Sculptor. Born in Melbourne, Australia, the son of a Scottish architectural sculptor. He studied with his father and at the National Gallery of Victoria School of Design in Melbourne, coming to London in 1882. He entered the Royal Academy Schools but, finding the regime stifling, left shortly afterwards, subsequently travelling to Rome, and then to Paris, where he took a studio and learned by observing various sculptors at work, including Auguste Rodin. On his return to England in 1886 he took up an appointment as head of the modelling and design department of the Coalport Potteries in Shropshire. In 1888 In returned to Australia to execute sculptures on Parliament House, Melbourne. By 1892 he was back in Paris, where, in the following year, he exhibited his Circe at the Paris Salon. This received a mention honorable. When he exhibited this glamorous femme fatale at the Royal Academy in London in 1894, it was required by the hanging committee that her base, decorated with writhing nude figures, be covered with a discreet drape. From 1894 Mackennal remained in London, producing ideal works and architectural sculpture, but also increasingly involved with public monuments, including statues of Queen Victoria for Lahore, India (now Pakistan), (1898), Ballarat, Australia (1897–1901) and Blackburn, Lancashire (1903–05); of King Edward VII for Adelaide (1910–20) and Melbourne (1911–20), Australia, and Waterloo Place, London (1911–21); of Thomas Gainsborough for Sudbury, Suffolk (1910–12); and of Lord Curzon for Carlton House Terrace, London (1927–30). He also produced war memorials, including a South African war memorial at Highbury Fields, Islington, London (1904–05), and a First World War memorial at Blackburn, Lancashire (1924). He executed the tombs of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra for St George’s Chapel, Windsor (1910–27) and the 15th Duke of Norfolk (d. 1917) for the Fitzalan Chapel, Arundel Castle, West Sussex, but by far his most impressive funerary monument is the one to Lord and Lady Curzon (1907–13), in Kedleston Church, Derbyshire. London can boast several fine examples of Mackennal’s skills as an architectural sculptor, his last effort of this kind being the colossal bronze group of Phoebus Driving the Horses of the Sun (1924), crowning Australia House on the Strand at Aldwych. Mackennal also designed the George V coinage. He was knighted in 1921, and elected RA in the following year.
Bibliography: S. Beattie, The New Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1983; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. xiv, 250–51; D.A. Cross, Public Sculpture of Lancashire and Cumbria, Liverpool, 2017, pp. xiii, xiv, 15–16, 18–19; D. Edwards (ed.), Bertram Mackennal (Art Gallery of New South Wales), Sydney, 2007; ‘Golden Summers – Heidelberg and Beyond’, exh. cat. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1985/1986; Mapping Sculpture; N. Hutchinson, Bertram Mackennal, Melbourne, 1973; C. Marriott (rev. J. Peers), ‘Mackennal, Sir (Edgar) Bertram (1863–1931)’, ODNB (online edn), (2004), 2006; Royal Academy of Arts website: ‘Sir Bertram Mackennal RA (1863–1931)’; M.H. Spielmann, British Sculpture and Sculptors of To-day, London, 1901, pp. 132–35; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 383–86; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxxvii, 21–22, 405–09, 457–58.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, December 2024
Sir (Edgar) Bertram Mackennal, by Walter Stoneman, for James Russell & Sons, bromide print, c.1924, NPG Ax39065 (© National Portrait Gallery, London). Mackennal is shown working on his model for The Dawn of a New Age, his Royal Academy of Arts diploma work, accepted 1924.
