Sculptor born at East Dereham, Norfolk, the son of Robert William Howes, a photographer and picture dealer. On 25 July 1911 – he and his parents having by then moved to Richmond, south London – he entered the Royal Academy Schools. He won a number of prizes and in 1912 was awarded a two-year Landseer Scholarship for Sculpture. Although his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War and military service, he returned following his demobilisation and completed his course in December 1920. According to Kineton Parkes, he subsequently attended the Slade School of Fine Art. Howes became a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1921 and in 1923, when the Society divided itself into Associates and Fellows, he was elected an Associate (ARBS); he was finally elected a Fellow (FRBS) in 1938. His earliest known commission is the Kew War Memorial (unveiled 25 June 1921) on Kew Green, Richmond. From the following year, 1922, until 1968, the year before his death, Howes was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy, one of his two 1926 exhibits, a bronze cast of his Madonna of the Lily, being purchased from the RA by Queen Mary. Public commissions include the design of the decorative and emblematic features of G.H. Holt and V.O. Rees’s British Memorial to the Missing, Soissons, France (carved in situ by Herbert Hart; memorial unveiled 1928); architectural sculpture on the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine building, Keppel Street, London (1926–28, Portland stone), plus, inside, a memorial tablet to Sir Andrew Balfour (1932, bronze and stone); Family Group (1936, stone), on the exterior of Bermondsey Health Centre, south London; Atlas (1938), Alliance Building, Cape Town, South Africa; Crucifix (model exh. RA 1952), St Matthew’s Church, Great Peter Street, Westminster; and Virgin and Child, St Peter’s Church, Hammersmith. His Aphrodite (exh. RA 1945, Portland stone) in Terrace Gardens, Richmond Hill, was his donation to the borough in which he had spent his early years and in which he met his wife. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a collection of photographs of Howes’ sculptures bequeathed by Kineton Parkes, including The New Age, bronze (exh. RA 1923), An Allegory, bronze (exh. RA 1925), The Madonna of the Lily, marble (exh. RA 1932), Eve, Roman stone (exh. RA 1933), Madonna and Child, Roman stone (exh. RA 1933) and a relief panel entitled Adam and Eve. Howes lived and worked in Hammersmith from c.1929 until c.1951 at which date he moved to Saffron Walden, Essex. His work, chiefly figurative, was strongly influenced by Romanesque sculpture and Eric Gill.
Bibliography: A.T. Broadbent, Sculpture Today in Great Britain, London, 1944, pl. 16 (Dawn); D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 182, 440; Imperial War Museum: ‘Maquette for the Soissons Memorial to the Missing’; W. Kineton Parkes, The Art of Carved Sculpture. Volume 1: Western Europe, America and Japan, London, 1931, pp. 113–14 (and illus. facing p. 114); F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 204, 277; Mapping Sculpture; R.B.S. Modern British Sculpture (Country Life Ltd), London, 1939, pl. 47 (Torso), pl. 48 (Madonna and Child); Richmond Local History Society: ‘Kew’s war memorials’; G.M. Waters, Dictionary of British Artists Working 1900–1950, Eastbourne, 1975.
Terry Cavanagh 2007; revised, August 2024