Sculptor, carver and gilder, born in Folkestone, Kent. His brothers Sampson (1816–1903) and Montague (1821–55) were also carvers. Pepper exhibited four marble busts at the Royal Academy: two in 1846 and one each in 1847 and 1854, giving his address as Duke Street, Brighton (1846 and 1847), and 39 Western Road, Brighton (1854). Three of the busts are untraced but that of the surgeon John Cordy Burrows (RA 1846, no. 1476) is in Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, which also has Pepper’s busts of General Sir George De Lacy Evans (1855), the Revd Joseph Sortain (1860) and Sir Robert Peel (date unknown). His bust of William Seymour (1850) is in Brighton Town Hall. His signed monuments include: in St Nicholas’s Church, Bramber, West Sussex, three memorial inscription tablets to members of the Lidbetter family, comprising a matching pair listing nine children of Leonard and Sophia Lidbetter, who died at ages ranging from 10 to 24 over the years 1850–59 and, between this pair, one to Richard Lidbetter, who died aged 71 in 1861; and in St Peter’s Church, Brighton, a monument which is described by Rupert Gunnis as ‘large … with a relief-bust of J. Allen, 1851’ and another, ‘a charming miniature Gothic work to Mrs. Crozier, with a small figure of a woman mourning by an urn’. Pepper also made the model for the three intertwined dolphins forming the centrepiece of the Victoria Fountain in Steine Gardens, Brighton, commissioned by John Cordy Burrows, designed by the architect Amon Henry Wilds, and inaugurated on 24 May 1846. One of Pepper’s sons, William Reynolds Pepper (1830–1919), was a sculptor and portrait painter.
Bibliography: The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. XXVI (August 1846), p. 193; A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts. A complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, (1905–06), Vol VI (Oakes–Rymsdyk), 1906, p. 105; R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851, London, [1968], p. 299; Mapping Sculpture; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 969–70; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 39–40.
Terry Cavanagh, March 2025