Sculptor born in London. He began as a potter, studying under the Malaysian potter Poh Chap Yeap and selling his own work, 1976–78, in London and Europe. Sabin subsequently studied sculpture at Chelsea College of Art, 1979–83, returning to teach, 1997–2006. He made his first installation in 1990 for the Chisenhale Gallery, London. His work in the public realm includes several commissions in which he was lead artist: History Wall, Whitstable, Kent (part of the Horsebridge Development, 2001–03); Square Bridge, Round Bridge and Viewing Platform, Ravensbury Park, Merton, London (part of the Wandle Trail art programme, 2002–05); and The Calibrated Ramp, part of the ‘Art changes Bracknell’ programme, for Bracknell, Berkshire (2003–06). Between 2006 and 2010 he was working on The Coldstones Cut at Nidderdale, Yorkshire Dales, which won the PMSA Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture in 2011. His Painting and Sculpture, 2013, was commissioned to mark the former site of Chelsea College of Art in Manresa Road, Chelsea, now Henry Moore Court. Sabin has exhibited widely, both in solo and group exhibitions. He lives and works with his wife, the sculptor Laura Ford, and their three children.
Sources: Andrew Sabin website; The Coldstones Cut; Wikiwand.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Andrew Sabin, 2016 (photo: © A.K.Purkiss)
Sculptor, letterer and teacher. He studied at the City and Guilds of London Art School, Kennington, and, for 20 years, taught lettering on its architectural carving course. Before setting up his own workshop in 1992, he served an apprenticeship with Richard Kindersley and worked as an assistant to Ralph Beyer and Sally Bower. His favoured materials are Cornish Delabole and Cumbrian green slates. He has received commissions both in the UK and in Karachi, Johannesburg and Moscow. Salisbury is listed on the Lettering Arts Trust register.
Sources: information from the artist; The Lettering Arts Trust.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Collaborative artists, best known for their anthropomorphic creations, ‘Dogman’ and ‘Rabbitwoman’. Neither had any formal training in painting or sculpture, although Australian-born Marc Schattner studied graphic design at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. The couple met in Hong Kong in 1990 and married the same year. They moved to Sydney in 1999 and by 2006 had decided to work collaboratively, henceforth signing their works ‘Gillie and Marc’. Their first collaborative work, a painting, He’ll never be famous but he doesn’t give a damn, he’s a musician, featuring the first of their man-dog hybrids, won first prize in the 2009 Chianciano Biennale in Tuscany; Bondi Coffee Dog, a sculpture in fibreglass was included in the same year’s Florence Biennale. Dedicated conservationists, in 2016, the Schattners submitted a sculpture, Buried Rhino, to the ‘Sculpture by the Sea’ exhibition on Bondi Beach; intended to raise awareness of the species’ impending extinction, it won them the Allen’s People’s Choice and Kid’s Choice awards. This was followed in 2018 with the installation in Astor Place, New York, of what the couple trumpeted as the ‘world’s largest rhino sculpture’, The Last Three. Featuring life-size sculptures of three Northern White Rhinoceroses balanced acrobatically one on top of the other, it was, like Buried Rhino, a popular success. Inevitably, the art world viewed such productions differently, New York magazine’s senior art critic Jerry Saltz, for example, writing off The Last Three as ‘a kitschy monstrosity’. Sculptures by the Schattners in the UK include Rabbitwoman and Dogman Drinking Coffee, 2017, Bishop’s Square, and Tandem Lovers, 2020, Reuters Plaza, Canary Wharf, both Tower Hamlets; and The Friendship Bench, 2020, Halkin Arcade, Westminster.
Sources: ‘Gillie and Marc Schattner’, Art Nomad; Gillie and Marc (sculptors’ website); Small, Z., ‘How Paparazzi Dogs and Rabbitgirl Conquered New York City Streets’, New York Times, 3 January 2019; ‘Gillie and Marc’, Wikipedia.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Gillie and Marc Schattner with their dog, Idie, 2017 (photo:Gillieandmarcart, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons).
Fine art foundry based in Basingstoke, Hampshire. Public sculptures include Mark Jackson, Memorial to the Irish Guards, 2011, Windsor; Charlie Langton, Yeats (racehorse), 2011, Ascot Racecourse; Mark Bibby, Memorial to the Sikh Soldiers of the Great War, 2015, National Memorial Arboretum, Staffordshire; and David Williams-Ellis, sculpture for The Normandy Memorial, 2019, Ver-sur-Mer, north-western France.
