Sculptor born in Oxford, the son of a Thames navigator. On leaving school he served an apprenticeship as a wood carver with the Caversham-based firm of Heiden and Batting, while in the evenings attending Reading University’s art classes, firstly as a life model and subsequently a pupil. By 1926, the year of his marriage to Ella Myra Hicks, he gave his profession as ‘wood carver’. In c.1927, he gained admission to the City and Guilds of London Institute’s South London Technical School of Art, travelling from Reading to London each evening after work. In 1929, he won the Institute’s competition for a three-year, £300-a-year studentship, which included a year’s tour of European art centres and carried the prospect, at the end of that period, of a further £150, should the Institute decide it was necessary for the completion of his studies. Clack was at the School throughout the first half of the 1930s, his entries to the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s annual exhibitions of work from Students’ Sketch Clubs drawing favourable mentions from The Times on two occasions: in February 1933, ‘South London comes out strong in sculpture, with excellent things by Mr. E.J. Clack’ and in January 1936, ‘In sculpture everything yields to “Composition in Wood,” a female figure curled up more or less into a ball, by Mr. E.J. Clack’. Also during these years, he worked as an assistant to the sculptor William Reid Dick and as an architectural stone carver for the firms of G. & A. Brown and J. Armitage. Clack showed at the Royal Academy annual exhibitions, 1932–62, a total of 34 works. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors (RBS) in 1940 and a Fellow in 1946. In this latter year a number of Royal Academicians nominated him for Associate membership of the Royal Academy (RA) but both this and two future attempts, in 1954 and 1962, proved unsuccessful. In the second half of the 1940s Clack taught art and woodwork at Blundell’s School, Tiverton, Devon, and, in 1947, executed the school’s Second World War memorial. In that same year, for his Transformation of Daphne, which he had shown at the RA in 1946, he was awarded the RBS Otto Beit prize for the best work of sculpture exhibited in London; carved from a solid yew trunk, the lower half of the sculpture, as is appropriate to its subject, retains the original form of the tree. Another woodcarving, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve, which he showed at the RA in 1948, so impressed the RA President, Sir Alfred Munnings, that he suggested it should be purchased for the nation; it was later acquired by the Dean and Chapter of Wells Cathedral and now stands outside the Bishop’s Palace. The Dean and Chapter subsequently commissioned from Clack a yew-wood sculpture of Christ the Redeemer (exhib. RA 1955) for the cathedral’s north transept. Another of his yew-wood sculptures, a 193cm-high carving of a mother and child, entitled Opus No. 3, was purchased for Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery for the sum of £1,500 on viewing day at the 1950 RA exhibition. In 1951 he won a competition, initiated by the Constance Fund and limited to sculptors recommended by the RBS, to design a new drinking fountain for Green Park, London; the Diana Drinking Fountain (also known as Diana of the Treetops) was inaugurated in 1954 and earned the sculptor his second Otto Beit prize. Although living at 32 Redcliffe Gardens, Chelsea, throughout the 1950s, he also occupied, c.1952–c.1955, a studio in ‘Limnerslease’ (the Victorian artist George Frederic Watts’s former home) at Compton, near Guildford, Surrey; it was here that he worked on, inter alia, his Christ the Redeemer for Wells. Clack’s last major commission dates to 1960, a large Portland stone panel for an office block, Ferguson House, in Marylebone Road, the construction of which had necessitated the demolition of Devonshire Terrace whose most famous resident (at No. 1) had been Charles Dickens. The relief comprises a three-quarter portrait head of Dickens set against imaginary portraits of the principal characters of the six novels he had written at that address.
Bibliography: flickr: ‘Clack family heritage’ and ‘E.J. Clack FRBS’ (photo archives assembled by Jonathan Clack, the sculptor’s son); Mapping Sculpture; Reading Standard, 2 July 1954 (‘Sculptor from Reading’); The Times: (i) 22 July 1929, p. 12 (‘London Art Studentship’); (ii) 2 February 1933, p. 8 (‘Students’ Sketch Clubs’); (iii) 20 January 1936, p. 10 (‘Student Sketch Clubs’); (iv) 8 December 1954, p. 10 (‘Medal for Green Park Sculpture’); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xli, 46–48, 86, 153–54, 208, 440.
Terry Cavanagh, November 2024