William Spence (1793–1849)

Sculptor, born in Chester. He moved to Liverpool in c.1808 to study under a wood carver and teacher of drawing by the name of Mr Pether, and there became friends with the sculptor John Gibson (1790–1866), who recommended him to his employers, the brothers Samuel (c.1761–1829) and Thomas (c.1765–1822) Franceys, who subsequently took him on. The brothers were essentially builders, marble masons and plasterers, relying on sculptors such as Gibson and Spence to carry out all modelling and figurative work. Gibson left for Rome in 1817, and in 1819 the brothers split the business into two, reestablishing themselves as S. Franceys & Son, marble masons and sculptors, at 91 Brownlow Hill and next door, at no. 90, Thomas Franceys and Spence (Spence having now become a partner), marble masons, sculptors and ‘repository for marble chimney-pieces’. Following Thomas Francey’s death in 1822, Spence became sole proprietor, though still apparently traded as Franceys and Spence until c.1844. In 1828 he had been appointed master of drawing from the antique at the Liverpool Academy and in 1845 became the Academy’s treasurer. (One of his students was John Alexander Patterson MacBride [1819–1890], who went on to have a successful career as a sculptor in Liverpool.)

In 1812, two ideal compositions, Centaurs Pursuing Dante and Young Hymen (both untraced), which Spence had exhibited at the Liverpool Academy, attracted the attention of William Roscoe, the Liverpool banker, politician and patron of the arts. He commissioned a bust of himself, which Spence exhibited at the Academy in 1813 and which was replicated many times in various sizes and materials: a marble is in the National Portrait Gallery, bronze casts are in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the Manchester Art Gallery, and a porcelain edition, inscribed on the rear – ‘Pub^d by / T. Franceys & Spence / Sculptors Liverpool / W. Spence Fecit’ – is at Monticello, Virginia, USA. Roscoe tried in vain to persuade Spence to visit Italy to study antique sculpture, but it was not until later in life when his son Benjamin Edward Spence (c.1823–1866) was already working there as a sculptor, that he finally made the journey. Spence’s other busts include George Canning (c.1821; Walker Art Gallery), the architect John Foster Senior (1827; Walker Art Gallery), the politician William Huskisson (1831; untraced) and the Revd Hugh McNeil (1836; bronzed plaster in the Walker Art Gallery). He also executed a bust of the painter William Huggins (untraced), who returned the compliment, painting a portrait of Spence posing next to the clay model for his bust (the painting, entitled ‘The Sculptor’s Studio’, is now in the Walker Art Gallery). Spence also exhibited a considerable number of ideal sculptures, all of them untraced; although these were mainly at the Liverpool Academy, seven of the eight works he exhibited at the Royal Academy in London (in 1821, 1843 and 1844) were also of ideal subjects. His church monuments, of which he and his workshop produced many, are not considered his best work, Rupert Gunnis dismissing them by and large as ‘dull’. Franceys & Spence’s monument to Meyrick Bankes (d. 1827) for St Aidan, Billinge, Lancashire, perhaps led to Spence being commissioned by Bankes’s son, Meyrick Bankes II, to execute his designs for a Neptune Fountain (1848) for the family home, Winstanley Hall, near Wigan. The only public sculpture with which Spence’s name has been associated is the sculpture on the former Liverpool Collegiate Institute building, 1840–43 (façade designed by Harvey Lonsdale Elmes), comprising a coat of arms and a niche statue of the 13th Earl of Derby (attributed to Spence by Timothy Stevens). Spence died in Liverpool, aged 56, on 6 July 1849.

Ancestry website sources: various trade directories of Liverpool; Liverpool … Church of England Burials … for Thomas Franceys, Toxteth, St James 1813–1826 (1822); England & Wales, Non-Conformist and Non-Parochial Registers … for Samuel Franceys … Liverpool, Brunswick Chapel, Moss Street (Wesleyan), 1814–1837 (1829)

Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 209–11; P. Curtis (ed.), Patronage and Practice: Sculpture on Merseyside, London, 1989, pp. 43, 45–46, 48, 50; R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660–1851, (rev. edn.), London, [1968], pp. 362–63; E. Morris and E. Roberts, The Liverpool Academy and other Exhibitions of Contemporary Art in Liverpool 1774–1867, Liverpool, 1998, p. 721; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 57, 117, 139; J.A. Picton, Memorials of Liverpool (2nd edn.), London and Liverpool, 1875, vol. 2, pp. 217–18; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 1166-67.

Terry Cavanagh, September 2025