Sources: Sculpture Castings website; ‘Find and update company information’, GOV.UK.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
The most prominent member of a family of sculptors, stonemasons, modellers and plasterers. His grandfather, John Seale, a mason and builder of Bradford, Wiltshire, had two sons, John Wesley Seale (1825–1885), who by 1857 had relocated the family’s architectural sculpture business to south London, and John Whitfield Seale (c.1835–1900), who by 1871 had similarly moved to south London but seems to have worked outside the family firm. Gilbert presumably trained with his father and by 1887 the firm was listed as ‘Gilbert Seale (late J.W. Seale & Son)’. One of Gilbert’s own sons, John Hector Seale (1884–1949), later joined the firm which, from 1910 operated as Gilbert Seale & Son. For at least twenty-five years Seale’s firm enjoyed a continuous succession of important contracts from some of the leading architects of the day. E.W. Mountford engaged him to work on Battersea Polytechnic Institute, 1890–93 (interior decorative plasterwork); Battersea Town Hall, 1892–92 (exterior decorative carving); St Olave’s Grammar School, Bermondsey, 1893–96 (interior plasterwork); and Central Criminal Court, Old Bailey, 1900–07 (plasterwork and sundry carving). A section of Seale’s plaster ceiling panels for R.W. Edis’s rebuilding of Cheveley Park, Cambs, 1896–98 (demolished 1925) was illustrated in The Builder, 30 May 1896, p. 468. By 1900, a rare privilege for an architectural sculptor, Seale was allowed to sign below his work, usually to the right of the architect’s name on the building’s frontage. Examples include the cupids seated on the entrance arches of H. Huntley Gordon’s St Bartholomew House, Fleet Street, 1900, and Reginald Morphew’s Marlborough Chambers, 70–72 Jermyn Street, 1903; one of the pair of carved escutcheons on W.E. Riley’s screen wall, Buckingham Palace Road, 1905, for Victoria Railway Station; and the merfolk framing the corner window of J.S. Gibson, Skipwith & Gordon’s No 41 Kingsway, London, 1910 (this last signed ‘Gilbert Seale & Son’). In 1925, the firm published a book showcasing its work entitled Architectural Decoration. Gilbert Seale seems to have retired by this date as the names beneath the company name are J. Hector Seale and his younger brother, (Arthur) Barney Seale (1896–1957) who would go on to establish himself as an independent sculptor and painter. The firm continued to trade as G. Seale & Son and was finally dissolved in 1949.
Sources: Builder: (i) 30 May 1896, pp. 468, 469; (ii) 4 March 1899, p. 230; Cavanagh, T., Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007; Gray, A.S., Edwardian Architecture, London, 1985, p. 324; Lloyd, F., et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011; Mapping Sculpture: Seale, John Wesley; Seale, George Whitfield; Seale,(John Hugh) Gilbert; Seale, John Hector; Seale, (Arthur) Barney; Merritt, D., et al, Public Sculpture of Bristol, Liverpool, 2011; Seale (Gilbert) & Son, Architectural Decoration [London, 1925] (RIBA Library); Ward-Jackson, P., Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Architect and designer whose style is characterised by Gothic Revival forms with Arts and Crafts detail. He was born at Eton, Berkshire. In 1858, he joined his elder brother, Edmund (1836–1868), in the office of G.E. Street, alongside William Morris, Philip Webb and Richard Norman Shaw. After leaving Street’s practice, Sedding began designing for embroidery, wallpaper and metalwork. In 1865, he joined his brother’s practice in Penzance but in 1868, following his brother’s death, relocated to Bristol. Sedding’s most important work from these years was St Martin’s Church, Low Marple, Cheshire (1869–70), which incorporated stained glass by the Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co designers Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones and William Holman Hunt. Sedding’s first major commission was St Clement’s Church, Boscombe, Bournemouth (1871–73). Here, Sedding also designed many of the principal furnishings, bringing in F.W. Pomeroy to execute the Crucifixion in the window over the west door. In 1874, Sedding relocated to London and in the same year was elected FRIBA. He joined the committee of the Art Workers’ Guild at its founding in 1884 and, 1886–87, was its second Master. His pupils included the metalworker and jeweller John Paul Cooper, the furniture designers Ernest Barnsley and Ernest Gimson, and the ceramicist Alfred Powell. His chief assistant, who completed many of his projects, was Henry Wilson (1864–1934). A devout Anglican, Sedding was, from 1878, a sidesman and later churchwarden at St Alban the Martyr, Holborn. Following his death, Wilson designed, and Pomeroy executed a memorial for the church to Sedding and his wife (who had died, possibly from grief, a few days after her husband); the memorial was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War. Pomeroy’s memorial to Sedding the architect survives in Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, Chelsea, his final work.
