Antony Gibbons Grinling (1896–1982)

Sculptor and director of W. & A. Gilbey, wine merchants, born on 6 January 1896 in Stanmore, Middlesex, the son of Gibbons Grinling (at that time a director of the firm) and his wife, Alice, a watercolourist who exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1889–92. Grinling was educated at Harrow, 1910–14, where he won the Yeates Thompson Art Prize. Any thoughts he may have had of going on to art school were quashed with Britain’s declaration of war against Germany in August 1914. Grinling served with the Hertfordshire Regiment and for his actions during Germany’s 1918 spring offensive – in which he was gassed while briefly in command of his much-depleted regiment – he was awarded the Military Cross. While convalescing in Taormina, Sicily, in 1919–20, he took lessons from an Italian sculptor but, deciding it was now too late for him to become an art student, entered the family business, practising his sculpture after office hours and at weekends. In 1924 he was commissioned to make a set of miniature sculptures for the garden of Queen Mary’s Doll’s House, which had been designed by the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. In c.1930, his old schoolfriend from Harrow, the architect Serge Chermayeff, who was designing the interiors for Wimperis, Simpson & Guthrie’s Cambridge Theatre at Earlham Street, London, commissioned him to design three friezes: Dance for the vestibule, and Music and Drama for the foyer. Coloured in copper and terracotta, the reliefs were in a newly-developed, but short-lived, material known as ‘Lap’ (also used by Newbury Abbot Trent for his contemporaneous New Victoria Cinema friezes in Wilton Road near Victoria Station). When not working to commission, Grinling’s preferred subjects were nude figures, usually in wood but sometimes modelled in clay for casting in bronze. His work in this field was influenced by another of his friends, Henry Moore: examples include Mother and Child (1928, in polished Kauri pine; private collection), Reclining Figure (c.1931, in Honduras mahogany) and Family Group (c.1949, in cedar; Bristol Museum and Art Gallery). In 1934, he had two solo exhibitions: one for his sculptures at Arthur Tooth & Co, London, and the other for some designs he had made for furniture at Whiteley’s Department Store, Queensway. In 1939, following the outbreak of the Second World War, he was recalled to his regiment with the post of County Quartering Commandant; he was invalided out in May 1944 and in the same year awarded an MBE. In 1946 he appeared at the Royal Academy for the only time, showing two sculptures: Torso, in mahogany, and Awakening, a statuette in cedar. A second solo exhibition of his sculptures, at Worthing Art Gallery, followed in 1949, and throughout the ’50s he showed with the National Society of Painters, Sculptors and Printmakers at the Leicester Galleries in London (1950, 1954, 1955 and 1958). In the late 1950s Grinling was commissioned to model a statuette of the ballet dancer and choreographer, Sir Anton Dolin, to be cast in bronze as an edition of three and presented to the three people whom Dolin considered to be the best in their field for that year, the recipients being John Gilpin (male dancer), Nadia Nerina (female dancer) and Frederick Ashton (choreographer); a bronze cast, presumably one of the original three, is on permanent display at the Royal Ballet School, Richmond Park. By 1963, failing eyesight compelled him to give up sculpture, although he continued painting in watercolour after his retirement from Gilbey’s in 1965. He died on 29 January 1982, and was survived by his second wife, Cicely Somers (née Eve), a son, Jasper, from his first marriage, and three daughters, Amanda, Judith and Tessa, from his second marriage. In 1986, the Fine Art Society included two of his works, the Kauri pine Mother and Child and Dancers (c.1929, in brass on a marble base; private collection) in its exhibition, ‘Sculpture in Britain between the Wars’.

Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; Antony Gibbons Grinling website; Historic England: Official List Entry for Cambridge Theatre, Earlham Street; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 270–71; B. Read and P. Skipwith, Sculpture in Britain between the Wars (Fine Art Society exh. cat.), London, 1986, pp. 86–87; The Times, 2 February 1982, p. 20 (death notice).

Terry Cavanagh, April 2026