Sculptor, painter, printmaker and bronze-founder. He was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and after training at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, joined the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. Resigning his commission in 1960, he enrolled at St Martin’s School of Art, where he began his association with the artists of the emergent British Pop Art movement, and with whom he exhibited in the seminal Young Contemporaries show at the RCA Galleries, London, in 1963. For much of the remainder of the 1960s he lived in New York, where his images of drag racers, skydivers and Hollywood starlets, together with his inventive mimicry of the Ben-Day dots of newsprint, brought him considerable commercial success. In 1969 he returned to the UK, but instead of re-joining the London art scene he chose to make his home in Kinkell Castle, a ruined sixteenth-century tower house in a remote part of the Black Isle near Inverness, the restoration of which was recorded in the publication Kinkell: the reconstruction of a Scottish castle (1974). By this time, his attention had switched to the production of large, totemic abstract sculptures, mostly fabricated from industrial materials such as Corten steel, and designed for landscape settings. These were followed by what Laing himself described as an ‘epiphany’, when a chance encounter with Sergeant Jagger’s Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner prompted him to question the aesthetic and moral basis of his work as a Pop artist, and to embrace the more ‘humanist’ practice of producing figurative works on a monumental scale. With the guidance of the master metal-worker George Mancini, he established his own bronze-casting foundry at Kinkell, from which flowed a succession of major public commissions, including a bronze frieze, The Wise and Foolish Virgins (1977–79), on the Standard Life Aberdeen plc building, George Street, and the monument to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1989–91), Greenside, Edinburgh; and a number of sporting monuments such as Batsman (2001) for Lord’s cricket ground, London, and Line-out (2010), Twickenham Stadium. In the last decade of his life, Laing returned to his roots as a Pop artist, producing a series of bitter-sweet paintings and screen prints in which Amy Winehouse replaced Brigitte Bardot as signifier of the glamour, and the tragedy, of contemporary popular culture. It should be noted that in 1968 the artist changed his surname by deed poll to Ogilvie-Laing, but continued to exhibit, and publish, under the name given at the head of this entry.
Principal source: Macmillan, D., ‘Laing, Gerald Ogilvie-’, ODNB, 2015.
Ray McKenzie, 2018
Sculptor born in Paris, the elder son of the painter George Washington Lambert ARA and brother of the composer Constant Lambert. He was apprenticed to the sculptor Francis Derwent Wood, 1918–23, assisting him on the Machine Gun Corps Memorial, Hyde Park Corner, and attended life classes at Chelsea School of Art, 1920–25. Throughout his career he sculpted portraits, figures and animal subjects in stone and bronze. He had his first solo exhibition at the Claridge Gallery, London, in 1927. Other exhibitions include Seven and Five Society, 1928–31; Messrs Tooths’ Gallery, 1929; and Lefevre Gallery, 1932 and 1934. In 1932 the Tate accepted the gift of his alabaster carving, Swan. At his first appearance at the RA Summer Exhibition in 1938, he showed a bronze Head of a Woman, which was purchased under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest and presented to the Tate. In the same year Lambert was elected FRBS but resigned in 1948. In 1949, however, he was awarded the Society’s silver medal for his Pegasus and Bellerephon, shown at the RA in 1948, and in 1951 he was re-elected. He saw active service in the Second World War but was invalided out in 1941; in the same year he was elected ARA but only began exhibiting again in 1945. He and his wife spent the war years living with friends in Bosham, Surrey, firstly while he convalesced and latterly while he worked for the Government building motor torpedo boats nearby at Itchenor Shipyard. In 1950–58, he was Master of the RA Sculpture School and was elected RA in 1952. In 1956, his bronze statue of Margot Fonteyn was another purchase by the Chantrey Bequest; this is now at the Royal Ballet School, White Lodge, Richmond Park. His public sculptures include an equestrian statue of George V, 1936–48, Adelaide, South Australia; statue of Viscount Nuffield, 1944–49, Guy’s Hospital; six groups of the Angel of Light Overcoming the Powers of Darkness, plus two decorative armillary sphere finials, 1958–60, former Associated Electrical Industries Building, Grosvenor Place, London; Grand Fountain, 1958–62, Presidential Palace, Baghdad, Iraq; and Mother and Child (water sculpture), 1962, Basildon New Town, Essex.