Sources: Oxford Art Online – Grove Art Online; Seccombe, T., ‘Sedding, John Dando (1838–1891)’, rev. D. Findlay, ODNB, Oxford, 2004.
John Dando Sedding, 1882, postcard, Hayman Seleg Mendelssohn
(photo: public domain)
Architect and designer born in London. His father, Thomas Seddon, was a cabinet maker and his elder brother, also Thomas, a landscape painter. It was through his brother that John Seddon first met Ford Madox Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Following Rossetti’s death in 1882, Seddon designed his memorial drinking fountain in Chelsea Embankment Gardens in front of his friend’s former home, 16 Cheyne Walk, while Madox Brown modelled the portrait bust which formed its centre-piece. Seddon had been articled to the neo-classical architect, T.L. Donaldson, but his formative influence was reading Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture. Seddon’s conviction thereafter was that Gothic was the only true Christian art, ‘most scientific and beautiful, and most in accordance with common sense’. Although principally an ecclesiastical architect, he was responsible for some significant secular designs, for example, University College, Aberystwyth (1864–86). One of Seddon’s most important ecclesiastical restoration projects (in partnership with John Prichard) was for Llandaff Cathedral, for which he persuaded the diocese to commission a triptych from Rossetti (1855–64). Of his independent designs, the most notable is perhaps the church of St Catherine, Hoarwithy, Herefordshire (begun mid-1870s), described in the ‘Buildings of England’ as ‘the most impressive Victorian church in the county’. Seddon also designed stained glass and furniture. In 1861, he designed an architect’s desk (King René’s Honeymoon Cabinet), which he got his father’s company, Seddon & Sons, to make, and Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co’s artists to paint – Madox Brown, Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and Val Prinsep painting the figurative subjects for its ten panels, William Morris their decorative backgrounds. It was shown at the 1862 International Exhibition, South Kensington, and is now in the V&A Museum (no. W.10:1 to 28-1927).
Sources: Blackshaw, T.R., ‘Seddon, John Pollard (1827–1906)’, ODNB, Oxford, 2004; Brooks, A., and N. Pevsner, Herefordshire (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, 2012, p. 363.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Sculptor and painter educated at Balliol College, Oxford; RBS member. Best known for site-specific, large-scale sculptures, frequently in the form of suspended mobiles, usually in main entrances or atrium spaces of modern buildings in Europe, USA and Asia. He works in steel, bronze, aluminium, fabric and glass.
Source: Lincoln Seligman website.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Born in Dublin, he was a son of Simpson Sheppard, a monumental stone carver, and a younger brother of the sculptor Oliver Sheppard. Reuben Sheppard studied at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, 1889–94. In 1895, he exhibited a model of a candelabrum in the first exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland. In the same year, he submitted a design for a drinking fountain in the national competition run by the Department of Science and Art, South Kensington, and was awarded a silver medal, earning him a place at the National Art Training School (later RCA) where he studied, 1895–97, under Edouard Lantéri. His training under Lantéri led to his only public sculpture commission, the high-relief figures of William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds on Aston Webb’s V&A Museum façade. Sheppard worked as an assistant to Thomas Brock and in 1906 Brock successfully nominated Sheppard for membership of the RBS. Sheppard showed 10 sculptures at the RA between 1906 and 1914, but in this latter year, for reasons that are unclear, his career as a sculptor came to an end. For a while he earned his living as a salesman, but in 1921 lost his job and was reduced to living in a hostel at King’s Cross, subsisting on financial assistance from his brothers, Oliver and John (a physician). He eventually found employment with the bankers, N.M. Rothschild and Sons, remaining with them until his retirement on a pension in 1944.
