Figurative sculptor born in Scotland. He attended Farnham School of Art and afterwards worked for Henry Moore. In 1989, he was elected FRBS, winning the Silver Medal in 1990 and the Sir Otto Beit Medal in 1991, 1992 and 1993. In 2009, he was appointed CVO. He lives and works in Cocking, West Sussex. A highly successful and prolific sculptor, Jackson’s public sculptures include three commissions for the Manchester United Football Stadium: statues of The Young Mozart, 1994, Ebury Street, Pimlico, London; Constantine the Great, 1998, Minster Yard, York; the Chelsea In-Pensioner, 2000, Royal Hospital Chelsea; Queen Elizabeth II (equestrian), 2003, Windsor Great Park; Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, 2009, The Mall, London; Mahatma Gandhi, 2015, Parliament Square; Joan Littlewood, 2015, Theatre Royal Stratford, East London; a group, The United Trinity: Best, Law, Charlton, 2008, Old Trafford, Greater Manchester; monuments to Raoul Wallenberg in London, 1997, and Buenos Aires, 1998; the Bomber Command Memorial, 2012, Green Park, and the Korean War Memorial, 2014, Victoria Embankment Gardens, London.
Sources: Philip Jackson website; Ward-Jackson, P., Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Philip Jackson, 2005 (photo:©A.K.Purkiss)
Sculptor born at Torquay into a family of marble masons. From c.1890 he studied at the South London Technical School of Art under W.S. Frith and, 1893–98, at the RA Schools, where he became friends with the painter Gerald Moira, later collaborating with him on a number of decorative schemes using coloured plaster bas-reliefs, including for the interiors of the Trocadero Restaurant, Shaftsbury Avenue, and the Salle Bechstein (later Wigmore Hall), Wigmore Street, London. The two worked with the architect T.E. Collcutt on the P&O Company’s Pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, Lynn Jenkins’ low relief frieze panels winning a silver medal. They also worked on Collcutt’s Lloyd’s Registry of Shipping, Fenchurch Street, City of London, c.1900. Here Lynn Jenkins produced a relief for the lunette over the Council Chamber doorway and, for the vestibule, a 24.5m-long frieze in electrotyped copper, ivory and mother-of-pearl, with, at the head of the stairs, a bronze and marble group, The Spirit of Maritime Commerce. Lynn Jenkins’s 2.75m-high gilt bronze figure of Count Peter of Savoy, 1904, stands over the main carriage entrance of Collcutt’s Savoy Hotel, The Strand. In 1911, for Collcutt and Hemp, he carved monumental stone figures over the central entrance of Thames House, Queen Street, City of London. Lynn Jenkins was a member of the AWG from 1900 and a founder member of the RBS. In 1897, he joined the Chelsea Arts Club and in 1901 was elected chairman. He showed frequently at the RA from 1895 until his move to the USA in 1916, where he continued to work and exhibit until his death.
Sources: Architectural Review, vol. 1, November 1896–May 1897, pp. 99–106; Beattie, S., The New Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1983; Builder, 9 September 1927, p. 406; Gray, A.S., Edwardian Architecture, London, 1985; Mapping Sculpture; Spielmann, M.H., British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-day, London, 1901; The Times, 3 September 1927, p. 12.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Sculptor, born William John, in Canton, near Cardiff, the son of Thomas John, woodcarver to the Third Marquess of Bute. John began his training under his father, but in 1881 left Cardiff to work as a journeyman carver in Thomas Nicholls’ workshop in Lambeth. It was after his move to London that John added Goscombe (from his mother’s side of the family) to his name. During his five-year stay with Nicholls, John began evening classes at South London Technical School of Art, learning modelling under W.S. Frith. In 1884, on the recommendation of the head of the school, J.C.L. Sparkes, John gained entry to the RA Schools. In 1886, he left Nicholls to work in the studio of C.B. Birch, but in the following year won the Landseer Scholarship, allowing him to set up his own studio. In 1888, a commission for a portrait bust funded a visit to Italy and in 1889 he won the RA Gold Medal and Travelling Scholarship, visiting Sicily, North Africa, and Spain. He then rented a studio in Paris for a year, where he was strongly influenced by Rodin, John’s Morpheus, 1890, clearly owing much to Rodin’s The Age of Bronze, albeit suffused with a somnolent quality alien to Rodin but characteristic of British work by Lord Leighton and Alfred Gilbert. John continued to exhibit ideal bronzes throughout the 1890s and, in 1900, won a gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle for The Elf, Study of a Head, and Boy at Play. His public monuments include Sir Arthur Sullivan, 1902, Victoria Embankment Gardens, London; King’s Liverpool Regiment, 1905, Liverpool; Engine Room Heroes 1916, Liverpool; equestrian statue of Viscount Wolseley, 1914–20, Horse Guards’ Parade, London; and Port Sunlight War Memorial, 1921. John produced little architectural sculpture, his allegorical reliefs, c.1903, for Electra House, Moorgate, and the figures of Edward VII and Alexandra, 1906, for Aston Webb’s Cromwell Road V&A façade being rare examples. John also designed the regalia for the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1911, the year in which he was knighted. He was a member of the Art Workers’ Guild from 1891, was elected ARA 1899 and RA 1909, and an RBS member from 1904. He was awarded the RBS gold medal in 1942 and continued to exhibit annually at the RA until 1948.
