Sculptor born near Macclesfield, Cheshire, the son of a quarry owner. While assisting his father he carved some statuettes and busts, including a bust of Milton (formerly at Gawsworth Hall, Cheshire, now in a private collection). A local clergyman, the Reverend James Sumner, encouraged him to study sculpture in London and in 1837 he entered the studio of Edward Hodges Baily. He joined the Royal Academy Schools in 1839 and won silver medals there in 1841, 1842 and 1844. In 1843 he became an assistant to Musgrave Lewthwaite Watson, whom he left in about 1847 to establish his own studio. At the Royal Academy between 1841 and 1853 he regularly exhibited busts, together with a few imaginative works and memorials. His busts of Mr and Mrs Thomas Legh (1844), of Lyme Hall, near Stockport, are still at the Hall. In 1843 his bust of Hebe was cast in bronze for distribution to prize winners in the Art Union of London lottery. In late 1852 he went to Rome, although he had only one commission: a bust of Mrs Lowther, daughter of Thomas Legh. He took with him its model, which he had made in London, but did not finish the marble version until 1855. In 1853 he visited Florence and Perugia, but he always preferred early Greek to Renaissance art. Between about 1853 and 1855 he produced two ideal figures in marble, Night and Echo (the former is untraced, the latter is now at Gawsworth Hall). His principal patron in Rome was Samuel Christie-Miller, for whom he made, in the severe Greek style, two low reliefs on an epic scale to be placed in the sides of the mausoleum of Christie-Miller’s cousin, William Henry Miller, at Craigentinny in the Edinburgh suburbs. Gatley received this commission early in 1854, and he and his patron discussed various allegorical subjects for the reliefs. They eventually chose Pharaoh and his Army in the Red Sea, which seems to have been a larger and more elaborate version of an earlier relief, together with The Song of Moses and Miriam. Christie-Miller was receiving advice from his architect, David Rhind, in Edinburgh and Gatley from John Gibson in Rome. Gatley’s first studio in Rome had been near the Porta Pinciana but in 1854–55 he rented a larger studio behind the Piazza del Popolo for these ambitious works, which were to cost about £800, including delivery to Edinburgh. In 1858 he was responsible for the memorial in St Mary’s Church, Disley, to his old patron Thomas Legh, a work of considerable originality, with an angel and trumpet on a sarcophagus. In 1861 he made a marble group, A Greek Hero leading a Bull to Sacrifice (now in Salford Museum and Art Gallery), together with – at about the same time – some animal studies and statuettes of lions. In 1862 Gatley returned to England to display the Pharaoh relief and the lions, together with Echo and Night, at the London International Exhibition at South Kensington. Despite his friendship with Gibson, he had obtained very few commissions in Rome, apart from the Christie-Miller reliefs, and now he achieved no sales in London. He had suffered considerable poverty in Rome, and shortly after his return there in 1863 to complete the Miriam relief he died, unmarried and intestate, from dysentery. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. The Athenaeum commented in January 1864: ‘You remember poor Gatley, the great sculptor, for he was so. The people too often passed his studio, and ran after the insignificant prettinesses which crowd the shops of several workers in marble […] Mr Christie-Miller is now in Rome; and what with claims made by the heirs, and advances asserted by the patron, a very great confusion has been created which might raise poor Gatley from the grave’. In its 1863 obituary, the Art Journal reprinted its analysis of the Pharaoh and Miriam reliefs: ‘In Art, unlike works surrendered, as the mode now is, to the allurements of pictorial treatment, this severe composition conforms to the true principles of bas-relief as taught by the Greeks. In modelling and execution each figure is firm and vigorous, and thus partakes of the style found among the early Greeks rather than of the generalised manner usual with the later Romans. An intractable subject – the overthrow of an army in a sea – has betrayed the artist into an extravagance, an excess, from which the companion work, the “Song of Miriam,” … is delivered.’ Gatley’s reputation was enhanced in 1871 by Salford Museum and Art Gallery’s purchase of his Echo (subsequently transferred to Gawsworth Hall) and his Greek Hero group, together with his busts of Euripides and Paris (untraced).
Archival source: Gatley’s MSS Journal and Letter Book 1853–56 (Private Collection, Cheshire).
Bibliography: Art Journal, 1863, p. 181 (obituary); Athenaeum: (i) 25 July 1863, p. 117 (obituary), (ii) 16 January 1864, p. 89; J. Gifford et al, Edinburgh (The Buildings of Scotland), Harmondsworth, 1984, pp. 661–62; R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851, London, [1968], pp. 164–65; R.E. Graves (rev. M. Greenwood), ‘Gatley, Alfred (1816–1863)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn.), 2004; A. Reaney, ‘Landseer of Sculpture’, Cheshire Life, 1968, vol. 34, pp. 54–55 (especially useful for reproductions of Gatley’s work); I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 505–06.
Emma Roberts, 2012
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