Santo Calegari il Vecchio (the Elder) (1662–1719)

Sculptor, said to have been trained by a pupil of Alessandro Algardi, and credited with introducing the Roman Baroque style to Brescia. He was father to two sculptors, Antonio and Alessandro, and uncle to a third, Santo the Younger, who continued the family business. In Brescia, his works include the sculptures on the façade of Santi Faustino e Giovita, 1702, and the figure of Faith in the chapel of the Holy Sacrament, Sant’Agata.

Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, p. 128; M. Napier and A. Laing, The London Oratory. Centenary 1884–1984, London [1984], pp. 79–80.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Thomas Campbell (1791–1858)

Sculptor. Born in Edinburgh, he was apprenticed at an early age to the marble cutter John Marshall, but the patronage of Gilbert Innes of Stow, Depute Governor of the Royal Bank of Scotland, allowed him to study at the Royal Academy Schools in London, which he entered in 1818. During his time there he was employed as assistant to the sculptor Edward Hodges Baily. Later in 1818 Campbell travelled to Rome, where, under the influence of Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, he became one of the most accomplished British sculptors working in the international neoclassical style. In 1830 he returned to London, setting up a studio there. Perhaps the finest example of his Canovesque manner is the seated figure of Pauline Borghese at Chatsworth, Derbyshire (1824–40). In tomb sculpture, his most ambitious monument is that to the Duchess of Buccleuch at Warkton, Northamptonshire (c.1830), while the best known of his public statues is that of Lord George Bentinck in Cavendish Square, London (1851). Among his private portrait commissions are the statue of Arthur, the son of Alexander Fitzgerald Kinnaird, in the guise of Ascanius (1822), and many busts.

Bibliography: P.J.M. McEwan, The Dictionary of Scottish Art and Architecture, Ballater, Aberdeenshire, 2004; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 1, pp. 121–25, 150, 394, vol. 2, pp. 144, 200, 234, 420–28; H.E. Smailes, ‘Campbell, Thomas (1791–1858)’, ODNB, (2004), 2009; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster, 2011, Liverpool, pp. 24–25.

Ray McKenzie 2018

Alexander Carrick (1882–1966)

Sculptor born in Musselburgh, East Lothian He trained as a stone-carver under William Birnie Rhind before studying at Edinburgh College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. He received numerous commissions for architectural sculpture, and produced war memorials at Killin, Perthshire (1920); Oban, Argyll and Bute (1919–23); South Ronaldsay, Orkney (1921); Dornoch, Highlands (1922); Forres, Moray (1922); Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland (1923); Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire (1923); and Newburgh, Fife (1923). He began teaching at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1918, and in 1928 succeeded Percy Portsmouth as head of the sculpture department, where he exercised a formative influence on many younger sculptors, including Hew Lorimer, Elizabeth Dempster, and George Mancini. He exhibited regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy, becoming an associate member in 1918 and a full member in 1929.

Bibliography: P.J.M. McEwan, The Dictionary of Scottish Art and Architecture, Ballater, Aberdeenshire, 2004; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 1, pp. 108–09, 126–27, 132–34, 257–58, 450, vol. 2, pp. 316, 374–78, 384–85, 433–35, 497; P. Usherwood et al, Public Sculpture of North-East England, Liverpool, 2000, p. 16.

Ray McKenzie 2018

Angelo Castioni (c.1834–1906)

Marble carver born in Stabio, Ticino, in Italian-speaking Switzerland. Castioni settled in Paris where he worked as a praticien in Jules Dalou’s studio. Like his employer, he participated in the 1871 Paris Commune and, following its fall, took refuge in London. By c.1881, Castioni is recorded living in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and during that decade became an assistant to Joseph Edgar Boehm. In August 1890, Boehm asked Castioni to go to Carrara to select and order some marble blocks. On his return journey, Castioni took a detour to Bellinzona, the cantonal capital of Ticino, where he joined in a popular uprising and shot dead a conservative politician. He fled back to London, the Swiss government requested his extradition and he was duly arrested. However, the 1870 Extradition Act clause stipulating that a fugitive would not be handed over if his crime had been politically motivated, resulted in Castioni’s discharge on appeal. Castioni made the newspapers again in June the following year (1891), but this time as the acknowledged carver of a portrait bust for the British Museum of Sir Henry Layard that his master, Boehm, had taken only as far as a plaster sketch at the time of his sudden death the previous December.

Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, p. 367; B. Landy, ‘Drury and Dalou – the benefits of a continental training …’, in Alfred Drury and the New Sculpture (exhibition catalogue), Canterbury, 2013, p. 15; Mapping Sculpture; Daily News, 12 November 1890, p. 5; Pall Mall Gazette, 12 June 1891, p. 7; Saturday Review, 15 November 1890, pp. 548–49; The Times, 12 June 1891, p. 10.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Castle Fine Arts Foundry

Chris Butler established the foundry in 1990 in a small shed in the grounds of Chirk Castle, hence the foundry’s name. The following year, he moved to larger premises at Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, Oswestry, Powys; and in 2004 he opened a workshop in Stroud and subsequently another in Liverpool. In 2008, the foundry won the British Small Business Champion award from the Federation of Small Businesses in recognition of the way it had developed its business. Public sculptures include Jemma Pearson’s Sir Edward Elgar, 2005, Hereford Cathedral Close; Ian Rank-Broadley’s two figure groups, 2007, for the Armed Forces Memorial, and Denise Dutton’s Land Girls, 2014, all three for the National Memorial Arboretum, Staffs; Mark Richards’ Captain Matthews Flinders, 2014, Euston Station; Andrew Edwards’ The Beatles, 2015, Pier Head, Liverpool, 2015; Sam Holland and Lynne O’Dowd’s Geoffrey Chaucer, 2016, Canterbury; and Emma Rodgers’ Elaine MorganElaine Morgan, 2022, Mountain Ash, Wales.

