Mary Grant (1831–1908)

Sculptor. Born at Kilgraston, Perthshire, daughter of John Grant and his second wife, Lady Lucy Bruce. Her uncle was the prominent society portrait painter, Sir Francis Grant, who in 1866 became President of the Royal Academy. She studied under Odoardo Fantacchiotti in Florence in the early 1860s, then reputedly under John Gibson in Rome. After her Italian training, she went on to study with Michel-Louis-Victor Mercier in Paris, and in 1868 set up her first independent studio at 64 Great Titchfield Street in London. She is supposed to have accepted the offer of further instruction from John Henry Foley. A commission for a series of busts for the Rajah of Kapurthala included a colossal bust of Queen Victoria, shown at the Royal Academy in 1871, for which Grant received sittings at Windsor. Besides her numerous portrait commissions, Grant produced a statue of St Margaret of Antioch which was shown at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878 (illus. in Art Journal, 1879, p. 106, and 1881, p. 284 – now in the cathedral of St Paul in Fond-du-Lac, Wisconsin) and the bronze memorial tablet centrepiece for the Women’s Memorial to Henry Fawcett, Victoria Embankment Gardens, London (1886). Otherwise, her chief output was in church sculpture, the largest example being the marble reredos of the Crucifixion in St Mary’s Episcopal cathedral in Edinburgh, completed in 1880.

Bibliography: Dictionary of Women Artists (ed. D. Gaze), (2 vols), London and Chicago, 1997, vol. 1, pp. 604–06 (entry on Grant by H. Smailes); Mapping Sculpture; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. 218, 218; Royal Academy of Arts website: ‘Mary Grant (1831–1908)’; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 328–30, 449.

Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011