Sculptor born in Southampton, Hampshire, the third son of Thomas Boyes, a boilermaker, and his wife, Lydia. In 1902, he was awarded a free studentship by the Board of Education to study at Southampton School of Art for two years. He afterwards attended the Royal College of Art, his contribution to an exercise in composition, a decorative panel entitled Music, appearing in the Art & Crafts Magazine, 1904. In the following year, Boyes was one of four students selected by Edouard Lantéri to work on figures for Aston Webb’s new façade for the Victoria and Albert Museum, Boyes being allotted Lord Leighton. About this time, he moved to Aberdeen to take up a teaching post at Gray’s School of Art. While in Aberdeen, he was commissioned to design and produce the leopard finials and a bronze relief of personifications of trades, finance, fishing, shipbuilding, engineering and agriculture for the city’s Union Bridge (1905–08). He showed at the Aberdeen Artists’ Society’s Exhibition of Works of Modern Artists in 1906 and 1908 and the Royal Scottish Academy in 1907. By 1910, he was back in London, initially working from 7 Wentworth Studios, Manresa Road, Chelsea. From this year until 1931, he showed 11 works – busts and statuettes – at the Royal Academy. His 1915 exhibit was a marble portrait bust of his four-year-old son, Marcus. Boyes was a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors (RBS) from 1908 and, at the RBS’s division into Associates and Fellows, was elected an Associate; he resigned in 1928. From 1916 to 1926 he taught modelling at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. In 1920, Boyes successfully nominated his fellow teacher at the Central School, the sculptor Onslow Ernest Whiting (1872–1937), for membership of the RBS; Whiting, in turn, submitted a bronze portrait bust of Boyes as his contribution to the 1924 Royal Academy annual exhibition.
Note: All records through to the 1920s give the sculptor’s full name as Sidney Boyes. However, in the catalogue for his final showing at the Royal Academy in 1931 and in the 1939 England and Wales Register he is listed as Sidney T. Boyes. His entry in the National Probate Calendar begins ‘Boyes Sidney otherwise Sidney Thomas …’.
Ancestry website sources: England and Wales Civil Registration Birth Index, 1878, Q3; England censuses: 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911, 1921; England and Wales Register 1939; National Probate Calendar, 1954
Bibliography: Arts & Crafts Magazine, 1904 (‘Exhibition of Students’ Work at the Royal College of Art. Part 2. Awards’); The Builder, 25 October 1902, p. 377 (‘Board of Education, South Kensington’); T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, p. 168; Mapping Sculpture; J. Physick, The Victoria and Albert Museum: The History of its Building, London, 1982, pp. 229, 230.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022; revised and corrected, November 2025
