Sculptor. He was a son of the sculptor Hamilton W. MacCarthy, and grandson of the sculptor and painter John James MacCarthy. He exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1875 and 1884. Of his nine exhibits, two, The Parting of Paul and Virginia (1876) and Robert Burns and Highland Mary (1880), were imaginary subjects, seven, portrait busts, three being of City of London dignitaries. In 1871, MacCarthy executed two busts of Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, one for St Peter’s School, Great Windmill Street, Westminster, and the other for the Merchant Taylors’ Company, for whom, in the following year, he also executed a bust of the Duke of Wellington.
Bibliography: A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts. A complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904 (8 vols, 1905–06), Vol V (Lawrence–Nye), 1906, p. 131; R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1951, London, [1968], p. 248; J. Johnson and A. Greutzner, A Dictionary of British Artists 1880–1940, Woodbridge, 1976; Mapping Sculpture; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 45–46.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, November 2024