Sources: Carpenter, A., and P. Murphy (eds), Art and Architecture of Ireland, Vol III: Sculpture 1600–2000, Dublin, 2015, pp. 316–17; Mapping Sculpture; Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Sculptor and engraver. He was born in London and developed early on a talent for draughtsmanship, the silver medal he won in 1812 from the Society of Arts encouraging him to train as an engraver, firstly under John Young and then Edward Scriven. In 1818 he entered the RA Schools and produced a large number of stipple engravings after a wide variety of artists ranging from Hans Holbein to William Etty. It was simply a desire to improve his knowledge of anatomy that led him to study under Joshua Brookes, the anatomical lecturer, and to learn to model in clay, but this resulted in his giving up engraving in about 1823 and turning to sculpture full time. His talent for seizing a likeness earned him a great many commissions for portraits. His busts include the Lord Chancellor, 1st Earl Eldon (1824); Sir Thomas Lawrence (1830, Soane Museum, London); Albert, Prince Consort (1842, Royal Collection); and Frederick William IV, King of Prussia (untraced). Memorial statues include Edward Jenner (1825, Gloucester Cathedral) and 3rd Earl Harcourt (1832, St Michael, Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire). Among his few ideal subjects is Musidora 1830, now National Museum of Wales, Cardiff. Sievier exhibited at the RA 1822–44, at the British Institution 1825–31, and at the Society of British Artists 1829–43. He became a director of the General Cemetery Company, Kensal Green Cemetery, in 1832, designing not only his own family monument (1830s), but also one to the quack doctor, John St John Long (d. 1834). In 1841 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and by 1845 had given up sculpture to pursue his lifelong interest in scientific matters and to manage a rubber works in Holloway, north London.
Sources: Greenwood, M., ‘Sievier, Robert William (1794–1865)’, ODNB, Oxford, 2004; Roscoe, I., et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Portuguese sculptor whose suffix ‘Sobrinho’ (i.e. ‘nephew’) is applied to distinguish him from his namesake uncle (1844–1926), also a sculptor. Simões de Almeida attended the Lisbon School of Fine Arts from 1893 on the general design course and then, from 1897, the statuary sculpture course, where he was taught by his uncle. In 1904, he was awarded a scholarship to study in Paris for three years; here, he studied with Raoul Verlét and Jean-Paul Laurens. In 1915, he was appointed professor of sculptor at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts in succession to his uncle. One of his earliest commissions was the statue of Bento de Góis, for the island of São Miguel (inaugurated 1906; removed 1963). Important works include the Bust of the Republic (marble, 1908), Museu da Presidência da República, Lisbon; the pedimental relief for the São Bento Palace, Lisbon; and the memorial to the dead of the Great War, 1924, Cascais. A bronze statue of Prince Henry the Navigator by Simões de Almeida was unveiled in 2002 in Belgrave Square, London.
Sources: José Simões de Almeida (Sobrinho); ‘Biografia de José Simões de Almeida (Sobrinho)’, Museo Centro Arts; Wikipedia.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
José Simões de Almeida (sobrinho) (photo:Biblioteca Municipal de Figueiró dos Vinhos from Portugal, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons ).
Foundry established by John Webb Singer (1819–1904) of Frome, Somerset. Singer began as a watchmaker and jeweller, setting up Frome Art Metalworks in 1848, specialising in church furnishings, and soon gaining a national reputation. In 1888, with encouragement from three of the leading British sculptors of the day, William Hamo Thornycroft, Edward Onslow Ford and Alfred Drury, Singer extended his premises on the outskirts of Frome to incorporate a statue foundry, providing facilities not only for traditional sand casting, but also the recently re-introduced lost wax process. Unsurprisingly, each of the above sculptors soon provided Singer with valuable commissions, Thornycroft in c.1889 with a copy of his London Statue of General Gordon, for Melbourne, Australia; Onslow Ford with his General Gordon on a Camel, 1889, for Chatham, Kent, and Drury with his Statue of Joseph Priestly, 1899, for Leeds. Such high quality results ensured that the foundry quickly became one of the leading fine art bronze foundries in Britain. In 1899, Singer and Sons was made into a private limited liability company and J.W. Singer passed control to his sons, Walter Herbert and Edgar Ratcliffe Singer. The foundry continued to flourish into the 1920s when increased competition and its own relatively remote location forced it into an amalgamation with the Lambeth-based Morris Art Bronze Foundry, creating the new firm Morris Singer.
