Caius Gabriel Cibber

Caius Gabriel Cibber
Caius Gabriel Cibber, 19th-century engraving by William Camden Edwards
Born	1630 Flensburg
Died	1700
Known for	sculpture
Spouse(s)	Jane Colley

Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630–1700) was a Danish sculptor, who enjoyed great success in England, and was the father of the actor, author and poet laureate Colley Cibber. He was appointed "carver to the king's closet" by William III.

Cibber was born in Flensburg in the province of Schleswig in Denmark. His father was a cabinetmaker, supposedly to King Frederick III of Denmark. He travelled to Italy to study art, where he may have changed his name from Sieber to Cibo. The Cibos were an old and noble Italian family to which Pope Innocent VIII had belonged. Cibber later emigrated to London, England, probably via the Netherlands. At first, he worked for the mason-sculptor John Stone, who had a workshop on Long Acre, until he set up his own studio after Stone's death in 1667.

In 1668, Cibber became a Freeman, by Redemption, of the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers [1], and in 1679 he became a Liveryman of the same Company, remaining so until his death. He carved the Company's coat of arms, and a stone mermaid pump, which stood outside Leathersellers' Hall in Little St Helen's, off Bishopsgate. The mermaid's head survives, having been discovered in excavations at St Helen's Place in 1925.

A decade or more after his arrival in London, Cibber married (as his second wife—his first wife had died) Jane Colley on 24 November 1670 at St Giles in the Fields, London. In the marriage licence documents, Cibber's age is given as 'about 33'. Jane came from a family of English gentry who claimed descent from the sister of William of Wykeham, and her grandfather, Sir Antony Colley, had been a prominent Cavalier during the English Civil War. They had three children: Colley, Lewis and Veronica. Between 1673 and 1679, Cibber was detained in Marshalsea prison and the King's Bench prison for unpaid gambling debts, though he was able to continue his work, and borrowed substantial sums from Edward Colley, his brother-in-law.