Sculptor, also practising as an architect by 1851. He was born in Kingston-Upon-Hull, the eldest son of Joseph Keyworth, a stone and marble mason who moved to London in 1826 to work in the studio of the sculptor Francis Chantrey with the intention of ultimately setting up on his own. In 1831 William began an apprenticeship with the sculptor Henry Weekes, while in c.1834, his father, his independent career having failed to materialise, returned to Hull. William seems to have followed soon afterwards for, although in 1837 he submitted his first work to the annual Royal Academy (RA) exhibitions from an address in Chelsea (29 Arthur Street), his earliest recorded commission, of c.1834, was for architectural ornaments on the Assembly Rooms in Kingston Square, Hull (destroyed by fire in 1891), and his residence is recorded in the RA catalogues as ‘Hull’ from 1838 onwards. He showed seven works at the RA between 1837 and 1844, all of them portrait busts: four are untraced, but Dr Ayre, MD (marble, 1837) is in the Guildhall, Hull; the Revd William Ellis (plaster, 1839), in the Lowewood Museum, Hoddesdon, Herts; and the Revd Walter Farquhar Hook (marble, 1844), in Leeds Civic Hall. A marble bust by Keyworth, of the surgeon Samuel Solly (signed and dated 1867), is in St Thomas’ Hospital, London. Perhaps Keyworth’s most unusual commission was a trio of life casts, comprising the heads of an Inuit couple, Memiaduluk and Uckaluk, who were brought to Hull in 1847, and of John Parker, the captain of the whaling ship which carried them there (now in Hull Maritime Museum). Keyworth, a keen advocate of the Gothic Revival, was commissioned in 1854 to make a series of plaster casts of medieval buildings for the medieval court at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham. A number of his funerary monuments were also in the gothic style, notably his monument to Major Thomas Northcliffe Dalton, for St Andrew’s churchyard, Fillingham, Lincolnshire (engr. in Illustrated London News, 17 November 1855, p. 593). He left a number of works in his will to his native town, but these were destroyed in 1943, in a Second World War air raid. Keyworth’s son, William Day Keyworth II (1843–1902), worked for his father before moving to London in 1860 to attend the National Art Training School and Royal Academy Schools. He subsequently returned to Hull (while retaining a studio in London) and, in addition to his independent work, occasionally collaborated with his father, the two going into partnership c.1880 as W.D. Keyworth & Son.
Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 60–61; A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts. A complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, Vol IV (Harral–Lawranson), 1906, p. 321; Mapping Sculpture; G. Mulcahy-Parker, ‘Keyworth, William Day, junior (1843–1902)’, ODNB (online edn), 2016; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 691–94.
Terry Cavanagh, February 2025