Sources: Fletcher, H., ‘Lambert, Maurice Prosper (1901–1964)’, rev. V. Nicolson, ODNB, Oxford, 2004; Mapping Sculpture; Nicholson, V., The Sculpture of Maurice Lambert, Aldershot, Hants, 2002; Royal Academy of Arts website.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Maurice Lambert by Walter Stoneham, bromide print, 1953 (photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London)
E.M. Lander is a firm of monumental masons operating from premises in the Harrow Road, opposite Kensal Green Cemetery. The firm’s connection with the cemetery dates back to 1838 when George Lander (c.1799–1861) undertook building work for the General Cemetery Company. Many of the cemetery’s monuments, however, are known to be by E.M. Lander, until recently a source of confusion. When J.S. Curl edited his monograph on the cemetery in 2000, the only E.M. Lander known to the volume’s writers was Edward Manuel Lander, who is buried in the cemetery and whose dates are 1836–1910. This would have made him too young to have executed two significant sculptural monuments dating to 1844, those to Major General Sir William Casement and to Emma Soyer (the latter being signed ‘E.M. LANDER / MASON TO THE CEMETERY’). Clearly there were two E.M. Landers and, according to English Heritage’s 2015 official list entry for the 1927 showrooms occupied by the current firm (E.M. Lander Ltd), the earlier of these two, the man who was responsible for the above-mentioned monuments, was George’s brother, born Manuel Lander but subsequently known as Edward Manuel Lander (1814–1884); the later E.M. Lander was George’s grandson. E.M. Lander Ltd was incorporated in 1916 and continues in business to this day, although the connection with the family ended about the time of the Second World War.
Sources: Curl, J.S., (ed.), Kensal Green Cemetery, 2001, pp. 104, 117–118, 119, 142, 172, 184, 187, 193, 218, 229, 233–234 and n11, 262, 277, 279, 283; ‘E.M. Lander Ltd’s showroom’, Historic England Official List Entry; Roscoe, I., A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, p. 716.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Sculptor, medallist, and teacher of sculpture and modelling born at Auxerre, Burgundy. In c.1863 he entered the Petite École de Dessin, Paris, while receiving training in the sculpture studio of Aimé Millet. Lantéri left the Petite École in c.1865 and entered the École des Beaux-Arts, where his tutors included Pierre-Jules Cavelier and Eugène Guillaume; during this time he also worked in the studio of François-Joseph Duret. During the Paris Commune in 1871, his friend Aimé-Jules Dalou took refuge in London and recommended Lantéri as an assistant in the studio of Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm (with whom Lantéri stayed from 1872 until the latter’s death in 1890). In 1880, Lantéri succeeded Dalou as a teacher at the National Art Training School (from 1896 the Royal College of Art), South Kensington, carrying on his master’s liberating modelling methods and becoming the most respected and influential sculpture teacher of his day; he was appointed the College’s first professor of sculpture and modelling in 1901 and, in response to requests to publish the notes he used for demonstration classes, compiled his three-volume Modelling: a Guide for Teachers and Students (1902–11). For Aston Webb’s extension to the V&A Museum, Lantéri executed, with assistance from four of his advanced students at the RCA – Sidney Boyes, Richard Reginald Goulden, Vincent Hill and James Alexander Stevenson – three figures for the central tower, Fame at the summit and Sculpture and Architecture in niches below; he also supervised the same students in their execution of four of the figures in the niches below, on the Cromwell Road façade (1905). Other public sculpture by Lantéri includes statues of Ludwig Mond, 1912, Swansea, and Sir Samuel Sadler, 1913, Victoria Square, Middlesbrough. Examples of his work are at the Tate, V&A, National Portrait Gallery and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. He showed at the RA, 1885–1917 (70 works); and was a member of the Art Workers’ Guild, 1901–06, and of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, 1905 until his death in 1917.
Sources: Beattie, S., The New Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1983; Gray, A. S., Edwardian Architecture, London, 1985; Mapping Sculpture; Stocker, M., ‘Lantéri, Edward (1848–1917)’, ODNB, Oxford, 2004.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Alphonse Legros, Edouard Lantéri, 1898, silverpoint drawing, Paris, Musée du Louvre (photo: public domain).