Source: Castle Fine Arts Foundry website.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Ludwig Cauer (1866–1947)

Sculptor. Although his place of birth and death was Bad Kreuznach, Germany, Cauer exhibited at the RA, London, from 1892 to 1894, giving his address as 46 Glebe Place, Chelsea. His bronze statuette of Thomas More, 1894, is in Chelsea Library. He was the son of Carl Cauer and grandson of Emil Cauer the Elder, both sculptors. Ludwig’s brothers Emil, Robert and Hugo were also sculptors, as were his daughter, Hanna, and son, Eduard. Ludwig trained initially with his father, which included a study trip to Rome, and then with Reinhold Begas and Albert Wolff in Berlin. Following his years in London, Cauer returned to Germany and by 1895 was living in Berlin. He received an honourable mention at the Paris Salon of 1895 and was awarded third medal at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. In Berlin he contributed to two major schemes for which Begas was artistic director: supporting groups for the Kaiser Wilhelm National Monument (1895–97; destr. 1950) and a marble statue of Emperor Charles IV (1899) for the Siegesallee (demolished post Second World War). A replica of this latter statue was cast in bronze in 1900 by Martin & Piltzing of Berlin (the founders for Cauer’s Thomas More statuette) and erected in Tangermünde. Cauer was elected to the German Academy in 1916 and returned to Bad Kreuznach in 1918 where he worked mainly as a funerary sculptor.

Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 57–58; ‘Kaiser-Wilhelm-Nationaldenkmal’, Wikipedia (German); ‘Liste der Figurengruppen in der Berliner Siegesallee’ figurengruppen, Wikipedia (German); ‘Ludwig Cauer’, Wikipedia (German); Mapping Sculpture; Oxford Art Online – Benezit Dictionary of Artists.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Tim Chalk (b. 1955)

Born in Glasgow, he studied at Edinburgh College of Art and the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1978 with a joint degree in fine art and the history of art. A specialist in site-specific and community art projects, he co-founded the Artists’ Collective in 1981, collaborated with the sculptor Paul Grime in the formation of Street Artworks in 1985, and Chalk and Grime in 1988, and is currently the proprietor of Chalk Works, a studio undertaking public art commissions with a special emphasis on museum and heritage work. Recent commissions include a pair of cast concrete Tram Horses for the Riverside Museum, Glasgow (2011), as well as numerous sculptural sundials, such as Katie Wearie’s Hours at West Port, Linlithgow (2010).

Bibliography: Chalk Works art and design studio, Edinburgh; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 1, pp. 423–24, 310–12, 442–43, 446.

Ray McKenzie 2018

Sir Francis Chantrey (1781–1841)

Sculptor and painter. Born at Norton, near Sheffield. He began work in a grocer’s shop, but was then apprenticed to a Sheffield carver and gilder. He received lessons in drawing from the mezzotint engraver Raphael Smith, who visited the carver’s workshop. Becoming disillusioned with wood-carving, Chantrey bought himself out of his apprenticeship and began to paint portraits for a living. He moved to London around 1809 and set up as a portrait sculptor. He had already carved one bust in Sheffield, and in 1811, when he exhibited a very characterful bust of Horne Tooke at the RA (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), Chantrey’s powers as a portraitist were recognised. In the same year, a full-length marble portrait of George III was commissioned from him by the Corporation of the City of London for the Council Chamber of the Guildhall (destroyed in bombing in 1940). Chantrey established his credentials as a sculptor of church monuments when he showed his moving family group, commemorating Marianne Johnes, at Spring Gardens in 1812. The group was destined for Hafod in mid-Wales, where it was destroyed in the fire of 1932. Busts, statues and church monuments account for the bulk of Chantrey’s output. Virtually his only imaginary works are two Homeric reliefs, executed in 1828 for Woburn Abbey. Chantrey despised allegory, and his many church monuments are characterised by their direct appeal to sentiment, as in his celebrated Sleeping Children (1817), on the tomb of the children of Revd William Robinson in Lichfield Cathedral. His busts and statues are in a naturalistic style, and depict their subjects in tempered modern or ceremonial costume. His equestrian statues of George IV (Trafalgar Square, London), of Sir Thomas Munro (Madras) and of the Duke of Wellington (Royal Exchange, London), depart from precedent by the rejection of movement in the horse. Chantrey visited Paris in 1815 and Italy in 1819. He was elected ARA in 1815 and full RA in 1818. He was knighted in 1835. After his death, Chantrey’s studio models were presented by his wife to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In almost all cases, heads and busts are all that survived a space-saving exercise of 1939.

Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. xxix–xxx, xxxi, xxxii, 155–58, 224, 225; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 75–79, 284–86; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. 271–72; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. 163–64, 216–17, 221–22, 226–28; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 1, pp. 343–50, 365, vol. 2, pp. 99–112, 248–50, 411–20; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Glasgow, Liverpool, 2002, pp. 122–24, 393–94; D. Merritt and F. Greenacre, with K. Eustace, Public Sculpture of Bristol, Liverpool, 2011, pp. liv–lvi;  E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 113–14; G.T. Noszlopy, Public Sculpture of Birmingham, Liverpool, 1998, pp. 68–69; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, Liverpool, 2010, pp. 59–60, 246–47; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 9–10, 13–14, 17–18, 103; M.G. Sullivan, Sir Francis Chantrey and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2014; Walpole Society, vol. 56 (1991/1992), 1994, ‘An Edition of the Ledger of Sir Francis Chantrey, R.A., at the Royal Academy, 1809–1841’ (eds. A. Yarrington et al); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 330–34; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 60–62, 293–95; M. Whinney (rev. J. Physick), Sculpture in Britain 1530–1830, London (1964), 1988; D. White and E. Norman, Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, Liverpool, 2015, pp. 66–68, 119–22, 159–60; T. Wyke, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, Liverpool, 2004, pp. 32–33.

Philip Ward-Jackson 2023

Léon-Joseph Chavalliaud (1858–1921)

Sculptor born at Rheims where he was apprenticed as a modeller in the studio of Hippolyte Bulteau. He afterwards received a scholarship from the town to enter the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, where he studied under Alexandre Falguière, François Jouffroy and most importantly Louis-Auguste Roubaud (‘le jeune’). In 1880, he won a Prix de Rome with his Mère Spartiate, in 1885 and 1886 obtained honourable mentions, and in 1890 was elected a member of the Société des Artistes Français. Shortly afterwards he moved to England, where he stayed for about 15 years, living in Brixton, south London. He showed at the RA from 1893 onwards, his exhibits comprising portrait busts and statues in both bronze and marble. For a number of years he worked for Farmer & Brindley, in whose employment he executed the figure for the memorial to Cardinal Newman, 1896, Brompton Road, Kensington; effigies for the monuments to Bishop Richard Durnford, 1896, Chichester Cathedral, and Hugh Grosvenor, First Duke of Westminster, 1901, St. Mary, Eccleston, Cheshire; four marble and four bronze statues of explorers and navigators, 1897–98, for the Palm House, Sefton Park, Liverpool; and statues of Bishop Talbot and Sir Samuel Bignold, (c.1906), for niches on the frontage of G.J. Skipper’s Norwich Union building, Norwich. Chavalliaud also executed the memorial to Sarah Siddons (1897) for Paddington Green. He appears to have returned to France in the 1900s and died at Boissy-sans-Avoir, Yvelines.

Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 129–31; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 197–203; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 349–51; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, p. 60; D.A. Cross, Public Sculpture of Lancashire and Cumbria, Liverpool, 2017, p. 150; Lord E. Gleichen, London’s Open-Air Statuary, London, 1928; A.S. Gray, Edwardian Architecture, London, 1985; Mapping Sculpture; Oxford Art Online – Benezit Dictionary of Artists.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Thomas John Clapperton (1879–1962)

Sculptor. Born in Galashiels, Scottish Borders, the son of a photographer, he studied at Galashiels Mechanics’ Institute (1896), Glasgow School of Art (1899–1901), South London Technical School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools (1904–05), where he was student assistant to Sir William Goscombe John. He later studied in Paris and Rome on a travelling scholarship. Returning to London, he set up studios in Chelsea and St John’s Wood, receiving commissions for the Mungo Park Memorial and Flodden Memorial in Selkirk (1913), and allegorical figures on the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff (1914–37). After war service in India, he executed war memorials at Canonbie, Dumfries and Galloway (1919), Minto, Scottish Borders (1921) and Galashiels, Scottish Borders (1925). He executed a colossal frieze for Liberty’s store in London (1926), and numerous works in New Zealand, Canada and the USA. His last important work was the 49th West Riding Reconnaissance Regiment Memorial, Wakefield Cathedral (1947). Elected an Associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1923 and Fellow in 1938, he exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, 1908 to 1946 and the Royal Scottish Academy, 1910 to 1946. He died at Upper Beeching, Sussex.

Bibliography: R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 1, 126-28, 132-34; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Glasgow, Liverpool, 2002, pp. 310–12; W.M. Parker, A Great Scottish Sculptor (Guernsey: Toucan Press, n.d.).

Ray McKenzie 2018

James Harvey Clark (1886–1980)

Edinburgh sculptor, who worked from a studio at 1 Belford Road. After apprenticing as a lithographic printer, he studied drawing and modelling at the Royal Scottish Academy, and was one of the first to transfer to Edinburgh College of Art when it opened in 1907. He served in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in World War I, then worked for several established Scottish sculptors, such as Joseph Hayes and Alice Meredith Williams, assisting the latter on her bronze panels in the Scottish National War Memorial. In 1929 he established his own practice, specialising in heraldic work for leading Edinburgh architects, but also produced figurative works and portrait busts, as well as maquettes for the woodcarvers Alexander and William Clow. He exhibited regularly at the Royal Scottish Academy, and was elected ARSA in 1934.

Bibliography: W.T. Johnston, Dictionary of Scottish Artists (c.2000), Scottish National Library, ref CD-ROM.585; P.J.M. McEwan, The Dictionary of Scottish Art and Architecture, Ballater, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, 2004; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 2, pp. 305–07.

Ray McKenzie 2018

Philip Lindsey Clark (1889–1977)

Sculptor born in London, son of the sculptor Robert Lindsey Clark. He was educated in Cheltenham and studied sculpture under his father from 1905. He then attended the City and Guilds of London Art School, 1910–14, and the RA Schools, 1919–21 (having served in the Artists’ Rifles, Royal Sussex Regiment, 1914–18, where he rose to the rank of captain, received a mention in dispatches, and was awarded a DSO). Examples of his designs for war memorials were shown in the 1919 ‘War Memorials’ exhibition at the RA; his executed memorials include St Saviour’s War Memorial, 1922, Borough High Street, south London; The Cameronians Memorial, 1924, Kelvingrove Park, Glasgow; and, with Sue Dring, the Belgian Soldiers’ Memorial, c.1920, St Mary’s RC Cemetery, Kensal Green, London (he was awarded the Palm of the Order of the Crown of Belgium in 1932). Other commissions include a ceramic relief of bakers, 1926, 12–13 Widegate Street, London; a statue of William Dennis, ‘the potato king’, 1930, outside the Town Hall, Kirton-in-Holland, Lincolnshire; architectural sculpture on 159 Aldgate High Street, London; and carved reliefs in Westminster Cathedral. Clark showed at the RA, 1920–52. After becoming a Carmelite tertiary, he executed various works for The Friars, at Aylesford, Kent, 1949, and featured in the Friary’s publication, Image of Carmel, 1974. He was ARBS 1922–45; FRBS 1945–65; and PRBS 1958–59; his relief of St Thomas More was illustrated in RBS: Modern British Sculpture, 1939.

Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, p. 470; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 212–14; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Glasgow, Liverpool, 2002, pp. 243–44; Mapping Sculpture; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, p. 118; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 260, 438, 439; D. White and E. Norman, Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, Liverpool, 2015, p. 129; Who Was Who.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Samantha Clark (b. 1967)

Artist working in a range of mediums, including video, installation, photography and text. Born in Glasgow, she studied drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art (1985–89), followed by periods of study at Belgrade Academy of Fine Arts, the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and finally at the University of Central Lancashire, where she received an MA in Values and Environment in 2011. Public commissions have included the video installation Sky Flowers at Great Ormond Street Hospital, London (2005), and two works entitled Catchment and Lie of the Land at the Community High School, Auchterarder, Perthshire (2004). She has written and taught extensively, and is currently Reader in Art at the University of the West of Scotland.

Bibliography: Samantha Clark website; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 1, pp. 268–69.

