Charles McBride (b. 1851 or 1853; d. 1903)

Edinburgh sculptor, mostly of portrait busts. The University of Edinburgh has his marble busts of the Revd. John Ker (1887); Alexander Grant (1887); Alexander Dickson (1889); John Inglis, Lord Glencorse (1893); and Sir William Muir (1900). In the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh is his marble bust of Daniel Rutherford Haldane (1887); in Edinburgh Central Library, his marble bust of the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, for whom McBride acted as an advisor in the purchase of paintings for his collection (1891), and in Campbeltown Museum, McBride’s bronze bust of Sir William Mackinnon of Balinakill (1894). McBride’s statuette of W.E. Gladstone (whereabouts not known) was evidently ‘much admired’. Of the small number of monuments he produced, the finest is the marble recumbent effigy of Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquis of Argyll, in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh (1895). He also executed outdoor monuments: to the geologist and explorer, Joseph Thomson (comprising a bronze portrait bust on a pedestal bearing a relief of a woman holding up a large map of Africa), for Thornhill in Dumfries and Galloway (1887), and to the president of the Imperial British East India Company, William MacKinnon (comprising a standing statue on a pedestal bearing small reliefs of sailing ships, etc), for Campbeltown in Argyll and Bute (1899). For the Monument to Sir Walter Scott, Edinburgh, McBride executed the figure of Dougal Gregor, a character from Rob Roy. A rare example of an ideal sculpture in McBride’s oeuvre, his marble statue, The Murmur of the Shell, h. 108cm, signed and dated 1888, was sold as lot 604, ‘Seated Woman with a Sea Shell’, through Sotheby’s, New York, in February 2019.

Bibliography: Gazetteer of Scotland: ‘Charles McBride, 1851–1903’; W.T. Johnston, Dictionary of Scottish Artists (c.2000), Scottish National Library, ref CD-ROM.585; R. McKenzie, Public Sculpture of Edinburgh (2 vols), Liverpool, 2018, vol. 1, pp. 72, 161, 198, 221, 446, vol. 2, pp. 347, 351, 509; The Scotsman, 18 December 1903, p. 4e; Sotheby’s, New York: 19th Century European Art, 1 February 2019, lot 604; Wikipedia: ‘Charles McBride (Sculptor)’.

Ray McKenzie 2018; revised, March 2026, Terry Cavanagh