Edward Carter Preston (1885–1965)

Sculptor, painter and medallist born in Liverpool. He became an apprentice with E.R. Latham of Renshaw Street, a firm making decorative glass, where he studied gilding, lettering and engraving. He then moved on to Morton’s, a furnishing company, where he could have learnt about interior design. Meanwhile, he was also studying modelling, painting, drawing and decorative design at the Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art (the applied art section nicknamed the ‘Art Sheds’) possibly as early as 1898 and certainly from 1902 to 1905. He then joined the very progressive Sandon Studios Society. There he was initially influenced by the painter Gerard Chowne, but he was soon painting strongly coloured, decorative Post-Impressionist watercolours, some of which were exhibited at the Society in 1911 alongside a selection of works from Roger Fry’s famous first Post-Impressionist exhibition in London. In 1910 he married Marie, the sister of the sculptor Herbert Tyson Smith who became a close friend. During the war years he occupied Tyson Smith’s studio and his small polychrome models and statuettes in plywood of that period achieved some popularity. However, it was his success in 1918 in winning the competition for the design of the ‘Next-of-Kin plaque’, given to the closest relative of British or Dominion service personnel killed during the First World War, that secured for him national fame. He became a successful medallist, moving gradually from an archaic to a more classical style and often employing a rich symbolism and many literary allusions. As a sculptor he was responsible for a few modest war memorials, most notably at Holy Trinity, Warrington; at the Produce Exchange Buildings, Liverpool; for the Elder Dempster Company; and for J. Bibby & Sons. He also produced the Monument to the World Boy Scout Jamboree, near the entrance to Arrowe Park Hospital, Birkenhead (1930–31) and the twin Westmoreland stone relief busts of Sir Archibald Salvidge at the Birkenhead and Liverpool entrances to the Mersey Tunnel (1950–51). He became best known for his many statues in the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral, broadly early Gothic in style but with a distinctly twentieth-century stylization and sharply characterized faces. Towards the end of his career, he also carved many more imaginative figures and groups in wood using a modernist style indebted to Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.

Bibliography: Art UK: ‘Edward Carter Preston’; M. Bennett, The Art Sheds (Walker Art Gallery catalogue), Liverpool, 1981; R.F. Bisson, The Sandon Studios Society and the Arts, Liverpool, 1965, pp. 11, 29, 170–72; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 160–61; A. Compton (ed.), Edward Carter Preston, 1885–1965: Sculptor, Painter, Medallist (Liverpool University Art Gallery), 1999; P. Curtis, ‘The Sculptural Scheme in the Anglican Cathedral: Sculpting to Order?’, in P. Curtis (ed.), Patronage and Practice: Sculpture on Merseyside, Liverpool, 1989, pp. 94–101; Mapping Sculpture; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 11–13, 28, 35–36; S. Poole, ‘A Critical Analysis of the Work of Herbert Tyson Smith, Sculptor and Designer’ (unpublished Liverpool University PhD thesis), 1995, pp. 6–36; George Whitfield, ‘Liverpool Artists: Carter Preston’, Liverpool Diocesan Review, Vol. 2, 1927, pp. 423–25.

Emma Roberts, 2012