Ferdinand Victor Blundstone (1882–1951)

Sculptor. Born in Switzerland of English and French parents, he first studied art at Ashton-under-Lyne (Lancashire; now Greater Manchester). He drew animals at Manchester Zoo. A cast he made of a dead lion brought him to the attention of the painter Herbert Dicksee, who helped further his career in art. Blundstone moved to London, and attended first the South London Technical Art School, and then, from January 1904 to January 1909, the Royal Academy Schools, where he was awarded one-year Landseer Scholarships for sculpture in both 1904 and 1907, plus, in the latter year, a gold medal and travelling studentship of £200, enabling him to visit Egypt, Greece and Italy. In 1912, he was commissioned to provide the bronze sculptures for the Titanic Engineers Memorial, Southampton, Hampshire (unveiled 1914). After the First World War, Blundstone received commissions for war memorials for Stalybridge, Lancashire (1921); for the Prudential Assurance Company’s London office (1922); and for Folkestone, Kent (1922). In 1919 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors; when the Society divided its membership into Associates and Fellows in 1923, he was elected an Associate, becoming a Fellow in 1926.  In the 1920s he assisted Gilbert Bayes in the Modelling Department of the Sir John Cass School, London. As with Bayes, Blundstone’s work in the interwar period took on a pronounced déco quality, especially in small domestic bronzes, but the same quality can be detected in his Memorial to Samuel Plimsoll on the Victoria Embankment, London (1929). At the end of his life, Blundstone sculpted a Wendy Memorial, a counterpart to Sir George Frampton‘s Peter Pan, for Hawera in New Zealand. Unveiled on 9 July 1951, it had been incomplete at the time of the sculptor’s death earlier that year on 5 January, and some final touches had to be given to it by Gilbert Bayes before it was despatched.

Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; Mapping Sculpture; Royal Academy of Arts website: ‘Ferdinand Victor Blundstone (b. 1882)’; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 194–96, 451; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 359–61, 437; Who Was Who (online edn), 2007; T. Wyke, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, Liverpool, 2004, pp. xiv, 353, 376–77, 438–39; A. Yockney, ‘Modern British Sculptors: Some Younger Men’, Studio, 1916, Vol. 67, p. 26.

Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised Terry Cavanagh, October 2024