Although best-known for her ceramic figures, Phoebe Stabler was also a sculptor, modelling in clay for casting in bronze and lead, and carving in wood, stone and marble. Born on 14 September 1879 in Handsworth, Staffordshire, she was one of the five children of Liverpool-born James McLeish, an engineer, and his wife, Mary. Her two older sisters, Minne McLeish (1876–1957) and Annie McLeish (1877–1919), would also go on forge careers in the arts as, respectively, a textile and ceramic designer and a jewellery designer. By the time of the 1891 census their mother, now widowed, had relocated with her five children to Liverpool, living in her brother’s house in Westminster Road, Kirkdale; following their mother’s own death in 1895, the siblings lived together in a house in Egerton Road, Wavertree, with Minnie as head of household. In 1901, Phoebe entered the Liverpool School of Architecture and Applied Art (‘The Art Sheds’) where her tutors included the sculptor Charles John Allen and the painter Augustus John. In 1902, she was awarded a scholarship and in 1904 both a three-guinea prize by the Northern Photographic Society and a £60 travelling scholarship by the Liverpool Education Committee. Instead of travelling abroad, she used her scholarship to fund her course at the Royal College of Art in London where her tutors included Édouard Lantéri. In 1906 she married the sculptor and metalwork designer, Harold Stabler (1872–1945), whom she had known in Liverpool when he was assistant to Richard Llewellyn Rathbone, the instructor in metalwork at the Art Sheds. The couple established what was to be their lifelong home and studio at 34 Upper Mall, Hammersmith. From now on practising under her married name, in 1907 Stabler had her bronze statuette-group of a mother and her two children – its fluid modelling perhaps reflecting the influence of Lantéri’s teaching –selected for production by the Art Union of London. She began to exhibit widely in 1910: at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition in the Walker Art Gallery; with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in the New Gallery, London; and with the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers in the Grafton Gallery, London. Her Liverpool exhibit, a small-scale bronze group entitled Granny (signed and dated 1908), was purchased from the exhibition for the Walker Art Gallery’s permanent collection. In 1911 she showed at the Royal Academy for the first time; between this year and 1946 (the year after her husband’s death) she contributed to 21 of the annual exhibitions, with a total of 28 works, encompassing the full range of her output: statuettes, busts and groups, in bronze, lead, carved stone, earthenware and porcelain. In 1912 the Stablers installed a kiln on their property and Phoebe Stabler added the design and modelling of ceramic garden ornaments to her repertoire. Two of the stone sculptures she exhibited at the Royal Academy, ‘Carved head’ in 1916 and ‘The Dreamer’ in 1917, attracted the attention of Kineton Parkes in his 1921 and 1931 surveys of sculpture. In 1921 he wrote: ‘Phoebe Stabler, as is the case with several other women sculptors, carves direct, and works in miscellaneous materials. Her larger work is in stone, like her Head of a Woman … and the Dreamer … The former, more or less realistic, the latter, treated – the hair particularly – in a modified form of the modern manner …’, and in 1931, ‘Phoebe Stabler is another woman artist who attacks stone, and has exhibited at the Royal Academy in recent years two good pieces, A Woman’s Head and The Dreamer. Life-size, these well display a nice [in the sense of ‘precise’] decorative sense which is characteristic of Mrs. Stabler’s general work in plastic media.’ Pauline Rose has suggested that ‘The Dreamer’ may be the signed but not dated Portland stone head, now in the Leicester Museum and Gallery where it bears the title, Memory. Another surviving example of Stabler’s work in carved stone, Fortitude, is over the main entrance to the former YWCA building in East Acton Lane (on the corner with Greenview Close), north-west London (1929–31, by C.H. James). She began the carving in her garden and completed it in situ, as recorded in a 1930 British Pathé short film showing her climbing the scaffolding and applying finishing touches with mallet and chisel. In the second half of the film Stabler is seen in her studio, working on ‘the famous World’s Land-Speed Trophy … one of her most beautiful creations’ (the Wakefield Trophy, commissioned in 1929 by Sir Charles Wakefield). The kiln the Stablers had installed at Upper Mall having proved unsatisfactory, in 1921, Harold had become a partner in a joint pottery enterprise, Carter, Stabler, Adams (later known as Poole Pottery), which allowed a more commercial operation. The firm’s most prestigious commission was providing a 6.4m-high white, yellow and blue faience group of two angels raising the soul of a semi-naked serviceman heavenwards on H.L.G. Pilkington’s war memorial (‘The Cenotaph’) for Durban, South Africa, unveiled on 7 March 1926. Evidently inspired by the artefacts recently discovered in Tutankhamun’s tomb, Phoebe Stabler’s brightly coloured group initially met with disapproval, only latterly gaining acceptance as the monument’s most distinctive component. Stabler was an Associate member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors from 1923. She died – ‘suddenly’, according to The Times – on 6 December 1955 in West London Hospital, Hammersmith. Examples of her work, in addition to those cited above, may be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight; Aberystwyth University Ceramics Collection; and Rugby Art Gallery and Museum.
Ancestry website sources: Liverpool … Church of England Baptisms … Everton, St Saviour, 1813–1919; England Censuses: 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911, 1921; London … Church of England Marriages and Banns … Kensington and Chelsea, St Mary the Boltons, West Brompton, 1905; National Probate Calendar, 1956.
Bibliography: The Art Sheds (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, exh. cat.), 1981 (n.p.); D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; A. Clay et al, British Sculpture in the Lady Lever Art Gallery (National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside), 1999, pp. 74–75; W. Kineton Parkes, Sculpture of To-Day. Vol. 1: America, Great Britain and Japan, London, 1921, p. 129; W. Kineton Parkes, The Art of Carved Sculpture. Vol. 1: Western Europe, America and Japan, London, 1931 pp. 77, 123–24; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 53–54; Mapping Sculpture; P. Rose, Working Against the Grain. Women Sculptors in Britain c.1885–1950, Liverpool, 2020, pp. 74, 109–10, 116–17, 135–38, 141, 244–45, 275, pl. 11; The Times, 9 December 1955, p. 13 (obituary).
Terry Cavanagh, March 2026
