The Mausoleum design (completed in 1817) was the successful result of a competition involving fifty design submissions and was won by T. F. Hunt.   Mr Hunt was a leading London architect.   Like John Flaxman (sculptor of the Edinburgh statue), Hunt had been a great admirer of the works of Burns and, also like Flaxman, was willing to donate his services to a memorial project.   

The sculptor of the original Mausoleum marbles was Peter Turnerelli but these were not finally installed until 1819.  In the end, Turnerelli, who was then at the height of his powers and considerable reputation, had not been so magnanimous as T F Hunt and disputes about payment led to delays in installation.  

The building is in the style of the neo-classicism that was popular in the first few decades of the nineteenth century.   The name “Mausoleum” derives from the ‘Mausolos’ or tombs of the king of Caria (353 BC) in Asia Minor.

Sir Walter Scott was heavily involved in the fund raising campaign that drew donations from all over Scotland, England, America, India and the rest of the world.

The remains of Robert Burns were disinterred from the original grave on 19 September 1817 and placed in the new Mausoleum.   The poet’s widow (Jean Armour) was later interred in 1834 when the opportunity was then taken to obtain a plaster cast of Burns skull.   On the earlier occasion, there had not been the medical skills to do this.

The original figures were carved in London and transported to Dumfries by sea and this also a factor in the delayed installation.

The present statues (2003) were created by Hermon Cawthra in 1936 and are remodelled carvings from plaster casts taken from the earlier originals.    The original sculptures being lost on the closure of a local builder’s yard – where they had been stored pending restoration work. Because of the alarming deterioration of the Turnerelli figures, the sculptor of the Cheyenne statue (H. S. Gamley) had been consulted about re-casting the statues in bronze.  It is likely that the plaster casts were taken at that time.

Wordsworth Connection

William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy visited St Michael’s kirkyard in 1803 in search of the grave of Robert Burns.  They particularly noted that, amid a collection of highly elaborate memorials, the grave of Scotland’s national poet was in a corner and only marked by a plain stone.  They also took the opportunity to visit the nearby Burns’ house but found Jean Armour Burns absent at the seaside mourning the death of her son, Francis.

What is not generally highlighted in connection with this visit of Wordsworth and his sister wass that by this time Burns reputation had taken off.   Internationally he was a well-known poet and, excluding the Kilmarnock and Edinburgh first editions, in the years up to the end of 1802 there had been thirty-one separate editions of Burns works as can be seen from the schedule below.  He was undoubtedly the posthumous poetic superstar of the era.

Indeed, examination of the above schedule shows that even before he moved to his final home in what is now known as Burns Street there had been eleven international editions of his poetry (again excluding the first Kilmarnock and Edinburgh editions).   Whilst never doubting the appreciation of the artistic genius of Burns’ work on the part of the Wordsworth brother and sister, perhaps there was also some curiosity as to the basis of its commercial success.

To be more charitable to Wordsworth, it is known that he again visited the kirkyard in 1833 and expressed his disappointed at the Mausoleum as being “monstrous in conception and clumsy in execution”.  This reaction was not entirely out of character given his previous letter of rejection to Sir Walter Scott concerning the national memorial in Edinburgh.   At that time he contended that Burns had “raised for himself a Monument so conspicuous and of such imperishable materials, as to render a local fabric of stone superfluous”.