Simon Verity, a British stone carver and artisan whose bevy of works included the statues that adorn the western facade of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Upper Manhattan, as well as grottoes, tombstones, fountains and floor inscriptions like the brass lettering that marks the shrine to Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, died on Aug. 11 at his home in Llandeilo, Wales. He was 79.
His wife, Martha Finney, said the cause was Lewy body dementia.
In 1988, Mr. Verity was chosen to direct the St. John the Divine project. Perhaps his best-known venture, it placed him on a scaffold on Amsterdam Avenue for parts of nine years, leading a small team that, using hammers, mallets and chisels, carved 31 biblical figures (including Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist, Abraham and Sarah) and various scenes from limestone blocks in the niches that frame the great brass doors at the Portal of Paradise.
One of the carvings at the portal — a modern reimagining of the burning of Jerusalem — depicts the destruction of the World Trade Center and other city landmarks under a nuclear mushroom. (It was created more than a decade before the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.) The carving also illustrates signs of a rebirth, with stonemasons building on the city’s ashes.
The Very Rev. Patrick Malloy, dean of the cathedral, said in a statement that many tourists visited the cathedral just to see the portal.
“Mr. Verity took the long-dead worthies of the Hebrew and Christian traditions and made them things of wonder for people in our own day,” he added. “Beyond this present age, his work will endure into a future beyond us.”
Joseph Kincannon, a stone carver who also worked on the St. John the Divine project, said that Mr. Verity took an unusual approach to making the statues.
“Normally, when you do statues, you work from a full-scale clay model,” he said in an interview. “But he was an advocate of letting the stones speak to him. He wanted us to discover what the stone would lay out and let that canvas inform you.”
Chipping away at the stones in bad as well as good weather, Mr. Verity sported a distinctive look — like that of a very busy ragamuffin.
Writing in The New Yorker in 1990, Brendan Gill described Mr. Verity’s uniform of “hand-me-down tweeds, moth-eaten sweaters and scuffed shoes” and noted that his hair “appears to be made of some spiky indestructible material in which grayish stone dust readily accumulates, sometimes to the point where it has been mistaken for frost.”
Simon Verity was born on July 1, 1945, in Amersham, a town northwest of London. His father, Terence, was an art director for films, and his mother, Enid (Hill) Verity, was a painter.
He attended Marlborough College in England and then spent five years as an apprentice to a great-uncle, Oliver Hill, an architect and decorator, before studying under the stone conservationist Robert Baker at Wells Cathedral.
That training helped him become one of the world’s leading stone artists.
In the late 1970s, Mr. Verity visited Austria, where he became fascinated by a 17th-century grotto built for the prince-archbishop of Salzburg. He went on to restore centuries-old grottoes and designed and built new ones, both in Europe and in the United States.
“I think there is an eternal fascination in the combination of rocks and water and what you can do with them that bubbles up after a few generations or so,” he told The New York Times in 1988. “It’s a sort of zeitgeist, a spirit of things coming together.”
One of his original grottoes was one at Leeds Castle, in Kent, England, which visitors entered through a suite of rooms. Nearly all the rooms were encrusted, from ceiling to floor, with colorful mosaics made from minerals, shells and animal bones, and some of the walls were covered with elaborate limestone sculptures.
In addition, he carved statues of four whales and a fountain for King Charles III when he was the Prince of Wales; a teacup made of broken crockery for Elton John’s garden; a seated king in the front of Wells Cathedral, whose restoration he also worked on; and “The Agony in the Garden,” which depicts Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane before his betrayal.
He created fountains and a sundial at the American Academy in Rome and headstones for the writer Nancy Mitford (which featured a mole, the animal on her family crest); George Wein, the Newport Jazz Festival impresario, and his wife, Joyce (for which he sculpted a jazz band); and the British poet laureate John Betjeman (in which a riot of Victorian curlicues nearly obscures his name).
Mr. Verity also completed other projects in Manhattan. In the early 1990s, he created “The Gorgeous Mosaic,” a diamond-shaped work, 22 by 13 feet, inspired by a phrase used by Mayor David N. Dinkins to describe the city’s ethnic and social mix.
Assembled from thousands of squarish bits of stone and glass, “The Gorgeous Mosaic” shows people rushing back and forth amid the city’s famous buildings. It now hangs at Bellevue Hospital.
Years later, he created the ribbon-like pathway at the Queen Elizabeth II September 11th Garden, at Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan, which honors the British subjects who died in the 9/11 attacks. For that memorial, he carved slabs of Scottish sandstone, into which he engraved the names of all British counties in distinctive designs, and laid them out in their approximate geographic positions.
“People would say to me, ‘Don’t you get bored carving all these words ‘shire’?” Mr. Verity told WNYC radio in 2005, five years before it opened. “And I say, ‘No, because each of them is a different shire.’”
“As I’m chiseling,” he added, “I’m thinking about the letter form that I’m carving and I’m thinking about the life of this extraordinary country that I’m from.”
Mr. Verity and his wife collaborated on the Castello Plan Monument, a three-dimensional bronze plaque of a 1660 map of New Amsterdam, the 17th-century Dutch settlement that was renamed New York after the English takeover four years later. Installed on a stone boulder, it shows the 317 houses on the map, as well as gardens and orchards. It was unveiled in Peter Minuit Plaza in Lower Manhattan in 2011.
“I made all the little buildings, and Simon carved the building facades,” said Ms. Finney, an architect and book artist.
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 2013, Mr. Verity is survived by a daughter, Polly Verity, and two sons, Tom and Johno, from his marriage to Judith Mills, which ended in divorce; five granddaughters; and his sisters, Spring Christie, Candida Wright and Alison Morse.
Mr. Verity thrived on the intimate relationship between his tools and limestone.
“There’s something in the repetitive action of the work,” he was quoted as saying in the magazine Parabola: The Search for Meaning in 2013. “I’m hitting that stone once every second for two hours, and then I stop for 20 minutes, and then I begin again, and for eight or 10 hours a day, that’s what I do.
“That’s extraordinary, isn’t it? And I’ve been doing that for 30 years. And that’s a very strange thing to be doing.”
Read More: Simon Verity, World-Renowned Stone Carver, Is Dead at 79