Ray McKenzie 2018

Richard Bentley Claughton (1917–1997)

Sculptor and teacher born in London. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, 1946–49, under Randolph Schwabe, returning later as a senior lecturer in sculpture. He was elected FRBS in 1953. His Queen Matilda (now Battle Abbey) was included in the 1960 LCC Battersea Park Open-Air Exhibition. His public commissions include a wall sculpture in wrought iron and plastic wood depicting ‘country pursuits in the smoke issuing from a moving train’, 1954, for the interior of the British Railways London Office; Rampant Enfield Beast, c.1961, a bronze sculpture for Enfield Town Hall and Civic Centre; Man with Eagle, 1966, for Barclays Bank, King’s Road, Chelsea; a heraldic porch carving for West Ham Technical College; an altarpiece and Lady Chapel screen in oak for Lagos Cathedral; a group for the forecourt of the British Shoe Corporation, Leicester; a water sculpture for Harrow Civic Centre (with a wrought iron wall sculpture for the Council Chamber); a bronze sculpture for the Royal College of Pathology, London; a commemorative bronze for University College Hospital, London; and a statue of Chief (Dr) Henry Fajemirokun, in bronze-fed polymer for a site near Ibadan, Nigeria, 1979.

Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 54–55; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, p. 243.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Coade’s of Lambeth, Coade and Sealy (firm fl. 1769–1840)

Coade’s of Lambeth, a manufactory of artificial stone, was set up by Mrs Eleanor Coade in 1769. One of her advertisements precisely summed up the unique properties that made her product so successful: the stone, it claimed, has ‘a property peculiar to itself of resisting the frost and consequently of retaining that sharpness in which it excels every kind of stone sculpture’. This was not an inflated claim, as is attested by the good condition, even after nearly two hundred years, of much of the outdoor sculpture produced by her firm. It was for many years assumed that the Mrs Eleanor Coade referred to as the owner of the firm was the widow of George Coade (d. 1769), a wool merchant of Lyme Regis and Exeter. It has, however, been established by Alison Kelly that the owner was not the widow (1708–1796) but the daughter, also called Eleanor (1733–1821). It was known that the daughter never married and the confusion arose from contemporary references to her ‘Mrs’, a courtesy title for women in business whether they were married or not. Eleanor Coade had been born 3 June 1733 in Exeter. Following her father’s declaration of bankruptcy in 1759 the family moved to London. Eleanor soon established herself as a businesswoman and in 1769 purchased an artificial stone manufactory at Lambeth from Daniel Pincot, whom she retained for a short while as superintendent. He was replaced in 1771 by the sculptor John Bacon the Elder who for 28 years until his death in 1799 was to be not merely her manager but also her chief designer and modeller. Apart from the durability and relative cheapness of the artificial stone, the other principal ingredient in the firm’s success was that it employed as designers and modellers, in addition to Bacon, some of the finest sculptors of the day including (on an occasional basis) J.C.F. Rossi, John Flaxman and Thomas Banks. In turn, such high standards of design and manufacture led to the factory’s employment by many of the leading architects of their day, including Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam, James Wyatt, John Nash and Sir John Soane. In 1799 Eleanor Coade went into partnership with her cousin, John Sealy (1749–1813), and the firm operated thereafter as Coade and Sealy. On the death of Sealy, Coade took on William Croggon as manager, and he in turn purchased the company on Coade’s death in 1821. The firm continued until Croggon’s death in 1835, at which point his son Thomas Croggon succeeded him. There was, however, no longer such demand for artificial stone, and the moulds were finally sold off in 1843. Coade’s output was prolific, ranging from garden ornaments and architectural decoration through statues and monuments to what is perhaps its most ambitious and impressive work, the Nelson Pediment, designed by Benjamin West and modelled by Joseph Panzetta, for the Royal Naval College (formerly Hospital) at Greenwich, 1810–12.

Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 272–73; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Leicestershire and Rutland, Liverpool, 2000, pp. 95–97, 122–23; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. xi–xii, 88–90, 165–68, 223–24, 358–59, 378–80, 392; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. 103, 139, 256; D.A. Cross, Public Sculpture of Lancashire and Cumbria, Liverpool, 2017, p. 64; A. Kelly, Mrs Coade’s Stone, Upton-upon-Severn, Worcs., 1990; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 64–65, 123, 152, 237–38, 295–96, 297–98, 324; D. Merritt and F. Greenacre, with K. Eustace, Public Sculpture of Bristol, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 20–22, 171–72; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 57, 77; G.T. Noszlopy, Public Sculpture of Birmingham, Liverpool, 1998, p. 38; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, Liverpool, 2010, pp. 163–68, 252–53; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. 11–12; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009; J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, London, 1996; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 23–24, 352–53.

Terry Cavanagh February 2023

Coalbrookdale Company

Established by Abraham Darby I (1678–1717) in 1709 as an iron foundry in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, for the first 120 years or so its output was wholly utilitarian, from cooking utensils to steam engine cylinders to England’s first cast-iron bridge (1779–80), spanning the River Severn at the nearby Ironbridge Gorge. Although by 1820, the Coalbrookdale Company was considering closing, in the 1830s the decision of Francis Darby (1783–1850), Abraham I’s great grandson, to add art castings to the Company’s output, using iron as a cheaper alternative to bronze, stimulated a recovery. The foundry’s early successes in this field were made possible by its discovery of the optimum composition of sand for its moulds: with grains sufficiently cohesive to retain the model’s more delicate lines but loose enough to allow the escape of gases which would otherwise be trapped as bubbles creating a pitted surface to the iron which no chasing tool would remove. In 1846, the Art-Union magazine devoted eight pages of its August issue to a laudatory account of the foundry, comparing its products favourably with those of the leading French iron foundries. The establishment in the following year of a close working relationship with the RA Schools-educated sculptor John Bell further secured Coalbrookdale’s reputation as a maker not merely of decorative work but also statuary, in iron and, from 1851 at the latest, bronze. In 1849, the Coalbrookdale Company was awarded the Gold Medal of the Society of Arts. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, it was awarded a Council Medal (the highest tier of medal) for the overall excellence of its exhibits, while Bell was awarded a Prize Medal for Coalbrookdale’s bronze cast of his Eagle Slayer. Against this acknowledged excellence of execution, however, should be set the adverse reaction to the display of some of the work: at the centre of the Crystal Palace’s west nave was the Coalbrookdale Dome, a 30-feet-high, open-work, rustic fantasy enclosing an iron cast of Bell’s Eagle Slayer, the slain eagle fixed by an arrow to the dome’s underside, an assemblage the Illustrated London News described as ‘an absolutely inexcusable piece of bad taste’. Also in the exhibition, the Coalbrookdale Gates, by the Company’s design manager, Charles Crookes, was afterwards permanently sited in Kensington Gardens. The 1862 International Exhibition at South Kensington saw a second set of ornamental gates, its pillars topped with ‘Victory’ figures by Bell; these gates are now at Warrington. Publicly sited sculptures cast by Coalbrookdale include: statues of James Montgomery, Sheffield (bronze, 1861) and Oliver Cromwell, Warrington (iron, 1860–62, both by Bell); John Robert Godley Christchurch, New Zealand (bronze, 1865, by Thomas Woolner); and Edward Colston (bronze, 1895, by John Cassidy), erected in Bristol, toppled in 2020 by Black Lives Matter activists, now retained in a damaged state by Bristol Museums; Temperance fountains at Queen Victoria Street, London (bronze figure, 1861, by Wills Bros); and Southsea Esplanade, Hants (1893, bronze figure by Bell, iron canopy by Joseph Kershaw); and memorial lamp standards at Chelsea Embankment (iron, 1870, by Timothy Butler). Following the death of the last member of the Darby family in 1926, the Coalbrookdale Company was absorbed into a succession of other companies; operations at the foundry ceased in 2017.

