Sculptor and teacher, the son of E. E. Friedrich T. Schenck, a distinguished German artist and lithographer who settled in Edinburgh in 1840. He worked for two years in the lithographic partnership Schenck & Son, but with the encouragement of his father and the sculptor George Clark Stanton enrolled at the Edinburgh School of Arts, where he won a bronze medal in the National Art Competition in 1872. He went on to study at the National Art Training School, South Kensington (now the Royal College of Art), returning to Edinburgh in 1875 to study at the life class of the Royal Scottish Academy, after which he was appointed master of modelling at Hanley School of Art, Stoke-on-Trent. Much of his early design and modelling work was for George Jones’ Crescent Pottery, Stoke-on-Trent, but when the demand for this declined in the 1880s, he moved to London and began to specialise in architectural sculpture, working closely with the architect Henry Hare. Major schemes with Hare include interior figures and reliefs for the County Buildings, Stafford (c.1895), and Oxford Town Hall (1897), as well as exterior work for the Municipal Buildings and Public Baths, Shoreditch (1899), and the Carnegie Central Libraries at Hammersmith (1904–05) and Islington (1905). He also worked with the architect Arthur Beresford Pite at 37 Harley Street, London, but his finest work is thought to have been on Hare’s now demolished United Provident Institution on the Strand (1906). He died in London of influenza.
Bibliography: 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. 318–19; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. 128, 284; notes written by Schenk’s grandson, David H. J. Schenck, posted on the website of Bob Speel.
Ray McKenzie 2018
