Sculptor born on 27 March 1821 in Carrara, Tuscany. It is not known whether his father, Antonio Fontana, was a sculptor, but two of his uncles, Pietro and Ferdinando Fontana, certainly were, and he trained in the former’s workshop while attending Carrara’s Academy of Fine Arts. He won two of the Academy’s annual prizes, one for drawing a copy of the head of Achilles (1834), the other, the head of a putto (1835). In 1840 he won the Academy’s gold medal and a studentship for Rome, travelling to Rome in April 1841 and working in the studios of Bertel Thorvaldsen and Carlo Finelli. One of the sculptures he produced in these years was a model for a figure of David (1844), which he subsequently carved in marble (signed, and dated ‘Roma 1848’, this was auctioned as lot 23 at Sotheby’s in December 2023). In 1849, he took part in Garibaldi’s attempt to make Rome an independent republic but was forced into exile following the French army’s restoration of the papacy. Eventually settling in London, in c.1850 he assisted the sculptor Thomas Campbell with the modelling of his statue of Lord George Bentinck for Cavendish Square (unveiled 1851). Fontana seems to have established an independent practice in England extraordinarily quickly, helped in no small way by his early contact with the Liverpool collector, antiquarian and philanthropist Joseph Mayer who, between 1852 and 1881, commissioned from him about 23 marble busts and reliefs. 1852 was also the year of Fontana’s first appearance at the Royal Academy (RA), with a marble statue ‘of the industrious girl’. Between then and 1886 he contributed 22 works to 17 shows. For his 1853 contribution to the RA he turned to his uncle, Pietro, commissioning him to carve a second marble from his David model (still in Carrara). In c.1855 he married an English woman, Sarah Southon, and in 1863 became a naturalised British subject. In March 1861 his career had been given another boost, when the Art Journal selected his marble group, Cupid Captured by Venus, for illustration as one of its coveted full-page engravings (p. 92). Fontana had exhibited this at the RA in 1859 and would go on to show it again in the 1862 International Exhibition and the 1863 ‘Sculpture by Living Artists’ exhibition, both at South Kensington. Over the next 11 years, four more of his ideal works were selected by the Art Journal: The Prisoner of Love (May 1863, p. 100), The Genius of Commerce (November 1864, p. 344), La Sonnambula (April 1870, p. 116) and The Sister’s Charge (November 1872, p. 288). Fontana’s most important portrait commission came in 1867 when the Liverpool Town Council took Mayer’s advice on who should carve his statue for St George’s Hall. A vivid description of Sarah Fontana’s contribution to her husband’s work can be found in a letter to Mayer from their mutual friend, the antiquarian Joseph Clarke (whose bust Mayer had commissioned from Fontana in 1865); he wrote that ‘she gets up every morning at five o’clock to kneed [sic] the clay, and is in such extacies that she says she shall never want again and their fortune is quite made’. Unveiled in 1869, the statue was commended by the Art Journal (June 1869, pp. 194–95) as ‘among the most excellent portait-statues of our time’. This was followed in 1875 by a second statue for St George’s Hall, that of Samuel Robert Graves (‘a work of considerable merit’, Art Journal, 1875, p. 287). It was through another patron, Baron Albert Grant, that Fontana received his only public commission in London. He had already supplied Grant with four caryatids representing the Seasons for Kensington House, the mansion James Knowles had built for him (but which was demolished in 1883), and in 1874 was commissioned to carve a marble copy of Peter Scheemakers’s statue of William Shakespeare to act as the centrepiece for Knowles’s fountain, in the new Leicester Square layout presented by Baron Grant to the Metropolitan Board of Works. In 1879 Fontana visited Australia, showing 10 of his works in that year’s Sydney International Exhibition and in the following year providing three life-size marble statues – of Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales and a personification of New South Wales – for the Government Offices in Sydney. He also secured commissions for a marble group of Queen Victoria enthroned above Britannia and New South Wales for the façade of Sydney’s General Post Office (completed 1885) and a bronze statue of John Dunmore Lang for Winyard Park, Sydney (unveiled 1891). Fontana died after a brief illness at his home – 25 Glebe Place, Chelsea – on 25 November 1893, survived by his wife and two daughters; Sarah Fontana died in 1899 and was buried with her husband in Kensal Green Cemetery. A substantial collection of Fontana’s sculptures is held in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
Ancestry website sources: (i) Giovanni Fontana: England censuses 1871, 1881, 1891; England and Wales National Probate Calendar … 1894; (ii) Sarah Fontana: England and Wales National Probate Calendar … 1899
Bibliography: Art Journal, 1894, p. 61 (obituary); Art UK: ‘Giovanni Fontana c.1821–1893’; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. xii, 274–77, 282–84, 294; R. Foster, ‘Philosophy and Patronage’, in M. Gibson and S.M. Wright (eds.), Joseph Mayer of Liverpool (Society of Antiquaries Occasional Papers) New Series, Vol. 11, London, 1988, pp. 30–39; J. Lennon, The Italian Connection: Public Sculpture in Victorian Sydney by Italo-Australian Sculptors, Sydney, 1993, pp. 1–16; Mapping Sculpture; E. Morris and M. Hopkinson, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, Foreign Catalogue, Liverpool 1977, pp. 299–309; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. xxi, 3–4; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, Liverpool, 2010, p. 214; The Times, 21 December 1893, p. 4 (obituary); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 25, 112–15, 119.
Terry Cavanagh, February 2026
