Sculptor born on 25 August 1883 in St Giles, London, the eldest surviving son of Markham Buxton, a farrier, and his wife, Hannah. In the 1901 census, aged 17, he is described as a stone carver’s apprentice. At an unknown date he gained entrance to the Royal Academy Schools, where his tutors included the sculptors William Hamo Thornycroft and Thomas Brock, and where in 1909 he won a gold medal and travelling studentship of £200 for a composition in sculpture, this latter funding a trip to the continent, the details of which are unfortunately not known. In 1910 he made his first appearance at the Royal Academy, with a relief entitled, The Expulsion from Paradise. Alfred, and his 32-year-old unmarried sister, Elizabeth (a music teacher) still lived in the parental home which, by 1911, was in Mortlake, Surrey. In 1912 he exhibited three sculptures at the Royal Academy, all of them illustrated in that year’s Academy Architecture and Architectural Review: a two-figure group, Athens, an Allegory of Sculpture; a crouching female nude, Isabella (from Keats’s poem, ‘Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil’); and a relief panel, Salamis, the Mourners. By 1916 at the latest he was in the Royal Flying Corps, presumably until demobilisation in 1919. After a promising start, his career as a sculptor seems to have by now faltered: he exhibited nothing at the Royal Academy between 1918 (a bust entitled, Le Travailleur) and 1927, and there is no record of his having gained any commissions. By 1921 he was working for the architectural sculptor, Charles Whiffen, in his workshop at 89 Altenburg Gardens, Clapham, south London, and in the 1939 Register he described himself as a ‘sculptor, carver of stone, traveller’. Buxton’s peripatetic work life in these years is consistent with Buckman’s statement that he ‘completed a large volume of church and memorial carving’. Indeed, the work with which he returned to the Royal Academy, in 1927, a panel entitled Chanson Triste, has been plausibly identified by Historic England with the bronze panel he placed on his father’s now grade II listed tombstone (‘The Buxton Monument’) in East Sheen Cemetery, London Borough of Richmond. Buxton died aged 79, in hospital, on 7 July 1963.
Ancestry website sources: London … Church of England Births and Baptisms … ‘Baptisms Solemnised in Christ Church St Giles in the Fields in the Year 1883’; England censuses for 1891, 1901, 1911, 1921; 1939 England and Wales Register.
Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; Historic England – The Buxton Monument’; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 234–35; Mapping Sculpture; The Times, 9 July 1963, p. [1] (‘Deaths’).
Terry Cavanagh, February 2026