Sculptor, writer, journalist and traveller, born in London, the second of three children of Moreton Frewen, of Brede Place, East Sussex, and his wife Clara, one of the daughters of Leonard Jerome of New York, a grandfather of Sir Winston Churchill. In 1910 she married Wilfred Sheridan (killed in the battle of Loos in September 1915) and bore two daughters, Margaret and Elizabeth, and a son, Richard. When Elizabeth died in February 1914, she modelled a little angel for her grave, discovering in the process a talent for sculpture. She studied under William Reid Dick and wanted to study under Jacob Epstein, but on hearing that Epstein did not take students, in autumn 1918 she convinced an admirer to give her a Christmas present of an Epstein bust of herself. While she sat for her portrait, she closely observed Epstein’s modelling methods which she later claimed in her book, Nuda Veritas (1927), ‘revolutionised my work’. Her first exhibition, with the National Portrait Society, generated considerable interest and she received commissions from Lord Asquith (prime minister, 1908–16) and the politician F.E. Smith; she also modelled a head of her cousin, Winston Churchill. In 1920 Leonid Krasin and Lev Kamenev, in London as part of the Soviet trade delegation, asked her to do their busts and invited her to Moscow to do the same for Lenin and Trotsky. Sheridan lived in the Kremlin for two months while not only Lenin and Trotsky but also Grigory Zinoviev and Feliks Dzerzhinsky sat for her. Following her return to England she was asked by the New York Times to publish an account of her time in Russia, which was published in 1921 as Mayfair to Moscow (American edition) and Russian Portraits (English edition). She next travelled to the United States and Mexico, returning to Europe in 1922 as roving correspondent for the New York World. She covered the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22) and the Irish Civil War (1922–23), and although she established a reputation as a leading war correspondent, she gave up journalism for sculpture in about 1925. In 1937 her son, Richard, died, aged only 21, from peritonitis. As she had with her daughter, Sheridan decided to carve a memorial for him. Hoping to assuage her grief and to perfect her wood-carving technique, she spent the summer at an art colony on a Blackfoot (Siksika) reservation in Montana. While there, she modelled portrait heads of Blackfoot men, two of which – Mountain Horse and Big Bull – are in the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery. She subsequently published an account of her time with the Blackfoot as Redskin Interlude (1938). On her return from Montana, she carved the memorial to her son from an oak tree from the park at Brede Place; entitled Our Lady of Brede, it was installed in the Lady Chapel of the Church of St George at Brede in 1941. In 1942 she made another bust of Churchill (bronze casts are at Chartwell and Harrow School). In 1947 she became a Roman Catholic and spent some years living in Galway (her cherrywood Crucifixion is in the Church of Christ the King, Salthill, Galway), returning to live in Belmont House, Hastings, East Sussex, in 1956. She published her final memoirs, To the Four Winds, in 1957. Sheridan died on 31 May 1970 and was buried in the churchyard at Brede. Many of her works, in wood, alabaster and terracotta, are in private collections.
Bibliography: A. Leslie, Cousin Clare: the Tempestuous Career of Clare Sheridan, London, 1976; A. Leslie, ‘Sheridan [née Frewen], Clare Consuelo (1885–1970)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edn), (2004), 2009; Mapping Sculpture; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 8–9; C. Sheridan, My Crowded Sanctuary, London, 1945; The Times, 2 June 1970, p. 12 (obituary); Who Was Who (online edn), 2007.
Terry Cavanagh, March 2025