Sources: Beattie, S., The New Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1983; Charles, R.L., ‘John, Sir William Goscombe (1860–1952)’, rev. F. Pearson, ODNB, (2004), 2014; Mapping Sculpture; Pearson, F., Goscombe John at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 1979; Royal Academy of Arts website; Ward-Jackson, P., Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster, Liverpool, 2011.
Terry Cavanagh February 2023
Simon Harmon Vedder, Sir William Goscombe John, 1901, oil on canvas, National Museum Wales (photo: public domain).
Sculptor and illustrator. She was born in Sweden but she and her parents moved to England while she was still a child. She studied, 1914–21, at the Slade School of Fine Art where she won the Feodora Gleichen memorial prize for sculpture; her tutor at the Slade was James Havard Thomas. She worked in stone, marble and wood, her principal subjects, animals and children. Kineton Parkes, in his The Art of Carved Sculpture, rated Obelisk, commissioned by the Duke of Westminster for Walden Court, Pimlico, and erected c.1930, ‘her most important work’. He also lists several other works of relief sculpture – Cats on a Chimney Cowl; Squirrels; Resting Horses; Milking; and Pastoral (this last in blue Belgian marble) – and three in the round – a cow and girl; a cat (in wood); and a St Francis (in mahogany). She exhibited at the Goupil Gallery, Chenil Gallery and Whitechapel Art Gallery, and took part in the Selfridge Roof Garden exhibition of the London Group, her contributions being a bird bath and a work entitled In Pasture (in green serpentine). Her first work as a professional illustrator, 1930–35, was for the Underground Group and London Transport, designing posters. Shortly after she began writing and illustrating children’s books, including Animal Families (Country Life), 1939; Fables from Aesop and Others (Transatlantic Arts), 1944; and Animals We Use (Methuen), 1948. She was compelled to give up illustrating in her later years following the deterioration of her eyesight.
Sources: Fraser, I., ‘The “English Independents”: some twentieth-century women carvers’, Sculpture Journal, Vol. 23.3 (2014), pp. 370–71; London Transport Museum website; Mapping Sculpture; Parkes, K., The Art of Carved Sculpture, 1931, vol. 2, p. 125 (and photo of Obelisk on page facing); Wikipedia.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Sculptor and painter, born in Ludlow, Shropshire. Dissuaded by his father from becoming an artist, he followed his father’s profession, training as a veterinary surgeon and qualifying at the Royal Veterinary College in 1866. In 1867, he was gazetted to the Royal Horse Artillery, serving for 24 years, mostly abroad, in Ireland, India, Abyssinia, Egypt and South Africa. Jones sketched and painted in these years, but it was not until 1882 that he took up sculpture, persuaded by a new friend, the sculptor Charles Bell Birch, that, with his innate artistic sense and profound knowledge of equine anatomy, he should take up sculpture. In 1884, after some informal training with Birch, Jones achieved his first success with his showing at the RA of an equine plaster statuette, A Hunter, one of the right sort. In 1887, his bronze group, Gone Away, won first prize in the Goldsmiths’ Company’s competition (RA 1887). In 1891, he retired from the army, by which time he was living with his wife and son at 147 Church Street, Chelsea, next door to the Chelsea Arts Club, of which he became a member and, in 1906–08, chairman. In 1918, Jones was elected a member of the RBS and in 1935 awarded the society’s Gold Medal. His ambition to be elected to the RA was never to be fulfilled, despite his being nominated several times. Jones’s bitterness is clear in his Memoirs of a Soldier Artist (1933). He felt that his lack of formal training had not only led to his not being taken seriously by the art establishment, but that his detractors spread rumours that he used formally trained sculptors to ‘ghost’ his work, an accusation he devoted a large part of his autobiography to repudiating. His earliest commissions were mostly received through the influence of his military friends and the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), who greatly admired his work. His principal public commissions were war memorials – Royal Marines, 1903, The Mall, London; Gloucestershire Yeomanry, 1922, College Green, Gloucester; the Cavalry of the Empire, 1924, Hyde Park; and Peace Memorial, 1924, Uxbridge; and equestrian statues – General Sir Redvers Buller, 1905, Exeter, and the Duke of Cambridge, 1907, Whitehall. His magnum opus, however, was his Peace Quadriga, 1912, for Constitution Arch, Hyde Park Corner, his hopes for a major unveiling ceremony (and perhaps even a knighthood) dashed by the death of his great advocate, King Edward VII, in 1910. Jones died at home in Chelsea aged ninety-two.