Sources: Beattie, S., The New Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1983; James, D. S, A Century of Statues. The history of the Morris Singer Foundry, Basingstoke, Hants, 1984; NPG British Bronze Sculpture Founders.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
John Webb Singer (photo: CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Art metalworker in the Gothic Revival style, born in Birmingham, the son of a silversmith. In 1822, the family moved to Coventry. Skidmore served a seven-year apprenticeship with his father, learning metalworking and jewel setting. He became a partner in Francis Skidmore and son, and in 1851 showed some church plate at the Great Exhibition (one example, a silver gilt and enamelled chalice, is now at the V&A, mus. no. 1329-1852). In 1852, Skidmore’s expertise was acknowledged by his election to the Oxford Architectural Society. At about the same date, he began a long and close working relationship with George Gilbert Scott, manufacturing, for example, choir screens to the architect’s designs in Lichfield, Worcester, Salisbury and Hereford cathedrals. The first two remain in situ;the chancel gates and surmounting cross of the Salisbury screen and the whole of the Hereford screen are now in the V&A (mus. nos. M.4-1979, M.5-2015, and M.251:1-1984 respectively). The Hereford screen, shown at the 1862 International Exhibition, was awarded a prize for ‘progress, elegance of design, and for excellent workmanship’ (Morning Post, 12 July 1862, p. 7); the Illustrated London News (30 August 1862, pp. 244–46) heralded it as ‘the most noble work of modern times … a monument of the surpassing skill of our land and our age’ and devoted two pages to its illustration. Naturally, it was to Skidmore that Scott turned for most of the metalwork on the Albert Memorial (completed 1872). Despite his high reputation, he outlived the fashion for the Gothic Revival style and died in much reduced circumstances. He was survived by his wife, Emma, and their four children. With the restoration in the 1990s of the Albert Memorial and the installation of the restored Hereford screen in the V&A, Skidmore’s reputation revived. In 2000, a memorial plaque was unveiled marking the site of his factory at Alma Street, Hillfields, Coventry.
Sources: Mapping Sculpture; Whyte, W., ‘Skidmore, Francis Alfred (1817–1896)’, ODNB, Oxford, 2013; Wikipedia.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Francis Alfred Skidmore, 1896 (photo: CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons).
Architect born in London, the fifth son of the painter Robert Smirke RA (1753–1845) and the younger brother of England’s leading Greek Revival architect Sir Robert Smirke RA (1780–1867), whose pupil he initially was. Sydney Smirke entered the RA Schools in 1817, winning the Silver Medal in 1817 and the Gold Medal in 1819. In the following year, he visited Sicily and mainland Italy, sketching and measuring classical architecture. In 1828, he was appointed Clerk of the King’s Works at St James’s Palace. He succeeded to many of his brother’s positions: in 1841, to the surveyorship of the Inner Temple, and in 1846, on his brother’s retirement, to the surveyorships of the Duchy of Lancaster, the British Museum and the General Post Office. His first major commission was the reconstruction of the Pantheon, Oxford Street (1833–34; demolished), and his most celebrated design the round reading room of the British Museum (1854–57), inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. He was elected ARA in 1847 and RA in 1859, was the RA Schools professor of architecture, 1860–65, and RA treasurer 1861–1874 (his last major commission was for a range of exhibition galleries for Burlington House, 1866–70). He was a fellow of the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, and the RIBA and, in 1852, founded the Architects’ Benevolent Society (serving as president until his death).
Sources: Reidy, D.V., ‘Smirke, Sydney (1798–1877)’, ODNB, Oxford, 2004; Royal Academy of Arts website; The Times, 12 December 1877, p. 11 (obit.).
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Sydney Smirke,1860s carte-de-visite by John and Charles Watkins (photo:John & Charles Watkins, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons).
Sculptor and designer, born in south Wales. He studied at West Surrey College of Art and Design, where he graduated with honours in three-dimensional design specialising in metals, and the RCA, where he gained a master’s degree in the metalwork department. In the mid-1980s, after attending research courses in Germany, France and Iran, Smith began designing street furniture and exhibiting both in Britain and abroad. In the late 1990s, he was commissioned to design a Sculptural Canopy to go atop the NGC Cable Joint Building, Canal Way, Kensington. Part of an urban improvement scheme, the building beneath it very quickly succumbed again to the graffiti which had so blighted the area before its refurbishment. Smith’s brightly coloured 15-metre-high, Lollipop Be-Bop, inaugurated 2001, in front of the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children, fared rather better, although its interior lighting, originally controlled by a console that the children could use on the hospital’s third floor, was not maintained and is now inoperative. Nevertheless, the sculptor believes that it still manages to convey the ‘sense of friendliness and welcome’ that he intended.
