Sculptor, painter, soldier, journalist and theatre manager. He was born in London and educated at Harrow. The painter George Clausen persuaded his father to send him to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian. He returned to London in 1887, was accepted at the Royal Academy Schools on presenting a Hercules in clay, and in 1890 was awarded a Landseer Scholarship for sculpture. Gotto’s unpublished autobiography claims that his statue of Victory, shown at the Royal Academy in 1889, was cast in bronze by Alfred Gilbert and was the first English example of casting by the cire perdue process. He set up a studio in Glebe Place, Chelsea, c.1902. Something of a polymath, Gotto worked as a newspaper correspondent during the Boer War. He later executed the Middlesex Yeomanry South African War Memorial for St Paul’s (unveiled 10 October 1906). In 1905, Gotto was among those ‘invited to join without the formality of proposal and seconding’ the Society (Royal Society from 1911) of British Sculptors (RBS). After the First World War, during which he served as a musketry instructor, Gotto sculpted the Caribou ‘bellowing defiance’ which commemorates fallen Newfoundlanders on five of the battlefields of the Western Front, and of which there is another cast in Bowring Park, St John’s, Canada. His Army and Navy Club War Memorial (1924), a bronze statuette of a helmeted nude Greek warrior, stands in a glass display case in front of the club’s building in Pall Mall, London. In 1923, when the RBS divided its membership into Associates and Fellows, Gotto became an Associate. He continued to execute war memorials but once the demand dried up, he turned to painting portraits and in 1929 resigned from the RBS. In the interwar period he was much involved in London theatre life, and played character parts in some early films. He was chairman of the Chelsea Arts Club, 1913–15, and inaugurated the Chelsea Arts Club Ball. In later life he immersed himself in local government.
Bibliography: Mapping Sculpture; M. Quinlan, British War Memorials, Hertford, 2005, pp. 120, 121, 316, 331; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 179, 449.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, November 2024