Sculptor born in Dublin, but living and working in London for most of his life. He trained in the Royal Dublin Society School and first came to notice in 1843 when his Cupid pressing Grapes into the Glass of Time was purchased by the Royal Irish Art Union. In the following year he exhibited for the first time at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and in 1845 moved to London where he was employed by John Thomas modelling statues for the new Palace of Westminster. In 1847 Lawlor entered the RA Schools on Thomas’s recommendation. In 1851, he won a prize medal for his plaster statue, A Bather, at the Great Exhibition. On the evidence of this work Henry Weekes acknowledged Lawlor as a rising sculptor, praising his Bather as unsurpassed ‘by any in the whole Exhibition for the modelling of female flesh’. Prince Albert was so impressed that he commissioned a version in marble for Queen Victoria’s birthday present in 1855. Having won the Prince’s admiration, it was inevitable that Lawlor should be among those selected by Victoria to produce sculptures for the Albert Memorial; he was allocated one of the groups of the Industrial Arts, Engineering (1864–67). Lawlor received few commissions for public statues, perhaps the two most important being from his mother country, General Patrick Sarsfield for Limerick, 1881, and Bishop William Delany for St Mary’s Cathedral, Cork, 1889. His exhibited output comprised mostly ideal works and portrait busts. He showed frequently at the RHA (becoming an associate member in 1861) and at the British Institution and also, until 1879, at the RA, in which year he became involved in a dispute with the committee. Such an altercation seems to have been uncharacteristic of Lawlor, as he was generally well-liked, sociable and easy-going, this latter trait being suggested as the probable cause of his relatively low output and his failure to live up to his early promise.
Sources: Mapping Sculpture; Murphy, P., Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture. Native Genius Reaffirmed, New Haven & London, 2010; Roscoe, I., et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Sculptor born in Chelsea, the third child of Richard Ledward (see below). After studying at Goldsmiths College, he entered the RCA in 1905, where he studied modelling in clay under Edouard Lantéri, and the RA Schools in 1910, where, in 1913, he won the travelling studentship and gold medal, and the first Rome scholarship in sculpture. He spent five months in Italy, returning through France following the outbreak of the First World War. The many sketches he made during this period are contained in the sketchbooks held in the RA archives. Ledward returned to Italy on active service with the Royal Garrison Artillery. In the post-war years he received several commissions for war memorials, including for Abergavenny and Harrogate (both 1921), Blackpool (1923) and, most prestigiously, Horse Guards Parade, London (1926), which earned him in 1927 the RBS medal ‘for the best work of the year by a British sculptor in any way exhibited to the public in London’. He was Professor of Sculpture at the RCA, 1927–29, during which period his interests expanded to include direct stone carving, evidenced by his Roman stone sculptures, Caryatid Figures (RA 1929, no 1404) and Reclining Figure –‘Earth Rests’ (RA 1930, no 1503). In 1934, he founded ‘Sculptured Memorials and Headstones’, an organisation aimed at improving the design of such work and encouraging the use of native stones. In 1936–38, he worked on Inspiration, a colossal nude figure for a corner of Collcutt and Hamp’s Adelphi Building, London. His is also the Venus Fountain, 1949–53, Sloane Square, Chelsea. Ledward’s last major work was a Portland stone frieze, Vision and Imagination, which was installed after his death on the Barclays Bank building, Old Broad Street, City of London; it was salvaged following the building’s demolition and, at the time of writing, remains in storage. Ledward was a member of the RBS from 1921 (president, 1954–56), was elected ARA in 1932 and RA in 1937, and was appointed OBE in 1956. He lived and worked for much of his life in Kensington: he was at 1 Pembroke Walk Studios, c.1924–c.1939, and died at home at 31 Queens Gate on 21 June 1960. Later that year, his son, Richard A. Ledward, presented an early work of his father’s, Awakening, 1914–15, to the Metropolitan Borough of Chelsea; it was erected in the newly laid-out Ropers Gardens, Chelsea Embankment, in 1965. Ledward’s unpublished autobiography (1953) is held at the Henry Moore Institute.
Sources: Ledward, G., unpublished typescript autobiography, [1953], Henry Moore Institute (ref 1988.16/13); Mapping Sculpture; Moriarty, C., ‘Ledward, Gilbert (1888–1960)’, ODNB, Oxford, 2004; Royal Academy of Arts website; The Times, 23 June 1960, p. 18 (obit.).
