Sculptor and agronomist. Born at Teignmouth (Devon), son of the agronomist Sir John Bennet Lawes, 1st baronet of Rothamsted, Hertfordshire. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he distinguished himself in athletics. This was a lifelong interest, and, at the age of 55 he was to take up speed cycling. After graduating at Cambridge in 1865, he rented a studio in Chelsea and set up as a sculptor, training with John Henry Foley in London, and, in 1869, with Hugo Hagen in Berlin. Between 1872 and 1908 he exhibited 12 works at the Royal Academy. He also exhibited with the Society of British Artists and at the Paris Salon. In 1878 he won an honourable mention at the Paris Universal Exhibition. In 1882 he was sued for libel by the sculptor Richard Belt, whom he had accused of fraudulently passing off the work of other sculptors as his own. He lost the case, and, after an appeal, the original verdict was upheld. In the artistic community, however, it was generally accepted that the wrong verdict had been given. Lawes succeeded to the baronetcy and the Rothamsted property after the death of his father in 1900, and continued the agricultural experiments pursued by his father. In 1902 he assumed the additional name of Wittewronge, after the eighteenth-century kinsman from whom his family had derived its Hertfordshire estates. His magnum opus was the multi-figure group, The Death of Dirce, the full-size marble version of which is at Rothamsted, and of which a bronze version was set up outside the Tate Gallery shortly after his death. In 1988, the Museo del Prado, Madrid, acquired an unusual nude portrait statue of Lawes as ‘a victorious athlete in repose’, executed by his master, J.H. Foley, between 1870 and 1872.
Bibliography: L. Azcue Brea, ‘A sculpture by John Henry Foley in Spain: Charles Bennet Lawes as a victorious athlete in repose’, Boletìn del Museo del Prado, Vol. XXXVII, No. 55–57, 2019–2021, pp. 151–66; B.S. Long (rev. M. Barnes), ‘Wittewronge, Sir Charles Bennet Lawes-, second baronet (1843–1911)’, ODNB (online edn), 2004; Mapping Sculpture; J. Sankey, ‘The sculptor’s ghost – the case of Belt v. Lawes’, Sculpture Journal, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2007, pp. 84–89; The Times, Law Reports from 1882, 1883 and 1884 (listed in B. Read, Victorian Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1982, p. 389n5); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 156, 157, 184.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, December 2024
Caricature of Charles Bennet Lawes (later Sir Charles Bennet Lawes-Wittewronge), by ‘VER’ (François Verheyden), Vanity Fair, 12 May 1883 (photo: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
