Sculptor born at Greenford, Middlesex. He wished to train as an architect, but his rather impoverished middle-class family could not afford the apprenticeship. From 1879 to 1889 he was with the architectural sculptors Farmer & Brindley of Lambeth, first as an apprentice and then as a carver in stone and wood. For them he worked on various projects including the stalls for the retrochoir of St Alban’s Cathedral (1880–02); the reredos for the high altar of St Paul’s Cathedral, London (1883–88); the Bishop Wordsworth Memorial, Lincoln Cathedral (1885–88); the Viscount Halifax Memorial, St Wilfrid’s Church, Hickleton, South Yorkshire (1885–88); the Bishop Woodford Memorial, Ely Cathedral (1886–88); and the choir stalls and organ case at St John’s Church, Hampstead (1886). In the 1881 census he described himself as a woodcarver. Meanwhile, from 1879 to 1887 he was studying both modelling and carving at the South London Technical Art School under William Silver Frith. He won medals awarded by the National Art Training School, South Kensington, in 1886 and 1888. In 1887 he entered the Royal Academy Schools, where he won four silver medals and two substantial prizes. He remained a student there until about 1893, attending classes in both life drawing and sculpture. He went to Paris in 1891 and greatly admired the French sculpture which he saw there. From 1890 to 1894 he was chief modelling assistant to William Hamo Thornycroft, whose influence is apparent in some of his later work. In 1890–92 he was working on Thornycroft’s sculpture for the Institute of Chartered Accountants building in London (figure of Justice, also panels representing Arts, Crafts, Education and Agriculture). He also assisted Thornycroft with his statues, including those of John Bright at Rochdale (1889–91), Sir Stewart Bayley at Calcutta (Kolkata) (1891–94) and Lord Granville in the Palace of Westminster (1891–96).
He exhibited his own works – a mixture of ideal sculpture and portraits – at the Royal Academy (1890–1922), as well as at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions, the Liverpool Academy, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Glasgow Institute. His bronze group Love and the Mermaid (1894–95) was bought by the Walker Art Gallery in 1896. In 1900, at the Paris International Exhibition, he received a gold medal for this work and for his plaster group, Rescued, of 1898. Queen Alexandra is said to have ordered a bronze cast of Rescued and there is a small version at Liverpool University. Glasgow City Art Gallery bought his marble, The Woman whom Thou Gavest to be with Me (1909), in 1914. Other imaginative works, many strongly influenced by the Symbolist movement of the period, include Love Flies from the Doubting Soul (1890; untraced); Love Repulsed (1893; untraced); Perseus Returning Victorious to the Gods (1894; destroyed; illus. in Clough, pp. 20, 75); and A Dream of Love (1895) (versions at Liverpool University and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery). Editions of statuettes were made from some of these sculptures.
In 1894 he became a member of the Art Workers’ Guild (retired 1936) and was appointed Lecturer in Sculpture and Modelling at the recently opened Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art (the latter section being nicknamed the ‘Art Sheds’). His referees for this post included Thornycroft, Frederic Leighton, Henry Hugh Armstead, Thomas Brock, Alfred Gilbert, Edward Onslow Ford and George Frampton. In Liverpool he shared a studio with his colleague, Robert Anning Bell. He remained very active in architectural sculpture in Liverpool, contributing two panels – Liverpool, a Municipality, Employs Labour … and Liverpool Collects Produce … – to the exterior of St George’s Hall (1895–97); figures of Commerce and Industry and spandrel reliefs of Wind and Water to the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board Building (1903–06); and an allegorical group and three figurative relief panels – influenced by the Institute of Chartered Accountants sculpture – to J.F. Doyle’s Royal Insurance Building (1896–1902). He was also responsible for a panel, Physiology and Pathology, on the Thompson Yates Building, Liverpool University (1896–97) and for two plaster reliefs, The Murmur of the Sea and Apollo with female attendants, in the Philharmonic Hotel, Liverpool (1898–1900). His masterpiece is the sculpture of the Liverpool Queen Victoria Monument (1902–06).
In 1904, he became a member of the newly established Society (Royal Society from 1911) of British Sculptors, and in 1923, at the Society’s division of its membership into Fellows and Associates, was elected a Fellow. In 1905 the Art Sheds was merged with the art school of the Liverpool Institute in Mount Street to form a new Municipal School of Art, with Allen as its Vice-Principal and Professor of Sculpture. In 1904–05 he built a studio for himself at 21 Cambridge Street near the University, but after 1905 he devoted more time to teaching than to sculpture. Probably the curriculum and examinations laid down by the Royal College of Art – to which he was committed in the new Municipal school – were very demanding, and there he had many more students than at the Art Sheds. However, he continued with his portraiture, medals and some statuettes, while also working on memorials for Samuel Smith, Sefton Park, Liverpool (1908–09); Charles W. Jones, Victoria Building, University of Liverpool (1910); and Florence Nightingale, Princes Road, Liverpool (1913), together with, from 1918, a few war memorials, notably, for the Liverpool Gas Company (Bootle, 1918), for the village of Eastham, Merseyside (1919–24) and for the University of Liverpool (1927). Allen retired to Guildford in 1927. He was by far the most important Merseyside follower of the ‘New Sculpture’ movement, although his figures were always relatively classical and conservative in style and costume.
Bibliography: S. Beattie, The New Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1985, pp. 25–26, 35, 45, 69, 79, 106, 180, 240; M. Bennett, The Art Sheds, 1894–1905 (Walker Art Gallery), Liverpool, 1981; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. xii, xiii, xvi, 36–43, 83–84, 120–22, 128–29, 154–55, 191–93, 228–29, 232–36, 251, 261–62, 263, 264; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Leicestershire and Rutland, Liverpool, 2000, pp. 150–53; M.H. Clough (ed.), C.J. Allen 1862–1956: Sculptor and Teacher, Liverpool University Art Gallery, 2003; T. Friedman et al, ‘The Alliance of Sculpture and Architecture’, Studies in the History of Sculpture, no. 3, Leeds, 1993, pp. 82–84; A.S. Gray, Edwardian Architecture: A Biographical Dictionary, London, 1985, pp. 87–88; Mapping Sculpture; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. xxii, xxv, 42, 107–09; M.H. Spielmann, British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-day, London, 1901, pp. 148–49; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. xxv, 1–2, 152, 153; T. Wyke, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, Liverpool, 2004, pp. 319, 320, 321, 322.
Emma Roberts, 2012; revised, Terry Cavanagh, September 2025
