Sculptor and teacher, born at Greenwich, south-east London. He studied at Goldsmiths’ College and then at the Royal College of Art where he was discovered and promoted by Charles Ricketts and Selwyn Image, who were acting as examiners. Ricketts detested modern forms of art and was immediately attracted to Cole’s work, with its grounding in the study of the Old Masters. Cole’s first and only large commission was from the architect Ralph Knott for the sculpture groups on the pavilions of the London County Hall. Cole began work in April 1915, but in October of that year enlisted in the Army. He thereafter worked at weekends and employed an assistant but in December 1916 was sent to the front, with just five-and-a-half of the eight groups of the first phase of operations completed in stone. Ricketts, fearful that the best hope (as he saw it) for the future of England’s sculpture might be killed, managed to get Cole sent on a safe mission to the USA, where he met and married Laurie Manly, an American divorcee. At about this time, Cole became a convert to modernism, a conversion which apparently so upset Ricketts that he could never again speak of his erstwhile protégé without, it was said, ‘a sort of rage possessing him’. Following his demobilisation, Cole recommenced work, eventually completing one of the groups in stone but, unaccountably, without first securing Knott’s approval for his plaster model, Knott subsequently rejecting the group on grounds of both scale and finish. Matters finally came to a head in March 1921, when Cole’s request for further funds was rejected by County Hall; Cole’s contract was terminated later that year. His six completed groups are: on the River front: The Creation of Eve, The Spirit of the Thames and one untitled group; on the Westminster Bridge front: Benevolence and Humanity and The World Beyond; and on the Belvedere Road front: Hero. Despite the praise lavished on Cole’s County Hall sculptures by some contemporary critics, it is difficult to argue with the adverse criticism published by Kineton Parkes in 1921; the groups, he wrote, ‘have not been well designed for their places: they appear to be over-modelled, and their perspectives seem wrong from the only possible view-points, and the faces of the stooping men are hardly seen, and unmeaning shadows spoil their foreshortening. In some of the groups are little spheres with tiny indistinguishable figures upon them: in [The World Beyond] are three huge rectangular masses of stone supporting a sphere on the top of which are two bronze figures, the details, and the meaning of which cannot be seen from the street’. Cole’s one other work associated with County Hall, a marble bust of the Revd Stewart Headlam (1909), was formerly in the County Hall library (present whereabouts unknown). After the termination of his contract, Cole and his wife spent a few years in New York, Italy and Germany, before returning to England and setting up home at Kingston, near Canterbury, Kent, with Cole teaching sculpture at the Royal College of Art, 1924–26. The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, holds examples of his early work, much of it bequeathed by Charles Shannon, from the Ricketts and Shannon collection. Cole’s chief influences, until his conversion to modernism, were Michelangelo, Alfred Stevens and Auguste Rodin; what his later influences were it is not possible to say in the absence of any known examples of his post-1921 work.
Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 94, 95–102, 429; W. Kineton Parkes, The Art of Carved Sculpture. Vol. 1. Western Europe, America and Japan, London, 1931, pp. 71–73; W. Kineton Parkes, Sculpture of To-Day. Vol. 1. America, Great Britain and Japan, London, 1921, pp. 117–18, 121–22, 234; C. Lewis (ed.), Self-Portrait. Taken from the letters and journals of Charles Ricketts, R.A. (coll. and comp. T. Sturge Moore), London, 1939, p. 275n; C. Ricketts, ‘The Sculpture and Studies of Mr. Ernest Cole’, Country Life, vol. xliv, no. 1137, 19 October 1918, pp. 328–30; Survey of London Monograph 17: County Hall (ed. H. Hobhouse), London, 1991, pp. 57–69.
Terry Cavanagh, 2007; revised, July 2024