Sculptor. Born in Dumfries, Scotland, he was the son of Thomas Dunbar, a builder and mason. He received his earliest training from his father, but following his father’s death in 1805 obtained employment with the mason and sculptor Paul Nixson of Carlisle, who entrusted him with carving capitals and other decorative parts on Lowther Castle, Penrith. Friends of Dunbar’s family, believing him to have artistic talents worth cultivating, funded a study trip to Rome. On his return to Britain, he relocated to London and secured a position in the studio of the sculptor (Sir) Francis Chantrey. In 1814 he was one of a group of assistants paid for work on Chantrey’s statue of George III for the Guildhall, London, and in 1815 for cleaning the Guildhall’s other monuments. In 1813 he married Ann Stokes. In 1815 he showed for the first time at the Royal Academy, giving his address as 25 Ebury Street, Chelsea. In c.1820 he moved to Carlisle and renewed his association with Paul Nixson. In 1822, Nixson built his own marble works in Finkle Street, where he established the Carlisle Academy of Fine Art with Dunbar its secretary and teacher of modelling (one of his students being Musgrave Lewthwaite Watson). Dunbar’s contribution to the building’s decoration, in a niche over the main entrance, was a statue of a young sculptor standing by a bust representing the ‘Genius of Carlisle’ and, surmounting the building’s pediment, busts of eminent representatives from each of the artistic disciplines: Sir Christopher Wren for architecture, Benjamin West PRA for painting and Dunbar’s former employer, Chantrey, for sculpture (building demolished 1930). Dunbar’s aspirations for the cultural improvement of Carlisle manifested themselves in his arrangement and promotion of a series of ambitious annual art exhibitions at the Academy, including works by both old masters and eminent contemporaries, and also in his involvement with the foundation of the Carlisle Mechanics Institute, of which he was the first secretary from October 1824 to December 1825. He was also much involved both organising and contributing to exhibitions in other regional centres, such as Leeds (1826), Dumfries (1828, 1830), Birmingham (1829), Newcastle (1831, 1832) and Manchester (1837). In 1826 he went on a second trip to Italy, this time visiting the studios of Joseph Gott and Bertel Thorvaldsen in Rome and that of the recently deceased Antonio Canova at Possagno. In 1830 he parted company with Nixson and established a studio in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. By 1841, Dunbar, ever on the move, was living in Edinburgh. Demand for his work seems to have declined in his later years and by 1864 he had returned to Dumfries, where he died in 1866 and was interred in the family vault in the Church of St Michael. In his lifetime he was best known for his portrait busts, amongst which may be noted those of Elizabeth Stephenson (the future novelist Mrs Gaskell) (1831, ex. Manchester City Art Gallery); J.R. Fenwick, M.D. (1832, Castle Museum Collection, Durham University); James Losh (1832, Literary and Philosophical Institute, Newcastle); and Grace Darling (1838, National Portrait Gallery). His only surviving public statue is that to Admiral Sir Pulteney Malcolm (1842) in Parliament Square, Langholm, Dumfries and Galloway. Among his more important funerary monuments are those to Elizabeth Connell (1825, St Cuthbert with St Mary, Carlisle); George Gibson (d.1835, St Lawrence, Crosby Ravensworth, Cumbria); Sir Joseph Dacre Appleby Gilpin (1835, Carlisle Cathedral); Katherine Losh (1850, Losh Mausoleum, St Mary’s Church, Wreay, Cumbria); and Elizabeth Dunbar, the sculptor’s infant daughter (1860, Carlisle Cathedral).
A note concerning David Dunbar II (1816–1868)
Certain details of the biographies of David Dunbar I and his relative David Dunbar II have become mired in confusion, a confusion exacerbated by the two men’s contemporaneous careers and the wider Dunbar family’s fondness for the name David. Rupert Gunnis (1968) thought they were father and son and attributed some of David I’s biographical details to David II. The researcher for David I’s biography in Ingrid Roscoe’s 2009 updating of Gunnis wrote that they were ‘probably father and son’ (p. 381) while his colleague working on the David II biography had no hesitation in identifying them as uncle and nephew and supplying a specific date for David II’s birth, 3 April 1828 (p. 383), a date immediately undermined by the ensuing statements that uncle and nephew exhibited together in 1833 (when David II would have been 5) and that David II married in 1837 (i.e., aged 9).
New research by Joanna Barnes, using census and marriage records, has, it is hoped, finally set the records straight. David II was indeed David I’s nephew. He was the son of David I’s older brother Stewart (1784–1855) and was born in 1816 at Annan, Scotland (making him about 17 when he first exhibited with his uncle). The David born on 3 April 1828 was the son of one George Dunbar, residing in Dumfries and of unknown relation to David I and David II (this David Dunbar went on to become an auctioneer’s clerk).
Both of the sculpting David Dunbars exhibited at the Royal Academy, but David II was not always given the distinguishing suffix ‘junior’ in the exhibition catalogues. After David I’s showings in 1815, 1817 and 1823 there was a gap of 17 years until the period 1840–59 when nine sculptures were exhibited under names variously rendered as: ‘_ Dunbar’, ‘D. Dunbar’ and ‘D. Dunbar, jun.’. Algernon Graves, in his dictionary of contributors to the Royal Academy annual exhibitions, presumed all the nine sculptures exhibited 1840–59 to have been David II’s. However, only two, those of 1841 and 1845, are listed as by ‘D. Dunbar, jun.’ Of the seven remaining contributions, five can be attributed with some degree of certainty. A greyhound (1840, no. 1116) from ‘_ Dunbar’ of Newcastle is almost certainly David I, given the address, as are the two pieces submitted in 1848 (nos 1415 and 1416), which are medallion portraits of Grace Darling and her father, the former being one of David I’s most popular subjects, submitted from one of his known London addresses, Ranelagh Place, Pimlico. The Statue of Burns (1842, no. 1340), however, must be David II, the address listed being the same as for ‘D. Dunbar, jun.’ of the previous year (11 Elizabeth Place, Pimlico) and the subject being the same as that submitted by David II to the Westminster Hall competition of 1844 (see Art Union, August 1844, p. 215). Another certain David II contribution is 1843’s Posthumous bust in marble of his son (no. 1484); although the address, 10 Lower Belgrave Street, Pimlico, is new, David II’s son – another David – David Stewart Dunbar, had died the previous year, aged 3 years and 7 months. David Dunbar II survived his uncle David Dunbar I by only two years, dying on 4 April 1868 at Chelsea.
Bibliography: Art Journal, 1 October 1866, p. 320; The Builder, 1866, p. 638; D.A. Cross, Public Sculpture of Lancashire and Cumbria, Liverpool, 2017, pp. xviii, 140, 142–43, 200–01; A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts. A complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, (1905–06), Vol II (1905), p. 385; R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1951, London, [1968], pp. 133–34; Radnor Street Cemetery. Remembering the ordinary people of Swindon – ‘Arabella Dunbar – widow of the late David Dunbar Sculptor’; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 380–83; Walpole Society, vol. 56 (1991/1992), 1994, ‘An Edition of the Ledger of Sir Francis Chantrey, R.A., at the Royal Academy, 1809–1841’ (eds. A. Yarrington, I.D. Lieberman, A. Potts, and M. Baker), pp. 9, 34.
Terry Cavanagh, February 2026
