Sculptor born in Paisley, Scotland. He was the eldest son of John Henning I (1771 – 1851), a self-taught sculptor who made his name with his miniature copies of the Parthenon frieze. John Henning II’s younger brother, Samuel Henning (died of cholera in 1832), was also a sculptor, specialising in intaglios. The family moved to London in 1811. John II seems to have been a prodigy: in 1815 he designed the obverse of a medal of the Duke of Wellington (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1828), in 1816 he was awarded the Silver Isis Medal by the Society of Arts for a relief of The Good Samaritan, and in 1817 exhibited at the British Institution for the first time (a work entitled simply ‘Composition’, accompanied in the catalogue by a quotation from Psalm 23). Although in 1824 he exhibited the first two of the small number of portrait busts he was to execute throughout his life (Dr Maltby and John Galt, both untraced), it is architectural sculpture which forms the main body of his work. In 1828, the architect Decimus Burton employed him to create original sculptural designs inspired by the Parthenon frieze for his Hyde Park Screen and a full-size facsimile of the frieze for his Athenaeum Club building at Waterloo Place (the works were carried out with assistance from his father and his brother Samuel). In 1836, Charles Barry selected Henning’s designs (in preference to those submitted by Charles Raymond Smith) for six stone reliefs representing Architecture, Painting, Sculpture, Wisdom, Astronomy and Mathematics, to be spaced across the façade of his Manchester Royal Institution building (now City Art Gallery). Then, in 1845, he was employed by William Bradwell to create a Panathenaic frieze and decorative candelabra for the museum of sculpture he had designed for the re-opening of the Colosseum, Regent’s Park (design by Decimus Burton 1823–27; demolished 1875). Also in 1845, W.J. Donthorn employed him to design and carve what has been described as ‘his most remarkable work’ (M.G. Sullivan, in Roscoe, 2009), the sculptural decoration of his Earl of Leicester Monument at Holkham Park, Norfolk (completed 1848). Possibly his last architectural commission was for John Bunstone Bunning’s City of London Freemen’s Orphan School (1852–54), Brixton, south London, which included a set of reliefs for the dining hall based on Hogarth’s ‘Industrious and Idle Apprentices’ (building demolished c.1927). In 1844, Henning had submitted a statue of Lord Bacon and a Boadicea group to the exhibition at Westminster Hall, but both were poorly reviewed in The Literary Gazette (1844, p. 466). His Homeric Table, commissioned by Lord Northwick for the gallery of Thirlestaine House, Cheltenham, received enthusiastic reviews in the Illustrated London News (12 January 1850, p. 21, with an engraving of the ‘Shield of Achilles’ design for its top) and Art Journal (1 February 1850, p. 65). Henning showed at the British Institution, 1817–37, and the Royal Academy of Arts, 1828–52.
Previously thought to have died in 1857 (Gunnis, 1968; Roscoe, 2009), Henning was still alive in 1871, in which year, according to Mapping Sculpture, he is recorded as a patient in St John’s Hospital, City Road, Holborn; he died in 1873.
Bibliography: Art Journal, 1 February 1850, p. 65 (‘Henning’s Homeric Table’); T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 297–98; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 348, 439; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. 106–09; R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851, London, [1968], p. 198; Illustrated London News: (i) 26 April 1845, pp. 264-65 (‘Re-opening of the Colosseum’), (ii) 21 March 1846, p. 193 (‘New Entrance to the Royal Botanic Gardens, at Kew’), (iii) 16 August 1845, pp. 111–12 (‘The Leicester Monument’), (iv) 12 January 1850, p. 21 (‘Homeric Table’), (v) 21 June 1851, p. 603 (‘Silver Dish. – by Angell, Strand’), (vi) 30 October 1852, p. 365 (‘Decoration of the Mansion House’); F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 253–54; Mapping Sculpture; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 605–07; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, p. 243; T. Wyke, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, Liverpool, 2004, pp. 94–96.
Terry Cavanagh, January 2025