Sculptor born in Andover (Hampshire), into a family of West Country stonemasons. He moved to London c.1810, and in 1814 married Sarah Abbot, whose portrait medallion he carved c.1816 (now in a private collection). In 1820 he enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools, winning a silver medal in 1821. About this time he became a pupil and subsequently an assistant of Francis Chantrey, whose influence is evident in his own prolific production of portrait busts and church monuments, such as the full-length statue of the Revd William Shipley (1828) in St Asaph Cathedral, Denbighshire, north Wales, are ambitious in scale. His ideal figures include a Reclining Nymph, shown at the Suffolk Street Exhibition of the Society of British Artists in 1837, and a Penitent, shown at the Westminster Hall exhibition in 1844 (both untraced). The former was commended by the Times (20 March 1837, p. 3) as one of the ‘most striking performances’ in the exhibition and by the Observer (19 March 1837) as ‘one of the most faultlessly beautiful figures that can be imagined’. Ternouth’s most prestigious commissions were the figures of St George and Britannia (1847) for the East front of Buckingham Palace (since removed and destroyed) and the relief of the Battle of Copenhagen for Nelson’s Column (1846–50); one of his preliminary models for the relief, sold at Sotheby’s London (5 October 2006), shows interesting differences from the final composition. Ternouth contributed 57 works, mostly portrait busts, to the annual Royal Academy exhibitions, 1819–49. He died of typhus on 13 December 1848, aged 52, and is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery beneath a Carrara marble stela of a grieving woman embracing an urn-topped pedestal which, it has been suggested, may be one of his own works.
Sources include: copy of an undated, unpublished life of John Ternouth by Roland Ternouth (supplied to Philip Ward-Jackson by Yolande Ternouth).
Bibliography: J.S. Curl (ed.), Kensal Green Cemetery, Chichester, 2001, pp. 207, 237, 242–43; Illustrated London News: (i) 9 March 1850, p. 168 (‘Sculpture of the new front of Buckingham Palace’, with engravings), (ii) 7 December 1850, p. 444 (Battle of Copenhagen relief panel, with engraving); I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 1229–32; P. Ward-Jackson, ‘“Is the Pedestal to be the Capital part of it?”. Pictorialism and the pedestal of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square’, in Display and Displacement. Sculpture and the Pedestal from Renaissance to Post-Modern (ed. A. Gerstein), London, 2007; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 279, 282, 283.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, January 2025
