Sculptor, printmaker, furniture designer and teacher, born on 6 December 1928 in Weybridge, Surrey. He studied at Wimbledon School of Art, 1947–51, and subsequently the Royal College of Art, where he took the furniture design course. In 1956 he married Gillian Dalby. By the late 1950s he was the art teacher at Henry Thornton School in Clapham, south London, and in 1958 was commissioned by the London County Council to provide the school with an outdoor sculpture; this semi-abstract figure in ‘plastic metals modelled over reinforced concrete’ (as described by Edwin Mullins in 1962) – originally known only as Sculpture but later dubbed The Scholar – was in all probability lost many years ago. Another lost work, formerly in St Mark’s Church, Wimbledon (destroyed by fire in 1966), is his series of six Bath Stone corbels representing Angel with Syrinx; Christ turning out the money changers; Peter and the tribute money; St Matthew; St Luke; St John. In 1963 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and in 1970 a Fellow. In the mid-1960s he was one of the sculptors selected to produce sculptures for Sir Edward Maufe’s Guildford Cathedral: on the exterior, he was responsible for Clipsham stone high-relief figures of St Hubert above the south balcony of the tower; Piety, one of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit along the Cathedral’s north side (at the bases of the seven windows); and St Cecilia and Lady Margaret Beaufort, two of the four Lady Chapel buttress figures (some or all of which figures were carved in situ); and, inside, two of the four limewood figures of angels at the corners of the Children’s Chapel’s ceiling. During these years he was living in Carshalton, Surrey, and was commissioned by the architects Thompson & Gardner to produce a figure of Anne Boleyn in painted limewood for the old people’s home they were building on Church Hill in Carshalton. Unveiled by Gavin Astor, 2nd Baron Astor of Hever Castle, on 18 March 1967, it was awarded that year’s Sir Otto Beit Medal for the best sculpture outside London. Another Carshalton commission was his memorial in carved wood to the obstetrician James Melrose Tate, formerly in the Carshalton War Memorial Hospital (closed in 2005, the building was subsequently converted into private residencies; the fate of the memorial is unknown). In the early 1970s Huntley became principal of Sir John Cass School of Art, and in 1975 his book, Modelling and Sculpture, was published by Hamlyn. He was also the winner of a competition organised by the Government of Mauritius to produce a bronze portrait bust of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam (1900–1985), the first Prime Minister of an independent Mauritius; it is now in the grounds of Ramgoolam National Hospital in Pamplemousses, Mauritius. Huntley died on 2 December 2021.
Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, p. 349; Commemorative Art, August 1964, p. 213; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 306, 308; E. Mullins, ‘The Open-Air Vision. A Survey of Sculpture in London since 1945’, Apollo, Vol. LXXVII, no. 6 [ns], August 1962, (pp. 455–63), p. 462; C. O’ Brien et al, Surrey (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, 2022, pp. 387, 389; Royal Society of Sculptors: Dennis Huntley (1928–2021)’; Wikipedia: ‘Dennis Huntley’.
Terry Cavanagh, February 2026
Dennis Huntley carving the high-relief figure of St Hubert in situ above the south balcony of Guildford Cathedral’s central tower, c.1964–1966 (photo copyrighted free use, via Wikimedia Commons).
