Sculptor and medallist born in Chelsea, the son of Henry Young, the bronze founder. Arthur usually styled his name Stanley Young or A. Stanley Young. He studied at the RA Schools, 1897–1902, in 1899 gaining the Landseer Scholarship. In about this same year, he executed the bronze relief (presumably cast at his father’s foundry) for the headstone of the tomb of his cousin, Horace Lott, in Brompton Cemetery, Kensington. In February 1902, his entry for one of the RA School’s competitions, a relief entitled Boadicea urging the Britons to avenge her outraged daughters, illustrated in The Studio. Young’s most important public commissions were for Norwich Union Life Assurance: two relief panels, Solace and Protection, 1906, for the Norwich office, and an allegorical group, Prudence, Justice and Liberality, 1913, for the Fleet Street branch, London. For the architects Hart and Waterhouse, he modelled a figure of Mercury, 1910, for the roof of Willing House, Grays Inn Road. He exhibited at the RA summer exhibitions, 1898–1912. He was elected ARBS in 1923, resigning in 1927 and rejoining as FRBS in 1952. Young lived at 30 Trafalgar Square (now Chelsea Square), Chelsea, from c.1891 to c.1912.
Sources: Cocke, R., Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013; Mapping Sculpture; Ward-Jackson, P., Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Henry Young established his art bronze foundry at the Eccleston Iron Works, Eccleston Street, Pimlico, London, in 1871. Young had been until then chief modeller at Holbrook & Co, Manor Street, Chelsea, but on hearing of the sculptor Alfred Stevens’s desperate need for someone to cast the bronze parts of his Wellington Monument for St Paul’s Cathedral, he successfully applied for the job himself. Much of Young’s early success is attributable to his employment of French craftsmen, many of them Communards and fellow travellers taking refuge in London following the fall of the Paris Commune at the end of May 1871. Their skills extended to the casting of bronze statuettes, a growing taste in England, then beyond the capabilities of British foundrymen. It was this expertise that attracted one of Young’s most loyal early clients, Joseph Edgar Boehm, who had been building a reputation as a creator of fine bronze statuettes for whose casting he had hitherto been compelled to travel to Europe; a notable example of Young & Co’s success in this line is Herdsman leading a Bull (V&A). Boehm also used Young & Co for his monumental statues, notably John Bunyan (1874, for Bedford), John Fox Burgoyne (1874, for Waterloo Place), Edward, Prince of Wales (1878, equestrian, for Bombay [Mumbai]), Lord Napier (c.1880, equestrian, for Calcutta [Kolkata]) and Thomas Carlyle (1882, for Chelsea Embankment Gardens). Henry Young & Co’s biggest job was the casting of C.H. Mabey’s two sphinxes flanking the Obelisk of Thutmose III (‘Cleopatra’s Needle’) on the Victoria Embankment, London, 1880–81. The press hailed the sphinxes as evidence of the rapid advances in casting processes in the 14 years since Marochetti had cast Landseer’s lions for the foot of Nelson’s Column: according to the Northern Echo (25 April 1881, p. 4), whereas Marochetti had cast each of the lions in ‘about two dozen different pieces’, which then had to be rivetted together, Young & Co had cast the sphinxes ‘each in a single piece’. What is more, according to the Builder (21 August 1880, p. 250), Young had also introduced graduations (no longer visible) to the colour of the bronze, making the face ‘lighter in tint than the body’. In the following year (1881) Henry Young commissioned an oil painting from R.L. Lomax (Guildhall Art Gallery, London; acc. no. 1851), showing his foundry’s chasing shop crammed full of a choice selection of its most famous casts. Young & Co’s output of bronze castings dwindled slightly in the 1880s and drastically in the 1890s, for a combination of reasons. Firstly, the probable return home of most or all of Young’s French craftsmen following the French government’s granting of an amnesty for the Communards (partial in 1879, full in 1880); and secondly, the arrival on the scene of two highly competent rival firms, the Thames Ditton Foundry (bronze casting from 1874) and J.W. Singer & Sons (from the late 1880s). Young’s last bronze sculptures date from just after the turn of the twentieth century, shortly before the company’s move to Nine Elms, south London. One of its final casts was Princess Louise’s 1904–05 Colonial Troops South African War Memorial for St Paul’s Cathedral. Today the company operates as H. Young Structures Ltd, specialists in structural steelwork.
Main sources: Building News, 25 June 1875, pp. 710–12 (‘Bronze Statuettes’); Graphic, 10 May 1873, p. 434 (text: ‘Casting a statue of the late Lord Derby’), p. 449 (engr: ‘Pouring in the metal’); H. Young Structures Ltd website; Illustrated London News, 16 April 1881, p. 373 (engr: ‘Melting the metal for the bronze sphinx to be placed on the Thames Embankment’), p. 374 (text: ‘Large Bronze Castings’); Mapping Sculpture; NPG British Bronze Sculpture Founders; Physick, J., The Wellington Monument, London, 1970, pp. 95–99; Princess Louise: The career of a royal artist, part 4 (inc. ‘The foundry and production’); Times, Monday 25 December 1882, p. 7 (‘The Beaconsfield Memorial’); Westminster and Chelsea News, 13 May 1882, p. 6 (‘Monument casting in Pimlico’).
Terry Cavanagh August 2023
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