Sculptor. Born at Oswestry, Shropshire, he studied at Goldsmiths’ College and, from 1934 to 1939, at the Royal Academy Schools. He served with the Jungle Field Artillery in Burma during the Second World War and, after demobilisation, took a part-time post at Goldsmiths’ College, becoming head of the sculpture department there in 1964. Before commissions for public sculpture came his way, Roberts-Jones explored generic themes, in what have been described as the Clown Series, the Smiling Woman Series and the Coiffured Female Head Series. Later, he experimented with sculptured still-lives and with sculpture incorporated into, or growing out of, miniature landscapes. The purchase by the Tate Gallery in 1960 of his bust of the French playwright, Paul Claudel (1957), helped to establish his reputation as a portrait artist, and led on to further private and public commissions. The public ones included a memorial to Augustus John for Fordingbridge, Hampshire (1967), and a number of commissions for portraits of eminent Welshmen from the Welsh National Portrait Collection, beginning in 1978. The most prominent of his public works is the statue of Winston Churchill (1973) for Parliament Square. Other versions of this were subsequently erected in Oslo, New Orleans and Prague. Later came the statues of Clement Attlee (1979) for the House of Commons, of Rupert Brooke for Rugby, Warwickshire (1988), and of Viscount Slim and Viscount Alanbrooke (1990 and 1993) for Whitehall. Drawing and sculpting animals was a continued preoccupation of Roberts-Jones, and between 1974 and 1984, he created a series of imaginary ‘Riders’, one of which, The Two Kings (1983–84), was commissioned for the town of Harlech by the Welsh Arts Council. He was elected an Associate Royal Academician in 1969 and a full Royal Academician in 1973, and was appointed CBE in 1975.
Bibliography: J. Black, Abstraction and Reality: The Sculpture of Ivor Roberts-Jones, London, 2013; P. Cannon-Brookes, Ivor Roberts-Jones. The Road to Harlech, London, 1983; P. Curtis (ed.), Sculpture in 20th-century Britain, vol.2: A Guide to the Sculptors in the Leeds Collections (Henry Moore Institute), Leeds, 2003 (entry on Ivor Roberts Jones by J. Darke); G.T. Noszlopy, Public Sculpture of Warwickshire, Coventry & Solihull, Liverpool, 2003, pp. xxii, 27–28, 268; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire, Liverpool, 2010, pp. xii, xiii, 95–97, 312; Royal Academy of Arts website: ‘Ivor Roberts-Jones RA (1913–1996)’; The Times, 14 December 1996, p. 21 (obituary); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 78, 145, 146, 210–13, 424–29, 464–65; Who Was Who (online edn), 2007.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, December 2024