Sculptor born at Dryburgh, Scotland. According to Stirling’s obituary in the Art Journal, his sculptural skills were precocious. While still a boy some clay models he had executed and left in a field attracted the attention of the writer and antiquary, Sir David Erskine of Dryburgh Abbey, who arranged for him to be apprenticed to a stone carver in Darnick. On completing his apprenticeship, he moved to Edinburgh, where he found employment and enrolled at the school of art. In the late 1840s he relocated to Ulverston, Lancashire, and married Mary Woodbourne. His final move was to Liverpool, where he initially worked for, and subsequently went into partnership with, an architectural carver by the name of Canovan. Much of Stirling’s work in Liverpool is either lost or unidentified. Surviving work includes most of the decorative carving (some was by William Grinsell Nicholl) on the Liverpool and London and Globe Insurance Company building, Dale Street (by C.R. & F.P. Cockerell, 1855–57) and two Atlantes and four female personifications of the Seasons for Brown’s Buildings, Water Street (by James Allanson Picton, 1861–63), relocated following the building’s demolition in 1928 to Calderstones Park to decorate the gateway on the corner of Harthill Road and Calderstones Road. Stirling also supplied a Portland stone statue of Albert, Prince Consort (1863), for Edward A. Heffer’s Prince Albert Memorial Clock Tower, Hastings (1862–64); following the demolition of the tower in 1973, Stirling’s statue was purchased by Miss Edith Skelton and installed in a greenhouse in Hastings’s Alexandra Park; finally, in 2017, the much-weathered statue was erected outside the town hall. Stirling died on 6 January 1867 and was buried in the Liverpool Necropolis. His firm continued after his death under his widow; in 1877 its tender for a Sicilian marble pedestal was accepted for William Theed the Younger’s statue of Henry Booth inside St George’s Hall, Liverpool. The Art Journal held Stirling in high regard, noting that ‘Liverpool is indebted for a considerable portion of the best ornamental sculpture which has, within the last few years, added to the architectural beauty of the town … The works he executed in the place are far too numerous for us to specify, but they all bear witness to his skill and taste, whether they consist of life-size figures, of busts, or of friezes, and other ornamental carvings’.
Bibliography: Art Journal: (i) 1 September 1863, p. 176, (ii) 1 March 1867, p. 84 (obituary); Builder, 17 January 1857, pp. 41–42; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. xiii, 10–13, 31, 294; Hastings and St Leonard’s Society: ‘Prince Albert Statue Is Re-Installed outside the Town Hall’; Mapping Sculpture; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 1203–04; J. Seddon et al, Public Sculpture of Sussex, Liverpool, 2014, pp. 180–81.
Terry Cavanagh, March 2025