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Gilbert Ledward, Bassano Ltd., 1937, half-plate glass negative, (photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London)
Sculptor and teacher of modelling, born at Burslem, Staffordshire. He was first employed as a modeller by the Burslem firm, Pinder, Bowne & Co, and studied at Burslem School of Art. After obtaining a national scholarship, he went on to the National Art Training School, South Kensington; here he obtained a gold medal for modelling from life and was appointed assistant master of modelling. He afterwards became modelling master at the Westminster and Blackheath schools of art. From 1888, he was a member of the AWG. He exhibited at the RA 12 times between 1882 and 1890, all portrait busts, mostly in terracotta, some in marble. His terracotta panels, Music and Visual Arts decorate the porch of Queen Alexandra’s House, accommodation for female students of the National Art Training School. In the 1889 Arts and Crafts Exhibition, the architect John Sedding showed a drawing of his design for the pulpit at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, the listing in the catalogue (no. 851, p. 263) indicating that the bronze panels were to be executed by Ledward. Tragically, the work was never carried out, as the sculptor died the following year, aged only 33, following a two-week bout of rheumatic fever. Ledward’s sudden death left his wife destitute and with four children to raise. A measure of Ledward’s popularity is evidenced by the raising of the ‘Ledward Fund’ to provide assistance for his family, organised by Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen, director of the South Kensington Museum, John Sparkes, director of the National Art Training School, and some of the most prominent sculptors of the day. At the time of his death, Ledward and his family were living in Beaufort Street, Chelsea. He was the father of Gilbert Ledward and father-in-law of Newbury Abbot Trent.
Sources: Art Journal, 1 December 1888, pp. 26, 27 (review of the Glasgow International Exhibition and photograph of Ledward’s bust of Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen, described by the critic as ‘an excellent likeness’); Glasgow Herald, 12 November 1890, p. 7; Mapping Sculpture; Moriarty, C., ‘Ledward, Gilbert (1888–1960)’, ODNB, Oxford, 2004; Pall Mall Gazette: (i) 26 November 1890, p. [1]; (ii) 10 December 1890, p. 2.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Master builder, responsible for the construction of many sculpturally important public buildings in Edinburgh, such as the Scott Monument, the former Royal Institution and the former British Linen Bank, and whose masons almost certainly carved large parts of their decorative enrichment. These, along with many other major Edinburgh landmarks he erected, such as William Playfair’s New College on Mound Place, were characterised by his obituarist as having been ‘constructed in a way rarely equalled and never surpassed’.
Sources: Caledonian Mercury: (i) 21 March 1850, p. 3a; (ii) 7 February 1856, p. 3e.
Ray McKenzie, 2018
Born in Leeds, but brought up in Portobello, Edinburgh, he trained as an architectural stone carver with Ian Ketchin at Wallyford, East Lothian, from 1983 to 1987, during which time the main commission was the restoration of the exterior of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. In 1990, he set up his own company, David Lindsay Stone Carvers, which now trades under the name Stoneworks. Major commissions outside Edinburgh include the Mercat Cross at Coupar Angus, Perth and Kinross (2000), and the series of twelve contemporary gargoyles for Paisley Abbey (1993).
Source: information from the artist.
Ray McKenzie, 2018
Sculpture foundry established by Wally Livingstone in the mid-1960s, based since 1985 in Matfield, Tonbridge, Kent. Public sculptures include Mo Farquharson’s The Miners, 1996, Hamilton, Lanarkshire; André Wallace’s Helmsman, 1996, Pimlico Gardens; David Barnes’s Hands and Molecule, 2000, Ramsgate; and Sam Holland’s Coxswain Richard ‘Dic’ Evans, 2004, Moelfre, Isle of Anglesey.
Source: Livingstone Art Founders website.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Sculptor born in Witney, Oxfordshire. He studied at Oxford School of Art, 1961–63; Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, 1963–66, under Robert Medley; and the Slade School of Fine Art, 1966–68, where he specialised in Theatre and Film Studies. He later taught at Wimbledon School of Art, Reading University and Goldsmiths’ College. Logan has chiefly made kinetic sculpture since 1969, his earliest pieces powered by electricity and with electronic controls, those from 1975, powered by the wind, and those from 1997, by solar energy. His works have been installed in the mountains of Switzerland and Japan and on the coasts of Holland, France, Ireland and California. His public sculptures include Stansted Javelins, 1993, Stansted Airport, and Arrows and Obelisk, 1995, Old Kent Road; sadly, his The Climber, 1998, at Notting Hill Gate was removed, c.2020, following several years of neglect on the part of the site owners.