Sources: Burns, R.S., Triumph: the life and art of Captain Adrian Jones, 2010, Almeley, Herefordshire, 2010; Crellin, C., ‘Jones, Adrian (1845–1938)’, ODNB, Oxford, 2004; Jones, A., Memoirs of a Soldier Artist, London, 1933; Mapping Sculpture; Ward-Jackson, P., Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Adrian Jones, c. 1918 (photo: public domain)
Painter, printmaker and sculptor, born at Southampton. After studying at Hornsey College of Art, 1955–59, he entered the RCA in 1959, but was expelled in the following year for ‘excessive independence’. He subsequently taught in Germany, Canada, the UK, and the USA. Jones first came to prominence in the 1960s as a Pop artist, producing work notable for its erotic content derived from mainstream and fetishist sex magazines; his best known work in this line being the group of fibreglass figures of women in bondage gear, Hatstand, Table and Chair, which provoked moral outrage at its first showing in 1970. Jones’s first international exhibition was at the 1961 Paris Biennale where he gained the Prix des Jeunes Artistes. His first solo exhibition was at Arthur Tooth and Sons, London, 1963, and his first exhibition in the USA was at the Richard Feigen Gallery, New York, 1964, since which date he has had frequent solo exhibitions worldwide. He has had retrospectives in 1978 (graphics; ICA, London, then tour); 1979 (painting; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, then tour), 1998 (print; Barbican Centre, then tour) and 2014–15 (Royal Academy). He was elected ARA in 1981 and RA in 1986. His public sculptures include Tango, 1984, Festival Gardens, Liverpool (commissioned for the Liverpool International Garden Festival); Dancers, 1987, Cotton Centre, Hays Lane, Southwark; Acrobat 1992, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital; Two to Tango, 1997, Swire Properties, Hong Kong; Dejeuner sur l’herbe, 2000, Chatsworth; Acrobat, 2001, GlaxoSmithKline, Brentford; and Head in the Wind, 2019, Greenwich Peninsula.
Sources: Buckman, D., Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; Cavanagh, T., Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997; Cavanagh, T., Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007; Lambirth, A., Allen Jones. Works, London, 2005; The Sculpture Factory; Royal Academy of Arts website; Royal Academy of Arts, Allen Jones, 2014 (exh. cat.; 13 November 2014–25 January 2015); Who’s Who (online).
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
Sculptor and teacher, born Karin Löwenadler of Swedish parents in London. In 1944 she married artist and dealer Basil Jonzen (d. 1969) and then in 1972 the Swedish poet Ake Sucksdorff (d. 1992). As a child, her comic drawings impressed her father sufficiently for him to send her to the Slade School of Fine Art (1933–36). She won both the painting and sculpture prizes and in 1936 was awarded a scholarship for a fourth year, which she spent at the City and Guilds of London Art School, Kennington. In 1939 she was at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, and in the same year won the Prix de Rome, although the Second World War – in which she served as an ambulance driver – prevented her from going to Italy. She was invalided out with rheumatic fever and during her recuperation became convinced that modernism – which she believed ‘did violence to the human form’ – was not the way forward, subsequently adopting a classicising style. Jonzen was both a fellow of the Royal Society of British Artists and FRBS (RBS silver medal 1983). She had a solo exhibition at the Fieldbourne Galleries, 1974, exhibited at the RA from 1944, and also showed in various group and mixed exhibitions. Examples of her work are in the National Portrait Gallery; V&A Museum; and the Bradford, Brighton, Glasgow and Southend art galleries. Public commissions include Ascension, 1956, Selwyn College, Cambridge; and The Gardener, 1971, Brewer’s Hall Garden; Beyond Tomorrow, 1972, Guildhall Piazza; and Bust of Samuel Pepys, 1983, Seething Lane Garden, all City of London. Jonzen and her first husband set up a short-lived, but highly successful, gallery in the house they purchased in South Bolton Gardens, Kensington, after the war. In her later years, Jonzen purchased a studio in Gunter Grove, Chelsea, in which she lived and worked for the remainder of her life.
Sources: Buckman, D., Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; The Independent, 2 February 1998, p. 16; Karin Jonzen Sculptor (intro. by Carel Weight CBE, RA), London, 1976; Mapping Sculpture; The Times, 31 January 1998, p. 25; Who Was Who.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022
#/media/File:Dancers_by_Allen_Jones,_Hay's_Galleria_in_March_2011_01.jpg){kind=link}