George Blackall Simonds (1843–1929)

Sculptor. Born in Reading, son of George Simonds of H. & G. Simonds Ltd, brewers, he was educated at Bradfield College. He studied sculpture in Dresden from 1858, with Johannes Schilling, and then worked briefly as an assistant to Louis Jehotte in Brussels (1863–64). In 1864 he travelled to Rome via Florence, establishing himself there and befriending American and Italian artists. In 1870, George Kemp, a wealthy American businessman, paid a visit to Simonds’s Rome studio and, admiring his plaster model for The Falconer, ordered a colossal version in bronze. The 3.6m-high figure was cast by Clemente Papi’s foundry in Florence, using the lost wax process, and was unveiled in Central Park, New York, in 1875; some years later Robert Evans, a native of Beverly, Massachusetts, paid for a replica, which was cast by the sculptor George Brewster at the Gorham Foundry, c.1912, and erected in Beverly’s Lynch Park. Simonds also made life-size versions of The Falconer: a bronze cast, which he exhibited at the Vienna World’s Fair in 1873, and which is now in the Museo Revoltella, Trieste, and a version comprising a marble figure holding an electrotype falcon, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1875 (depicted in the Illustrated London News, 24 June 1875, p. 85), and which is probably the version now in the Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead. The medieval subject of this piece was somewhat exceptional in Simonds’s œuvre. More typical of his poetic classicism was his next ambitious composition, Dionysos (1878–79), of which a marble version is in the Shipley Art Gallery. Simonds, who returned to England in 1874, found many patrons in the north-east, but the largest concentration of public sculpture by him is in his home town of Reading: a colossal bronze lion (1886) commemorating the Battle of Maiwand, a bronze statue of George Palmer (1891), founder of the firm of Huntley and Palmer, and a marble statue of Queen Victoria (1897). Simonds’s other public statues include a statue of the Hon. Frederick Tollemache, Grantham, Lincolnshire (1891); a memorial to Sir Joseph Bazalgette, Victoria Embankment, London (1901); and a bronze statue of Queen Victoria, Weymouth, Dorset (1902). As a founder member of the Art Workers’ Guild, Simonds made great efforts to promote the lost wax casting technique. He shares with Alfred Gilbert the credit for having introduced it into this country. Simonds retired as a professional sculptor in 1903, though he continued to dabble. In his old age he was able to indulge his lifelong passion for falconry.

Sources include: manuscript biography of Simonds by H. Godwin Arnold, held in the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

Bibliography: H. Godwin Arnold, ‘George Blackall Simonds 1843–1929’, Berkshire Archæological Journal, 75, 1994–97, pp. 111–15; ‘Arts + Architecture Profiles from Art History Research net’, at Art UK: Artists – George Blackall Simonds’; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, p. xxxvi; T.A.B. Corley, ‘Simonds family (per. c.1768–1960)’, ODNB (online edn), 2007; Mapping Sculpture; Royal Berkshire History: ‘George Blackall Simonds (1843–1929)’; Simonds family website: ‘George Blackall Simonds (1843–1929)’; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 339–40.

Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, January 2025