Henry Richard Hope-Pinker (1850–1927)

Sculptor, born in Peckham, Surrey (now south-east London). Originally Henry Richard Pinker, by 1896 he was exhibiting as H.R. Hope-Pinker. His father was a master mason and builder who by c.1871 was based in Hove, Sussex. Hope-Pinker learnt the art of carving in his father’s workshop but also, according to the critic M.H. Spielmann, attended the Royal Academy (RA) schools and, while still a student, visited Rome. On his return to England, he modelled a bust of the Revd. E.W. Benson for Wellington College, Berkshire, which, in 1875, was to be his first contribution to the annual RA exhibitions. The success of this bust led to more portrait commissions, including one from Queen Victoria: a Caen stone statue of John Hunter for the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (plaster cast exhibited at the RA in 1886; bronzed plaster cast at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, London). In 1885, he became a member of the Art Workers’ Guild (AWG), in 1888 donating to the Guild his bust of the architect John Sedding. (Hope-Pinker was, from 1887 to 1926, a regular speaker on a wide variety of topics at AWG events; he was AWG Master in 1915, and had his portrait painted by George Spencer Watson for the AWG’s collection of portraits of past masters.) In 1905 he accepted an invitation from the Society (Royal Society from 1911) of British Sculptors to become a member but appears to have resigned in 1918. Although he was a frequent exhibitor at the RA, showing 52 works between 1875 and 1908 – mostly commissioned portrait busts and statues, with the occasional ideal group – there is an as yet unaccountable gap of 14 years before his final exhibit in 1924, three years before his death. According to his obituarist in The Times, fellow AWG member Professor Thomas Okey, Hope-Pinker died ‘chisel and mallet in hand’, working on a funerary monument to his late wife, so this was evidently not a case of his taking early retirement. The situation is made all the more intriguing by the nature of his final exhibit: entitled simply ‘Head of Friend’, it is accompanied by the poignant lines: ‘A cut direct / But still my friend.’

Hope-Pinker was highly regarded for his technical skills. Okey wrote: ‘He was his own carver … and wrought direct on the stone without the intermediary of the clay model. His fine portrait of Professor Karl Pearson, cut from life straight into the marble and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1894, may be cited as an example of his method – a method which he always impressed on young students as the correct one, and bade them never to touch clay’. But it was his ability to put this superlative technique to expressive effect that impressed Spielmann, who wrote of the ‘life’ inherent in his sculptures and the deliberately rough surfaces he gave them, so avoiding ‘that close resemblance to actual clothing which, whether in marble or bronze, is so distressing a quality in many statues’.

Hope-Pinker’s public statues include Henry Fawcett, for Salisbury, Wiltshire (unveiled 1887); W.E. Forster, Victoria Embankment Gardens, London (1890); Queen Victoria, Georgetown, Guyana (1894); Revd James Martineau, Harris Manchester College, Oxford (1898); and Lord Reay, Bombay (Mumbai), India (1910). In addition to John Hunter, Hope-Pinker received commissions for three more Caen stone statues for the Oxford University Museum of Natural History: Thomas Sydenham (1894), Charles Darwin (1896) and Roger Bacon (1914), and four marble busts: Professor George Rolleston (1884), Sir Joseph Prestwich (1901), John Scott Burdon-Sanderson (1907) and Raphael Weldon (1908).

Bibliography: D. Bilbey and M. Trusted, British Sculpture 1470 to 2000. A Concise Catalogue of the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2002, p. 306; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, p. 329; Mapping Sculpture; M.H. Spielmann, British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-day, London, 1901, pp. 63, 65–66; The Times, 6 August 1927, p. 12 (obituary); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 336–37.

Terry Cavanagh, December 2024