Bibliography: Art-Union, August 1846, pp. 219–26 (‘The Iron Works of Coalbrookdale’); Builder, 29 March 1851, p. 198 (‘Sculpture and Iron. The Great Exhibition’); T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 18–19, 397–98; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 90, 107, 254; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. 158–59; Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851. Reports by the Juries …, London, 1852, pp. xcvi, 174–75, 498, 500, 502, 685, 706; Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History; Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, 1851. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue (3 vols), London, 1851, vol. II, pp. 659–61; Illustrated London News, 9 August 1851, p. 193; Mapping Sculpture; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 226–28, 241–42; NPG British Bronze Founders; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, Liverpool, 2010, pp. 68–69, 70, 125–26, 133; D. White and E. Norman, Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, Liverpool, 2015, pp. 124–26.

Terry Cavanagh March 2023

Doug Cocker (b. 1945)

Sculptor born in Perthshire, he studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee. In 1982 he was appointed Lecturer in Sculpture at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, but resigned in 1990 to become a full-time practitioner. He often works on a colossal scale, combining formal simplicity with a concern for weighty social issues, but almost invariably leavening the political critique with a vein of ironic humour, such as in State of a Nation (1985, destroyed), a wooden Greek temple mounted on rockers. He is also a prolific draughtsman, and has developed a distinctive form of multi-compartment box construction to accommodate, in miniature, ideas for sculptures that would otherwise remain as two-dimensional designs on paper. A good example is 2 Tribes/40 Shades (1989, private collection). Major public commissions include: Song of Sisyphus, Peterborough (1988); Meridian, for Mobil (UK), Aberdeen (1990); Poet and Scholar, for Ayr High Street (1995); and Glasgow Bouquet, Hutcheson Street, Glasgow (2010). He was elected an Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1984, and in 1992 he was awarded a Wingate Scholarship.

Bibliography: C. Carrell et al, Doug Cocker: sculpture and related works 1976–1986 (ex. cat.), Glasgow, 1986; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 1, pp. 308–10, 394; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Glasgow, Liverpool, 2002, pp. 50–51, 92; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, p. 261; A. Patrizio, Contemporary Sculpture in Scotland, Sydney, Australia, 1999, pp. 44–49, 145.

Ray McKenzie 2018

David Cohen (1932–2018)

Leading Scottish ceramic artist who specialised in Raku and slip-casting techniques, working from his family-run workshop at Tantallon Studios, North Berwick. After serving as an apprentice carpenter, he studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1958 to 1962, becoming a lecturer there in 1965 before being appointed Head of Ceramics at Glasgow School of Art in 1986. He contributed to numerous BBC broadcasts on ceramics, and wrote several books, including The Basics of Throwing, which was published by A. & C. Black in 2008. His work was exhibited throughout the UK and internationally, and can be found in numerous public collections, including the Copenhagen Craft Museum and the Baltimore Art Institute. Important works in Scotland include an installation of wall-mounted Ceramic Plates in the Edinburgh Business School, Herriot Watt University.

Bibliography: Galleria Luti – ‘Dave Cohen: Scottish Ceramic Artist and Master Craftsman 1932–2018’; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 2, pp. 499, 511.

Ray McKenzie October 2023

William Robert Colton (1867–1921)

Sculptor, born in Paris, raised in Essex. He studied under W.S. Frith at South London Technical School of Art before entering the Royal Academy Schools in 1889 where his masters included J.E. Boehm and H.H. Armstead. An exhibitor at the RA throughout his life, he first showed there in the year he joined the Schools. After leaving, he spent some years in Paris. On his return, his work was noticed by the First Commissioner of HM Office of Works who commissioned a fountain for Hyde Park; following the deterioration of the original, a replica was installed in its place. In common with much of his ideal work, the fountain shows the influence of Alfred Gilbert and, in its mild eroticism, that of contemporary trends in French decorative sculpture. In 1896, Colton showed three compositions in enamel on silver with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which led, in the following year, to his election as a member of the Society (he withdrew in 1900). Colton’s first work exciting major interest was The Image Finder, shown at the RA in 1897 (plaster) and 1899 (bronze; a cast is in Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery). The critic M.H. Spielmann hailed it as ‘a really fine thing [deserving] to be included in the list of notable works produced by English sculptors’. Its subject was a lean-muscled, sinewy Indian, naked but for a loincloth, heaving a piece of sculpture from the ground. The public attending the 1899 showing at the RA would have been able to see, alongside it, Colton’s The Girdle, which, first shown in plaster only the previous year, demonstrated his equally fluent talent for portraying the female nude. The Girdle was purchased by the Chantrey Fund and is now in the Tate. In 1903 he was elected Associate Royal Academician (RA in 1919). Soon after came his first major public commission. In the 1905 RA he exhibited a plaster bust of the Maharajah of Mysore (marble in 1906) and in 1907, the marble statue intended for India. In 1906, his statue of King Edward VII was unveiled in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and in 1908, his Worcestershire South African War Memorial. Two years later his Royal Artillery South African War Memorial was unveiled in The Mall, London. The centre part of this memorial was re-used as the crowning feature of the First World War memorial for Stafford (unveiled 1923). Colton was a member of the Art Workers’ Guild, 1894–1903, of the Royal Society of British Sculptors from 1905 (vice-president 1916; president 1920); and professor of sculpture at the RA Schools, 1907–11. His health was never robust and he died at the age of 53 at his home, 5 St Mary Abbots Place, Kensington, having failed to recover from a medical operation.

