, 169; M. Whinney (rev. J. Physick), Sculpture in Britain 1530–1830, London (1964), 1988, pp. 95, 437 n. 50, 440 n. 12; A. White, Biographical Dictionary of London Tomb Sculptors (Walpole Society, vol. 61, 1999, pp. 1–162), pp. 13–17; A. White, Biographical Dictionary of London Tomb Sculptors: Addenda and Corrigenda (Walpole Society, vol. 71, 2009, pp. 325–55), pp. 330–31; A. White, ‘Burman, Thomas (1617/18–1674)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn.), 2004.
Terry Cavanagh, November 2025
