I have been pondering how it was that Edward Pearce, a highly experienced mason-contractor, who worked on a range of different building contracts as well as St. Paul’s should have been responsible for the virtuoso head of Wren who was his employer.   Pearce did undertake work as a sculptor, including a bust of Oliver Cromwell in the Museum of London, which is signed and dated 1672, and two busts commissioned respectively by the Painter-Stainers Company and Royal College of Physicians.   The bust of Wren was presented to the University of Oxford by Wren’s son, also called Christopher, who was a great collector of manuscripts and information about his father, as well as working in the Office of Works.   So, it has an impeccable provenance.   But Nick Penny in his catalogue of the sculpture in the Ashmolean speculates that it may be a copy by Pearce of a lost original by Coysevox, presumably undertaken on Wren’s brief trip to Paris.   Doesn’t seem likely to be unrecorded.