Bibliography: A.L. Baldry, ‘Modern British Sculptors: W. Robert Colton, A.R.A.’, The Studio, November 1915, pp. 93–99; S. Beattie, The New Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1983, p. 241; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 146–48, 308–10; Mapping Sculpture; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, Liverpool, 2010, pp. 228–30; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. 128–29; Royal Academy of Arts website; M.H. Spielmann, ‘W.R. Colton, the new associate of the Royal Academy’, Magazine of Art, 1903, pp. 300–04; The Times, 14 November 1921, p. 14 (obit.); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 136–39; W.T. Whitely, ‘W. Robert Colton, A.R.A.’, Art Journal, 1911, pp. 177–82.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Angela Conner (b. 1935)

Sculptor and painter, born in London. Although she served an apprenticeship with Barbara Hepworth, she is otherwise self-taught. She works in both abstract and figurative modes, both of which she employed in successive versions of a single work, the Yalta Memorial, 1980–82 and 1983–86, Cromwell Gardens, South Kensington. Regarding her abstract work, she has described herself as ‘basically a landscape sculptor using natural forces such as wind, water, gravity, sun and shadow’. Major commissions for abstract sculptures include Wave, 129 ft high, stainless steel and carbon fibre, Parkwest Plaza, Dublin (it was, at the time of its construction [2003], believed to be the world’s highest mobile); also Threshold, Darlington Arts Centre; Janus Arch, Longleat; and Tipping Triangles, Aston University, all stainless steel; and in the USA, Arpeggio, stainless steel and granite, Heinz Plaza, Pittsburgh; and Poise, white marble dust, resin and stainless steel, Chattanooga. Her public statues include: General Charles de Gaulle, 1993, Carlton Gardens, London; Colonel Sir David Stirling, 2002, Doune, Stirlingshire; and Laurence Olivier, 2007, National Theatre, South Bank, London. She has exhibited widely in the UK, Denmark, Paris, Bologna, USA, Dubai and Australia. Examples of her work are held by the Arts Council, House of Commons, Eton College, National Portrait Gallery and the Jewish Museum, New York. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors.

Bibliography: Angela Connor website; D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 134–37; G.T. Noszlopy, Public Sculpture of Birmingham, Liverpool, 1998, p. 157; G.T. Noszlopy, Public Sculpture of Warwickshire, Coventry & Solihull, Liverpool, 2003, p. 57; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, p. 145; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 19–20, 244–45.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Edward Bainbridge Copnall (1903–1973)

Sculptor and painter who was born in Cape Town, South Africa, but following the death of his mother moved with his father to England. Copnall studied at Goldsmiths School of Art and the RA Schools (finishing at the latter in 1924). He began as a painter, but turned to sculpture 1929 having met Eric Kennington and been strongly impressed by his work. Copnall exhibited widely, at the RA (1925–70), the London Gallery, New English Art Club, Royal Society of Arts, and at the Paris Salon. He was awarded the MBE in 1946 for his services during the Second World War as a camouflage officer. He was head of the Sir John Cass School of Art, 1945–53, and President of the RBS (now RSS), 1961–66. Copnall’s major public commissions include stone relief figures, 1931–34, on Grey Wornum’s RIBA building Portland Place, London; the easternmost stone relief figure, 1936–38, on the Adelphi Building, John Adam St, London; The Word (The Lambeth Preacher)), 1947–49, Lambeth Mission and St Mary’s Church, Lambeth Road; Carrara marble reliefs of actors and playwrights, 1959, formerly on the balcony fronts of St James’s House (demolished 1986), erected on the site of the St James’s Theatre, Angel Court, London; and Stag, 1962 (RBS Silver Medal), aluminium, formerly Stag Square, Victoria, relocated to Maidstone, 2004. Copnall’s Sculptor’s Manual, published by Oxford in 1971, includes an account of his pioneering investigations into sculpture in fibreglass resin, the first result of which was The Swan Upper, 1963, ICT House, northern approach to Putney Bridge, and the best known probably Becket, 1973, St Paul’s Cathedral churchyard.

Bibliography: Bainbridge Copnall. Painter and Sculptor. Memoirs with a Postscript, Bath, 2018; D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 14–18; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 66–68, 272–73, 382–83; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 127–28; G.T. Noszlopy, Public Sculpture of Birmingham, Liverpool, 1998, pp. 136–37; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. 50–51, 54–55; W.J. Strachan, Open Air Sculpture in Britain, London, 1984; The Times, 19 October 1973, p. 20 (obit.); P. Usherwood et al, Public Sculpture of North-East England, Liverpool, 2000, p. 280; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 387–88; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 15–16, 28; Who Was Who.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Francesco, Antonio and Domenico Corbarelli

Corbarelli father and sons, specialised in the decorative use of inlays of semi-precious stones (pietre dure). The father, Francesco (d. 1718), may have been born in Florence, but he and his sons Antonio (d. 1735) and Domenico (1656–1732) operated principally in Brescia, Padua, Vicenza and Modena. In Brescia, the family produced the altar for the Chapel of the Blessed Rosary in S. Domenico (now in Brompton Oratory, London) and the high altar of the church of Santa Maria della Carità (1685–96).

Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 127–28; M. Napier and A. Laing, The London Oratory. Centenary 1884–1984, London [1984], pp. 81–82n22; ‘Corbarelli’, Wikipedia; ‘Francesco Corbarelli’‘, Wikipedia.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Hubert Christian Corlette (1869–1956)

Australian-born architect. He studied in the RA School of Architecture (1890–95) and the Slade School of Fine Art. He was in partnership with Sir Charles Nicholson, 1895–1916, their most important collaboration being the remodelling of Burton Manor, Cheshire (Grade II, 1903). Corlette also worked on government projects for Jamaica and Trinidad. His war memorials include Kensington (with figure carving by F.W. Pomeroy) and in Sydney, New South Wales, the University War Memorial and Archibald Memorial Fountain (in collaboration with François Sicard).

Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 230–32; Royal Academy of Arts website; Who Was Who.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Marcus Cornish (b. 1964)

Sculptor. He studied at Camberwell School of Art, 1983–86. In 1987, he was selected by Eduardo Paolozzi for the RA’s Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture; according to Cornish, he was the ‘youngest ever recipient’. He attended the RCA 1989–92, during which time he was awarded a scholarship to travel to India to study the work of the Aiyanar potter priests. In 1993, he was elected ARBS. In 2000, he was appointed official tour artist on Prince Charles’s diplomatic tour of Eastern Europe and in 2002 official artist with the British Army in Kosovo. He is an academic board member, and occasional tutor, at the Prince’s Drawing School (a charitable trust founded by Prince Charles). Cornish’s commissions include Paddington Bear, 2000, bronze, Paddington Station, London; Stag, 2002, bronze, St James’s Square, London; Christ in the World, 2008–09, bronze, Church of Our Lady Immaculate and St Philip Neri, Uckfield, East Sussex – dubbed by the media, ‘Jesus in Jeans’, because of the figure’s contemporary dress; Vaughan Williams, 2010, stoneware clay, Chelsea Embankment; Mare and Foal, 2013, bronze, Berkeley Homes, Highwood, Horsham; and roundel portraits of G.F. and Mary Watts, 2014, on the Watts Gallery building, Compton, Guildford, Surrey.

Bibliography: Marcus Cornish website; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, p. 9; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 80–81; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 243–44; Wikipedia.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

John Creed (b. 1938)

Sculptor in iron and steel. Born in Heswall, Cheshire, he studied at Liverpool College of Art (1955–59), and Liverpool University, gaining an Art Teacher’s Diploma. He taught in the Department of Silversmithing and Jewellery at Glasgow School of Art (1971–95), and became a professional blacksmith in 1988, establishing a forge at Milton of Campsie, East Dunbartonshire. Among his many public commissions are a set of sliding gates for the main entrance of Borders Regional Council Headquarters, Newton St Boswells (1990); a set of internal double doors for the Royal (now National) Museum of Scotland (1995); and Benchmark, a series of sculptural seating units at Norrie Miller Park, Perth (1998). He exhibits widely and is represented in major public collections throughout the UK.

Source: information provided by the artist.

Bibliography: R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 1, p. 435; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Glasgow, Liverpool, 2002, pp. 86, 321.

Ray McKenzie 2018

Martin Creed (b. 1968)

Artist, musician, composer and filmmaker. Born in Wakefield, the son of the artist blacksmith John Creed, he grew up in Milton of Campsie and Lenzie, near Glasgow, and was educated at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, graduating in 1990. As with many of his contemporaries among the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s, his working method owes much to the historical example of Marcel Duchamp, often using found and natural objects to extend the scope of sculpture, puncture the pretensions of traditional art, and dissolve boundaries between the artwork and its audience. Since the formation of his band Owada in 1994, music has been a central part of his practice, providing both a parallel to his work as a visual artist and an analogue of the process of time-bound performance that underpins many of his projects. Like a composer, he also identifies his works by assigning them numbers, though these are frequently supplemented by descriptive subtitles, as with Work No. 227: the lights going on and off, for which he was awarded the Turner Prize in 2001. Other works place greater emphasis on audience participation, such as Works No. 200-20: Half the Air in a Given Space (1998), in which visitors were invited to immerse themselves in a room containing inflated balloons, and Work No. 1197: All the bells in a country rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes, which was commissioned to mark the start of the London Olympics in 2012. Martin Creed currently divides his time between his studio in London and his home on the Aeolian island of Alicudi, near Sicily.

Bibliography: Martin Creed website; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol 1, pp. 321–24, vol 2, pp. 7, 398.

Ray McKenzie 2018

Benjamin Creswick (1853–1946)

Born in Sheffield, he was apprenticed to a knife-grinder. Health problems obliged him to relinquish this profession. He was inspired after a visit to John Ruskin’s Walkley Museum to emulate the drawn and modelled exhibits. He made contact with Ruskin and worked under his supervision at Coniston and Oxford. By 1884 Creswick had opened a London studio, and around this time began an association with A.H. Mackmurdo’s arts and crafts organisation, the Century Guild. The Guild’s Magazine, The Century Guild Hobby Horse, in 1887 advertised his services in ‘carving and modelling for terracotta or plasterwork’. In the same year, he completed his ambitious frieze of cutlers at work for Cutlers’ Hall in the City of London. Raffles Davison of the magazine British Architect, who had already praised Creswick’s work, found that the sculptor had reached new heights in this frieze. Creswick then worked briefly in Liverpool and Manchester, before taking up the post of Master of Modelling and Modelled Design at the Birmingham School of Art in 1889. Creswick produced a great deal of architectural sculpture for Birmingham buildings, and proved an inspiring teacher. He retired from his post in 1918, though he continued to accept private commissions.

Bibliography: S. Beattie, The New Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1983, p. 241; ‘An English Sculptor’, British Architect, 22 April 1887, vol. 27, p. 303; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 36–37; D. Merritt and F. Greenacre, with K. Eustace, Public Sculpture of Bristol, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 216–17; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 222–24; G.T. Noszlopy, Public Sculpture of Birmingham, Liverpool, 1998, pp. 46–47, 82, 86–87, 90, 91, 118, 126, 138, 158, 159; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 429–31; D. White and E. Norman, Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, Liverpool, 2015, pp. 116–17.