Sources: Art and the Public Realm Bristol; Buckman, D., Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; Merritt, D., et al, Public Sculpture of Bristol, Liverpool, 2011.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Sculptor born in Glasgow, now based in Amsterdam. He first attended Winchester College, before going on to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to study zoology, specialising in animal behaviour and evolution. Having learnt to sculpt at school, he further developed his skills as a sculptor in his spare time from his university studies, casting and exhibiting limited edition bronze sculptures. After graduating in 2005, he set up his own studio in Cambridge and began sculpting full-time. In 2009–10, he took part in an eight-month circumnavigation voyage aboard a three-masted clipper, working as ship’s artist and photographer for a Dutch-Flemish television documentary series, Beagle: In het kielzog van Darwin (‘Beagle: In Darwin’s wake’), retracing the route described by Darwin in his Voyage of the Beagle (published 1839). In 2012, Smith was awarded a Shackleton Scholarship to visit the Falkland Islands as artist-in-residence; and this was followed, in 2013, by two months on South George, again as artist-in-residence, this time at the invitation of the South Georgia Heritage Trust. Smith is now based in Amsterdam. His first major commission was for a portrait bust of Carl Linnaeus for the Linnean Society of London (2007). His statue of the young Charles Darwin was unveiled by the Duke of Edinburgh at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 2009 (shortlisted for the PMSA Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture) and his statue of Alfred Russel Wallace was unveiled by Sir David Attenborough in the Natural History Museum in 2013. Smith is an ARBS and a fellow of the Linnean Society.
Sources: Anthony Smith website; ‘Anthony Smith (sculptor)’, Wikipedia; ‘Beagle: In Darwin’s Wake’, Wikipedia; ‘Sculptor in Residence’, South Georgia Newsletter, September 2013.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Anthony Smith with his Elephant’s Trunk bronze, December 2020 (photo: Fortheloveofknowledge, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
A sculptor in slate, born in West Yorkshire, he learnt how to build drystone walls at the age of 11. From the age of 19, he began earning his living building functional drystone walls, but after noticing the increasing use of drystone walling as an art form, he decided to investigate its possibilities. Artists, he says, began to recognise ‘drystone walling as more than a means of keeping sheep out of the turnips – that it was beautiful. The art world started taking an interest in drystone walling, so I started taking an interest in art. It was a logical development in the skill.’ Since the mid-1990s he has turned his skill towards the creation of drystone sculptures, principally for gardens. Beginning with slate vases, he has expanded to include cones, spheres, obelisks, wine glasses, pears and chessmen. He collaborated with Andy Goldsworthy, 1989–93, in the UK, France, USA and Australia, a significant example of their work being Slate Hole Wall, 1990, in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh. Smith’s independent work includes Thrust and Tilted Globe, both 2001, Elphin, Highland, Scotland; Globe, 2004, in the grounds of Academy Gardens, Duchess of Bedford’s Walk, Kensington; and a trio of vases in Prince Charles’s garden at Highgrove. Recently he formed a business partnership with his daughter, Jenny, who, following a three-year apprenticeship, became a fully competent practitioner.
Sources: Joe Smith website; McKenzie, R., Public Sculpture of Edinburgh, Volume 2, Liverpool, 2018, p. 520; ‘Joe Smith’, On Form Sculpture; Sommerville, C., ‘Slate sculptures a solid foundation for garden’, 17 November 2013, The Scotsman.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Sculptor and stone carver based in London. His work includes both the restoration of existing works and the design of original sculptures; his range includes statues, architectural decoration and memorial headstones. After serving an apprenticeship as a stonemason at Woburn Abbey, he went on to study stone carving and sculpture at the City & Guilds of London Art School. In 2006, he was elected a member of both the RBS and the Master Carvers Association. His public sculptures include Portland stone replicas of Michael Rysbrack’s marble statue of Hans Sloane, in Duke of York Square, King’s Road, Chelsea (2007; commissioned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea), and Chelsea Physic Garden (2014; commissioned by Lord Cadogan); stone gargoyles and decorative foliage for Westminster Abbey’s chapter house (2010; commissioned by Nimbus Conservation Ltd); a statue of Kitty Wilkinson for St George’s Hall, Liverpool (Carrara marble, 2012; commissioned by Liverpool City Council – the first statue of a woman to be placed in one of the niches of the great hall); a war memorial, A Promise Honoured, Castle Yard, Winchester (Portland stone, 2014; commissioned by the ‘To Honour a Promise Project Group’ in remembrance of the American soldiers billeted around Winchester during the First World War – shortlisted for the PMSA Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture); and Bacchante, Sissinghurst Castle Garden (Carrara marble, 2016; commissioned by the National Trust).
