Sculptor. Born at Tramore near Waterford, Ireland, he is supposed to have studied in Dublin before coming to London in about 1809, where he was engaged as an assistant to Sir Richard Westmacott. He continued in Westmacott’s employ until 1822, when the Earl of Egremont persuaded him to accept an exclusive arrangement to work for him alone. Carew produced a series of very fine genre and mythological figures and groups for the Earl, which are still at Petworth House: Arethusa (1822–24), Adonis and the Boar (1824–25), Venus at Vulcan’s Forge (1825–27), The Falconer (1829–31) and Prometheus and Pandora (1835–37; unfinished). He was also persuaded by the Earl to set up a studio in Brighton. However, on discovering at his patron’s death in 1837 that he had been left nothing in the will, he brought an action against the executors, which he lost. When the Falconer and the Venus at Vulcan’s Forge were shown at the Westminster Hall Exhibition in 1844, the critic for the Literary Gazette (no. 1436, 27 July 1844, p.482), declared them to be ‘the workings of genius’. Carew produced vigorous, and still surprisingly baroque, devotional sculpture: extant examples are a high relief of the Baptism of Christ (1835) for the church of St John the Baptist (Roman Catholic) in Brighton, and another of the Assumption of the Virgin (1853) for the Royal Bavarian Chapel in London (now in the Chapel of the Assumption, Warwick Street). Carew showed a Descent from the Cross in his London studio in 1841. This was followed a year later by two religious sculptures shown at the British Institution in 1842. Recognition of Carew’s outstanding abilities was implied by his being given the commission to execute the colossal bronze relief of The Death of Nelson for the plinth of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, whose central group has been seen by one recent biographer as a secular Descent from the Cross. His portrait statues include Edmund Kean as Hamlet (1833, marble, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London), and Henry Grattan (1857, marble, Palace of Westminster). In 1844 he was commissioned to sculpt a colossal stone figure of the 14th-century Lord Mayor, Sir Richard Whittington, for the exterior of the Royal Exchange in the City of London. At the Great Exhibition of 1851 he showed a more fanciful figure of the youthful ‘Dick Whittington’ listening to the Bow Bells calling him back to fulfil his historic destiny in London. Carew and others hoped that the Corporation of the City of London would purchase this figure, but they declined to do so. Carew’s funerary monuments include the memorial with portrait statue of William Huskisson (1832), Chichester Cathedral, and the memorial to George IV’s mistress, Mrs Fitzherbert (d. 1837) in St John the Baptist, Brighton.
Bibliography: Art Union, April 1840, pp. 50–51 (‘Carew v. The Executors of the late Earl of Egremont’); T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. xviii, xxxi; P. Murphy, Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture. Native Genius Reaffirmed, New Haven and London, 2010, pp. 2, 72, 88–90, 138; P. Murphy (ed.), Art and Architecture of Ireland, vol. III, Sculpture 1600–2000 (entry on Carew by M.G. Sullivan), Dublin, New Haven and London, 2014, pp. 62–65; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 195–99; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 11–13, 17, 113–14, 150, 151, 153–54, 156, 158–59; W.G. Strickland, A Dictionary of Irish Artists, Dublin and London, 1913; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 320, 321, 323, 331, 453–54; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 279, 280, 281, 282, 285, 387, 439; W. Wroth (rev. J. Turpin), ‘Carew, John Edward (c.1782–1868)’, ODNB (online edn), 2004.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, October 2024