Philip Ward-Jackson 2003

Theo Crosby (1923–1994) and Polly Hope (1933–2013)

Theo Crosby was a South African-born architect, designer, writer and founder member of the Pentagram Design Group. He began as a modernist architect, but later questioned the quality, social adequacy and ideology of the vast post-war building programmes. He became a member of the Preservation Policy Group, which established basic conservation studies and some essential legislation. He was architect to the Globe Theatre project for twenty-five years, sharing with Sam Wanamaker a vision of the Globe helping to revitalise the area and developing bonds with the local community. In 1990, he married Polly Hope (for both, their second marriage). Born June Mary Anne Stockwell, Hope studied at Heatherley School of Fine Art, Chelsea Polytechnic and the Slade School of Art. She was a painter, illustrator, sculptor, ceramicist, set designer and writer, and exhibited internationally from 1958 in both solo and group exhibitions. In 1969, her first novel, Here (Away from It All), published under the pseudonym Maryann Forrest, garnered praise from Anthony Burgess. She executed many portraits, including one of Roy Strong in 1985 (employing yarn, fur, wax, applied work, painted wood and glass; V&A, museum number: T.465-1985). Her decorative work for the Globe Theatre included, in 1991, a bronze sculpture of Midsummer Night’s Dream, and, in 1997, a 20-metre ceramic mural with four corner sculptures on a zodiac theme. Examples of her work are in the Government Art Collection: Transport, Bangladesh (silk on linen), and Birds and Animals of Bangladesh (terracotta relief panel), both 1990.

Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 285–87; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 260-61; ‘Obituary: Professor Theo Crosby’, Independent, 15 September 1994; A. Powers, ‘Crosby, Theo (1925–1994), designer and architect; also including June Mary Anne Hope (1933–2013)’, ODNB, 2011; Polly Hope, Jobbing Artist; The Times: (i) 21 September 1994, p. 21; (ii) 13 July 2009, p. 11; (iii) 14 December 2013, p. 95.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Marjorie Crossley (1890–1968)

Sculptor, born Marjorie Vernon Lockey at Barton Regis, Gloucestershire; she married Lionel Crossley in 1916. She was an Associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors from 1947 (elected honorary treasurer in 1961) and from 1944 was listed as a teacher of modelling at the Polytechnic School of Art, Regent Street. She lived for some years in Felixstowe, Suffolk, and was a member of the Ipswich Art Club, 1946–50, her exhibits in these years including, in addition to portraits, The Journey by Night, 1947, St Mary Abbots Church, Kensington, and Descent from the Cross, 1949 (untraced). In 1955, Crossley was one of 12 sculptors invited by the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral to work as a team under the artistic directorship of Josefina de Vasconcellos to produce a representation in plaster of the Christmas stable at Bethlehem. Other collaborators included Franta Belsky; T.B. Huxley Jones and his wife, Gwynneth Holt; and Charles Wheeler. Crossley’s contribution was a group of The Three Shepherds (illustrated in The Times, 29 November 1955, p. 16; the complete ensemble was illustrated on the front page of the Illustrated London News, 24 December 1955). Crossley lived in London from about 1950, her final address being 70 Madeira Road, Streatham.

Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, p. 228; Illustrated London News: (i) 3 December 1955, p. 971; (ii) 24 December 1955, p. [1083]; Mapping Sculpture; Suffolk Artists; The Times: (i) 11 October 1955, p. 5; (ii) 29 October 1955, p. 16; (iii) 20 December 1955, p. 8; (iv) 27 March 1961, p. 6.

Terry Cavanagh November 2022

Thomas (Tom) Curr (1887–1958)

Edinburgh commercial artist, who worked for the colour printers McLagan & Cumming, but also exhibited portrait and landscape works in oils. A leading member of the Scottish Arts Club, he was well known for his work with the Boys’ Brigade. His relief portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson at Canonmills, Edinburgh, appears to be the only recorded example of his output as a sculptor.

Bibliography: W.T. Johnston, Dictionary of Scottish Artists (c.2000), Scottish National Library, ref CD-ROM.585; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 2, pp. 488–89.

Ray McKenzie 2018

Andrew Currie (1812–1891)

Self-taught sculptor and antiquarian. The son of a Roxburghshire farmer, he worked first as a millwright, and later served an apprenticeship at the dockyards in Chatham, Kent. After attaining some skill as a wood-carver, he set up a studio c.1859 in the grounds of Darnick Tower, near Melrose, Roxburghshire, where he produced a series of more ambitious works, such as the monuments to Mungo Park in Selkirk, 1859; James Hogg at St Mary’s Loch, 1860; and Robert the Bruce on the Castle Esplanade in Stirling, 1877. As a boy he had known Sir Walter Scott, and much of his career was devoted to the portrayal of characters from his novels. For the Scott Monument, Edinburgh, he produced figures of Edie Ochiltree and Old Mortality, 1873–74 (a third figure, of Dousterswivel, has not survived). Although he spent most of his life near Ettrick Forest in the Borders, he moved to Edinburgh at the end of his life, dying suddenly at his home in Melville Drive in February 1891.

Bibliography: W.T. Johnston, Dictionary of Scottish Artists (c.2000), Scottish National Library, ref CD-ROM.585; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 2, pp. 260–61, 509, 512; The Scotsman: (i) 25 June 1920, p. 6; (ii) 28 June 1920, p. 8.

Ray McKenzie 2018

Victor Cusack (b. 1937)

Australian sculptor, painter, founder and engineer. Born in Sydney, Australia, he studied painting as a youth under William Dargie and other members of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, and did not turn his attention to sculpture until 1983, after acquiring a technical grounding from the New Zealand sculptor Peter Sedcole. A series of increasingly ambitious government commissions led him to establish the Fineart Bronze Foundry Pty Ltd, which not only cast his own work but that of other sculptors, and which was also equipped for the production of carillon bells. His public commissions include First Fleet, a scale replica of the sailing ship Sirius mounted in a 1.8-metre bronze ring (Ku-Ring-Gai, Sydney; copy erected in Portsmouth 1991), and memorials to the botanist, Joseph Banks; the first Governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip (both in Sydney); and Governor John Hunter, The Shore, Leith, Edinburgh. Outstripping all his other works in its scale and complexity, however, is Man, Time and the Environment, an eight-metre-high, water-powered kinetic sculpture in bronze, glass and stainless steel incorporating three historic clock mechanisms, a seventeen-note carillon and a central pendulum, all mounted on a rotating barge in the centre of a pool in a pedestrian mall in Hornsby, New South Wales. This was one of the last works produced by Cusack before closing his foundry in 1993, since when he has concentrated on painting.

Bibliography: The Artworks of Victor Cusack – artist, sculptor, author, poet; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 2, pp. 402–04, 512; ‘Hornsby Water Clock’, Wikipedia.

Ray McKenzie 2018