Sources: Simon Smith website; ‘Kitty Wilkinson Statue Unveiled’, 19 September 2012, Liverpool Express.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Art metal workers based at 183 Princess Street, Manchester. In a classified advertisement in The British Architect (25 May 1888, supplement, p. i), the firm, previously known as Freeman and Collier, lists its range of activities as ‘Gates, Railings, Balustrades, Lamps, Gas and Electrical Fittings; Iron, Brass, and Bronze Founders’. The same magazine (26 October 1888, p. 306) announced that in February 1889, the owner, Arthur Standring, was scheduled to present a paper to the Manchester Architectural Association entitled ‘The Treatment and Manipulation of Metal in Art Metal Work’. In the mid-1880s, the firm cast the subscribers and promoters plaque for the Memorial Fountain to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Chelsea Embankment Gardens.
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Sculptor and medallist, born in Chester. He studied under Lantéri at the RCA, 1900–05 (winning a travelling scholarship in sculpture) and was one of the advanced students selected by Lantéri to carve a relief figure, of John Everett Millais, on the Cromwell Road façade of Aston Webb’s V&A Museum extension in 1905. He attended the RA Schools, 1906–09, winning a Landseer Scholarship in his first year. He was modelling master at the Regent Street Polytechnic, 1911–14, and was ARBS, 1923–26, and FRBS from 1926 until his death. He exhibited regularly at the RA (32 works), and also at the Paris Salon and the International Society. The signature he frequently applied to his works, ‘Myrander’, is a conflation of his wife’s first name (Myra) and his own middle name. In 1930 he produced two Kneeling Triton Lamp-standards in bronze for the Royal London Mutual Assurance building (Triton Court), Islington. Stevenson’s Times obituarist considered him at his best in portrait busts, notably that of Sir Frederic Kenyon, 1931 (British Museum). Other busts include King George V in naval uniform, 1914 (acquired by the sitter and now in the Royal Collection) and Sir Ernest Shackleton. His bronze bust of a Roman emperor entitled Imperator (1915) is in the Tate. He was commissioned to produce a number of war memorials including those to Major General C.W. Park, 1919, and to the Devonshire Regiment, 1921, both Exeter Cathedral; the parish memorial in St Mary’s Church, Bedfont, Middlesex, 1920; the Dingwall Memorial, Ross and Cromarty, Scotland, 1922; and the Askari Monument, 1927, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Sources: Mapping Sculpture; Royal Academy of Arts website; The Times, 6 October 1937, p. 16 (obit.).
T. Cavanagh November 2022
Painter and sculptor born at Brentford, Middlesex. Swan entered the RA Schools as a painter in 1872, but relocated to Paris in 1874 to continue his training at the École des Beaux-Arts under Jean-Léon Gérôme. Gérôme introduced Swan to the animalier sculptor, Emmanuel Frémiet, and the two studied together in the Jardin des Plantes. In Paris, he also admired the animalier sculpture of Antoine-Louis Barye and Auguste-Nicolas Cain. Swan returned to England in 1879, continuing to study live animals, now at the Regent’s Park Zoo. Although the primary focus of his painting and sculpture was wild animals, he also studied the human form, both in Paris under the anatomist Mathias-Marie Duval, and in London at St Thomas’ and St Bartholomew’s hospitals. Most of Swan’s works are in museums and private collections, an exception being the eight bronze lions (1907) he contributed to the memorial to Cecil Rhodes at Groote Schuur, Cape Town, South Africa. His Boy and Bear Cubs (1901), although part of the Tate collection, is on long-term loan to Holland Park. He was elected a member of the AWG in 1887 (then described as a painter), and ARA in 1894 and RA in 1905. He won first-class gold medals (in painting and in sculpture) at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Although little known today, Swan’s obituarist in The Times wrote of him: ‘It would scarcely be possible to name an English artist whose death would be more keenly felt among those working in a modern spirit, whether at home or abroad; and indeed it may be said that in France, Germany, and America Mr. Swan was probably more admired and more highly estimated than any of his English contemporaries’.
