Sculptor born in Southampton, Hampshire. 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 RCA, 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 a figure for Aston Webb’s new façade for the V&A 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 Exhibition of Works of Modern Artists in 1906 and 1908 and the RSA 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 RA. He was a member of the RBS from 1908 until his resignation in 1928 and, from 1916 to 1926, taught modelling at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.
Bibliography: ‘Exhibition of Students’ Work at the Royal College of Art. Part 2. Awards’, Arts & Crafts Magazine, 1904; 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; Royal Academy Exhibitors 1905–1970. A dictionary of artists and their work in the Summer Exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1973.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022