Sculptor, born at Caterham, Surrey, the second son of Revd. James Legrew, rector of St Lawrence’s, and his wife Elizabeth, a family descended from Huguenot refugees. He received a classical education but the talent he displayed from an early age in modelling small figures and animals led to his father placing him, in 1921, in the studio of the sculptor (Sir) Francis Chantrey. In 1822, Legrew was awarded the Silver Palette by the Society of Arts for a copy in plaster of a single figure and in the same year entered the Royal Academy Schools, where, in 1824, he was awarded a silver medal for the best model from the antique, and in 1829 a gold medal for the best original model of a historical subject (Ajax tearing Cassandra from the Altar of Minerva, which he showed at the Royal Academy in 1830). He showed at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions from 1826 to 1857 (30 works, a mixture of ideal subjects and portrait busts), at the Royal Society of British Artists in 1834 and 1835, and at the British Institution in 1829 and 1836. He travelled around Italy in the early 1840s, studying and working chiefly in Rome, after which he returned to his Pimlico address before relocating, by 1846 at the latest, to 1 St Alban’s Road, Kensington. He submitted two works to the 1844 Westminster Hall competition: The Last Prayer of Ajax and Milton Reciting to his Daughters; and four works to the Great Exhibition of 1851: the Milton group again; plus, Cupid, stung by a Bee, complains to Venus; Musidora; and Samson bursting his Bonds. In addition, plaster casts of Musidora and Samson, along his group, Murder of the Innocents, were selected for the Courts of Modern Sculpture in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham (opened 1854). Hardly any of his ideal works, according to the Art Journal (1857, p. 348), ‘found their way into marble’, a situation the magazine attributed to ‘the small amount of encouragement given to that class of art in this country’. Only two of his architectural commissions are known, a group of a seated woman with two children for the Lambeth Asylum for Female Orphans, Westminster Bridge Road, c.1824 (building demolished and sculpture lost; engr. repr. in Cavanagh, 2007, p. 367) and a statue representing London for Somerset House (engr. repr. in Illustrated London News, 14 February 1857, p. 135). He executed a small number of church monuments, the most ambitious being the marble effigy of Bishop Joseph Allen (d. 1845) for Ely Cathedral, the most personal, a memorial to his mother (signed and dated 1832), in the church of St Lawrence at Caterham. Although his own career was relatively unsuccessful, according to the Art Journal ‘he in no degree allowed this to affect his feeling towards his professional brethren’, always striving to help or offer advice, but only where it was requested. He was deeply religious and was an accomplished organist, even having an organ built under his own direction. He was also a linguist (able to read French, Italian, German, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac) and a writer (author of A Few Remarks on the Sculpture of the Nations referred to in the Old Testament, 1845; Ancient Sculpture of the Jews, 1855; and a short life of the sculptor John Flaxman). He never married, and the deaths in quick succession of his father, his only brother and his niece are believed to have contributed to a mental breakdown, culminating on 15 September 1857 by his taking his own life with a pistol shot to the head.
Bibliography: Art Journal, 1857, p. 348 (obituary); T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 367–68; L.H. Cust (rev. J. Edwards), ‘Legrew, James (1803–1857)’, ODNB (online edn), 2004; Morning Chronicle, 21 September 1857 (coroner’s inquest); I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 733–35.
Terry Cavanagh, February 2025