Sculptor born on 27 August 1781 in London, the son of James Bubb, a tobacconist with a shop in the Strand. Bubb entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1801, winning a silver medal in 1805. During these same years he worked for the short-lived partnership of J.C.F. Rossi and John Bingley, notably as a carver on their Monument to Captain Robert Faulknor in St Paul’s Cathedral (completed 1803). He showed at the Royal Academy for the first time in 1805, making intermittent appearances (a total of 10 works) up to 1831. He early on incurred the enmity of his fellow sculptors with his entry to the competition for the prestigious Monument to William Pitt the Younger for the Guildhall in 1806, dramatically undercutting their prices and, according to the diarist Joseph Farington, canvassing the commissioners, the Common Council of the Corporation of London. One of the thwarted competitors, Lawrence Gahagan, referred to him disparagingly as ‘Tobacconist Bubb’, a reference to his father’s lowly trade. Bubb completed his winning entry in 1813. Two years earlier his application for Associate membership of the Royal Academy had received no votes, a reflection of his continuing unpopularity. In c.1810, the architect Charles Busby invited Bubb (they were contemporaries at the RA Schools) to provide the sculpture for his Commercial Rooms, Corn Street, Bristol (completed 1811). In c.1818, Bubb went into partnership with his former employee, J.C.F. Rossi, producing architectural decorations in an artificial stone of their own devising (‘lithargolite’) for David Laing’s London Custom House. The endeavour proved a complete disaster, with the New Monthly Magazine (vol. 10, 1 September 1818, pp. 152–55) describing their figures as ‘entirely devoid of all that is requisite in art’ and the material in which they were modelled ‘very unpleasing’. Perhaps it was a mercy that the poorly constructed building suffered partial collapse with the loss of all its sculpture as early as 1825. The magazine seems to have been unaware of Rossi’s involvement, attributing the work only to Bubb, whom it dubbed a ‘burner of artificial stone’ rather than a sculptor, and a man ‘whose style of design is as inferior to [such men as Flaxman and Chantrey], as is the tasteless material in which he deals to the purest marble of Italy’. Also in 1818, Bubb had used the same material for his frieze for the Italian Opera House in the Haymarket; the building burnt down in 1867, but fragments of his frieze survive in private collections. Despite continuing to win commissions, in August 1820 Bubb became bankrupt and his artificial stone business was taken over by Joseph Browne (a supplier of marble, etc, and occasional architect) who employed him as a designer and modeller until c.1827. One of Bubb’s commissions during this period was to provide sculpture for the new Manchester Town Hall (1822). Bubb was one of three sculptors approached for an estimate by the architect, Francis Goodwin, who happened also to be a friend with a high opinion of the sculptor’s abilities. Bubb was required to provide an allegorical group to crown the building, two relief panels on the parapet and, in niches below, statues of Alfred the Great and Solon, all in his artificial stone. The commission did not run smoothly. Completion of the allegorical group was delayed until 1827 and the statues were too large for the shallow niches. Bubb made a second, smaller pair, at his own expense. The fate of the over-large Solon is not known but Alfred the Great was erected in the newly laid-out Trinity Church Square in Southwark, south London, in unknown circumstances and its authorship soon forgotten. In 1921, a preposterous suggestion that it was medieval gained currency for many years but as a comparison of the Southwark statue and the smaller version in Manchester shows, they are most certainly by the same nineteenth-century hand. A 2021 conservation programme confirmed that the greater part of the Southwark statue was indeed in artificial stone but also that the lower part of the (proper) right leg was of Bath stone and dated to the 2nd century. Why Bubb thought it a good idea to incorporate a piece of antique Roman sculpture into his own remains a source of speculation. Although within 10 years of its erection the Town Hall’s allegorical group was declared unsafe and removed, and the building itself demolished in 1912, the central part of the façade, with its two niches and their statues, was preserved and re-erected in Heaton Park, Manchester. By the 1830s Bubb’s business was in decline and in 1835 he applied to the Artists’ General Benevolent Fund for support, stating that he had found scarcely any work over the previous two years, that his landlord had taken and sold his stock in lieu of rent, and that he had a wife and two children to support. He is recorded as working at J.M. Blashfield’s terracotta works at Canford, Dorset, in 1839, and in the same year produced a statue of Pomona for Sir William Middleton at Shrubland Park, Suffolk (untraced). No later work is known by him and in 1860 he received a gift of £12 from the Royal Academy. He died in June 1861.
Sources include: Ancestry.com: (i) Westminster … Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1558–1812: St Martin-in-the-Fields 1775–1791; (ii) London … Church of England Marriages and Banns 1754–1938: City of London, St Mary Bothaw, 1756–1854; (iii) England and Wales, Civil Registration of Death Index 1837–1915: 1861, Q2 April-May-June.
Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 221–22; J. Farington, The Farington Diary (ed. J. Greig), Vol. 4 (20 September 1806–7 January 1808), London, 1924, pp. 1, 55; A. Kelly, Mrs Coade’s Stone, Upton-upon-Severn, Worcs, 1990, pp. 60, 225–26, 372; D. Merritt and F. Greenacre, with K. Eustace, Public Sculpture of Bristol, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxx, 109–10; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 155–57; Royal Academy of Arts website: ‘James George Bubb (1781–1853)’; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, p. 68; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. xix–xx, xxi, 173–77, 318; T. Wyke, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, Liverpool, 2004, pp. 3, 6, 148–49.
Terry Cavanagh, 2007; revised and expanded, January 2025