Sources: Buckman, D., Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol (1998), 2nd edn. 2006; Peter Logan website.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Born in the hamlet of Greenhead in Northumberland, son of a blacksmith and smallholder. Lough trained with a local stonemason, and carved some architectural decorations in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, before travelling to London in 1826, where he joined the Royal Academy Schools. In the following year, he exhibited his Milo and a group of Samson and the Philistines in the Great Rooms in Maddox Street. Lough was acclaimed by the Literary Gazette an ‘extraordinary genius’, and the exhibition became a social event, attended by the Duke of Wellington and the aged Sarah Siddons. Lough was befriended at this time by the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and found supporters amongst the aristocracy and landed gentry. He spent three years from 1834 to 1836 in Rome, on an allowance from the Duke of Northumberland. On his return he devoted himself to the illustration of English literature. A series of Shakespearean statues, commissioned by Sir Matthew White Ridley, was executed between 1843 and 1855. At the Westminster Hall exhibition of 1844, and again at the Crystal Palace in 1851, Lough exhibited a group entitled The Mourners, in which a dead knight was shown, lamented by his beloved and by his trusty steed. This proved widely popular, though condemned by the Art Journal for its ‘maudlin sentimentality’. Whilst it is widely agreed that Lough was at his best in imaginary subjects, he also received several important commissions for portrait statues, including Lord Collingwood for Tynemouth (1842), Queen Victoria (1844–45) and Prince Albert (1845–47) for the Royal Exchange, and George Stephenson for Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1842). Lough produced many portrait busts and church monuments. Although he exhibited there from 1826 to 1863, he was never elected to the Royal Academy.
Sources: Lough, J., and E. Merson, John Graham Lough 1798–1876, a Northern Sculptor, Woodbridge, 1987.
Philip Ward-Jackson 2003
Ralph Hedley, John Graham Lough in his Studio, 1881 (photo: Public domain).
Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, was born Louise Caroline Alberta, the sixth of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria’s nine children. While still a teenager, Louise was taught how to model in clay by the sculptor Mary Thornycroft. In 1868, she entered the National Art Training School, South Kensington, but royal duties prevented her regular attendance. Louise’s marriage to the Marquess of Lorne was arranged by her mother in an attempt to bring her free-spirited daughter into line. Although arranged, and despite Lorne’s probable homosexuality, the marriage was initially happy, but by the 1880s the couple were spending increasing amounts of time living separate lives, and Louise was devoting more time to her art. She had been closely associated with the sculptor, Joseph Edgar Boehm, since his engagement as sculptor-in-ordinary to the Queen in 1869. She had taken lessons from him over the years and was at his studio on the evening of his death in December 1890 (her presence there strengthening rumours of their being in a sexual relationship). Louise exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Society of Painters in Watercolour, and the Grosvenor Gallery. The Royal Collection has her marble busts of Princess Beatrice (1864); and Prince Leopold and Prince Arthur (both 1869). Her major works include her statue of Queen Victoria, 1887–93, Kensington Gardens; three memorials from the same model (the crucified Christ supported by an Angel): (i) to Prince Henry of Battenberg (1898; St Mildred’s church, Whippingham, Isle of Wight); (ii) to the Colonial Forces of the Second South African War (1904; St Paul’s Cathedral, London); and (iii) to the 8th Duke of Argyll (1906, formerly the Argyll Mausoleum, now Kilmun parish church, Cowal Peninsula, Scotland). She also designed a font (1861) for St Mildred’s and a statue of Queen Victoria for the west front of Lichfield Cathedral. Louise lived at Kensington Palace; her sculpture studio in the palace grounds dates from 1878 and was designed by Edward Godwin.
Sources: Galliard, A., ‘Princess Louise – the career of a royal artist’, part 3, history Scotland; Lloyd, D.W., and N. Pevsner, Isle of Wight (The Buildings of England), (2006), 2007; Mapping Sculpture; Roscoe, I., et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009; Stocker, M., ‘Louise, Princess, duchess of Argyll (1848–1939)’, ODNB, Oxford, 2004; Wake, J., Princess Louise: Queen Victoria’s unconventional daughter, London, 1988.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Princess Louise in Venice, April 1881, Royal Collection. (Photo: Fratelli Vianelli; public domain)
Sculptor of abstract forms in stone and marble. He attended Epsom School of Art and Design and, from 1979 to 1981, studied marble carving in Florence. He initially found work creating sculptures for film and theatre sets, but after about four years, decided to become a professional sculptor and devote his life to producing works of greater permanency. In 1989, he established a studio in Carrara, returning to the UK after about nine years. His Tonda, Iranian honey onyx, 2014, is in Holland Park. He currently lives and works at Dean Hill Park, Wiltshire.
Sources: Jonathan Loxley website; The Sculpture Park, Farnham, Surrey.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
.jpg){kind=link}
