Francis Henry Aloysius Jahn was a sculptor and teacher of modelling, born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. His German-born father, Ludwig Louis Hartmann Adalbert Jahn (c.1839–1911), was a pottery painter and designer and, from 1893, the art director of Stoke’s Minton factory, and his older brother, Albert Carl Christian (c.1865–c.1835), was a jeweller and, from 1905, headmaster of Sheffield School of Art. Jahn studied at Hanley School of Art, began working as a potters’ modeller in Stoke, and in 1891 was awarded a National Scholarship to the National Art Training School at South Kensington. He subsequently, c.1896, went on to teach modelling at various art schools before, in 1906, being appointed by his brother as head of modelling at Sheffield School of Art, a post he held until 1925. Jahn was an active artist from 1896 to 1933, exhibiting both in the north of England and at the Royal Academy (1901–28). He designed the York and Lancaster Regiment War Memorial (1923), Weston Park, Sheffield, and two of his busts in bronze – Un Gamin (date unknown) and The Chorister (RA, plaster 1902; bronze 1907) – and his bronzed plaster Study for a Boy’s Head (presumably RA, 1901, ‘A study: head of a boy’) are in the Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum.
Bibliography: Mapping Sculpture: (i) Albert Carl Christian Jahn, (ii) Francis H. Aloysius Jahn, (iii) Ludwig Louis Hartmann Adalbert Jahn; D. White and E. Norman, Public Sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire, Liverpool, 2015, pp. 227–29.
Terry Cavanagh, May 2024