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Public Statues and Sculpture Association

Thomas Bennier, Beniere or Besnier (c. 1663–1693)

Sculptor. Born in England of French parents, he lived and worked near Fleet Ditch in London. He worked on a small scale in marble, and, according to the chronicler, George Vertue, would ‘cutt in Marble from the Life a Portrait for 2 guineas’. Vertue also records that he worked on the wax figures exhibited by a Mr Salmon, and that he assisted in the casting of Grinling Gibbons’s statue of James II, Trafalgar Square (1686).

Bibliography: I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, p. 104; G. Vertue, ‘Notebooks’, Vol. 1, The Walpole Society, XVIII, 1929–30, p. 89; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 291, 436.

Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011