Sources: Armstrong, A., ‘Swan, John Macallan (1847–1910)’, rev. J. Melville, ODNB, Oxford, 2004; Baldry, A. L., ‘The work of J. M. Swan ARA’, The Studio, 22 (1901), pp. 74–80, 150–61; Beattie, S., The New Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1983; Mapping Sculpture; The Times, 16 February 1910, p. 10 (obit.).
T. Cavanagh November 2022
John Macallan Swan, before 1876, albumen print,coll. Royal Academy of Arts (photo:Elliott & Fry, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Designer, sculptor and painter born in New Malton, Yorkshire. He started out as an apprentice to an engraver in Sheffield and in 1843 was one of the first students to enrol at the Sheffield School of Design, a regional training institution recently opened by the Government’s Department of Art and Science. In 1850, the headmaster, Young Mitchell, persuaded Alfred Stevens (whose pupil he had been) to come to Sheffield to teach and to work as a designer with Hoole & Co. Sykes took the opportunity this afforded to work three-days-a-week as Stevens’s unpaid assistant at the firm, Stevens’s techniques and style exerting the single most important influence on his approach and working methods. In 1854, Sykes was commissioned to design a 60-foot-long frieze for the Sheffield Mechanics’ Institute (now in Sheffield City Art Galleries). In 1857, he was appointed assistant headmaster, but in October 1859 accepted Henry Cole’s invitation to relocate to London to work as principal decorative artist on the Horticultural Society’s new buildings and on the adjacent South Kensington Museum buildings; Sykes shortly afterwards engaged three of his fellow students as his assistants, William Ellis, James Gamble and Reuben Townroe. Cole, keen to enrich his principal designer’s artistic education, took him to France and Italy in 1861 (Sykes’s sketches from the journey are now in the V&A). Sykes’s health seems always to have been fragile and in early 1866 at the age of 41, he died of pulmonary oedema reputedly exacerbated by overwork. He left a rich store of sketches and designs which his assistants continued to use for the decoration of the museum buildings over the ensuing years. Sykes’s main work outside the South Kensington Museum was his design for the Monument to William Mulready (d. 1863), Kensal Green Cemetery, executed after Sykes’s death by Gamble and Townroe. Sykes, who had lived with his wife at 2 Rich Terrace, Old Brompton Road, was buried in Brompton Cemetery. Gamble designed both the headstone for his grave and also his monument at Weston Park, Sheffield (unveiled 1875).
Sources: Bryant, J., Designing the V&A. The museum as a work of art (1857–1909), London, 2017; Graves, S., ‘Sykes, Godfrey (1824–1866)’, ODNB, Oxford, 2004; Mapping Sculpture; Marsden, C., ‘Godfrey Sykes and his studio at the South Kensington Museum’, in M. Pye and L. Sandino (eds.), Artists Work in Museums: histories, interventions, subjectivities, Bath, 2013, pp. 48–62; Physick, J., The Victoria and Albert Museum: The History of its Building, London, 1982; V&A Museum, National Art Library: Catalogue of the special exhibition of oil paintings, water-colour drawings, architectural and other studies by the late Godfrey Sykes: at the South Kensington Museum, June 1866, HMSO (call no. VA.1866.Box.0001); Henry Cole. Diary: Typed Transcript 1859, 1861, 1866 (call nos 45.C.120, 45.C.122, 45.C.127).
T. Cavanagh November 2022
James Gamble, Godfrey Sykes, copper relief patinated to resemble bronze, detail from the Memorial Column to Sykes, Western Park, Sheffield, 1871. (Photo: Ukance, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
#/media/File:Sim%C3%B5es_de_Almeida_(sobrinho)_(4441217488).jpg){kind=link}
#/media/File:Sculptor_Anthony_Smith_with_his_'Elephant's_Trunk'_bronze_sculpture.jpg){kind=link}
