Thomas Thornycroft (1815–1885)

Sculptor. A farmer’s son from Cheshire, he was first apprenticed to a surgeon. His artistic aptitude was brought to the attention of the Duke of Sussex, and through him the young Thornycroft was introduced to the sculptor John Francis, who took him on as a pupil in 1835. Thornycroft married Francis’s daughter, Mary, also a sculptor of great ability, in 1840. Marble busts, now in private collections, from the years before the Rome trip, show Thornycroft’s early competence as a sculptor of portrait busts. One is of Samuel Thompstone, dated 1839, probably the bust shown in marble at the Royal Academy in 1842, the other is of a young boy, Arthur Davenport, shown at the Royal Academy in 1840. Thomas and Mary Thornycroft visited Rome together in 1842–43, where they received advice from the expatriate sculptor, John Gibson. Gibson recommended Mary as a portraitist to Queen Victoria, but her husband’s career was slower to take off. After he had shown his group of The Jealousy of Medea at the Westminster Hall exhibition of 1844, Thornycroft did receive commissions in 1847 for bronze statues of two Magna Carta Barons, Henry, Earl of Hereford, and Roger le Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, for the House of Lords. His boldly galloping equestrian statue of the young Queen Victoria, exhibited in plaster at the Great Exhibition in 1851, despite receiving Royal approval, did not, in its first form, find a commission. Thornycroft was amongst those interested in a commission for an equestrian statue of the Queen for Glasgow, a commission eventually won by Carlo Marochetti, leaving Thornycroft bitter, and suspecting Royal favouritism. A lively equestrian statuette of the Queen in a modern riding costume, modelled in 1853, was edited in bronze by the Art Union. In 1857, Thornycroft entered the competition for the Tomb of the Duke of Wellington for St Paul’s Cathedral, a commission eventually won by Alfred Stevens. Following the completion of the statues of Magna Carta Barons, Thornycroft and his wife were commissioned to produce marble statues of Kings James I and Charles I for Westminster Hall. Carried out between 1861 and 1864, these are now in the Old Bailey (Central Criminal Court). After Prince Albert’s death Thornycroft was commissioned to produce equestrian statues of the Consort for Halifax (1864), Wolverhampton (1866) and Liverpool (1866), and a group representing Commerce for the Albert Memorial. Another public statue was the marble of the Marquess of Westminster for Chester (1869). The following year he made a companion Queen Victoria on horseback, a more matronly image than his previous portraits of the Queen, to stand beside his Liverpool Albert. Thomas Thornycroft’s most famous work is the colossal bronze group of Boadicea and her Daughters at the northern end of Westminster Bridge. Though started in 1856, this was cast in bronze posthumously, under the supervision of the sculptor’s son Hamo Thornycroft, and inaugurated only in 1902. Thornycroft’s last major work was the so-called Poets’ Fountain, commissioned for Park Lane, London, by a landowner, Mrs Mangini Brown, and completed in 1875. At this time Thomas Thornycroft’s interest in sculpture was dwindling, and the fountain was in the end a collaborative effort, involving both Mary and Hamo Thornycroft. It was demolished in 1948, only one fragment of it surviving. Thomas Thornycroft had for some time been fascinated by boat-building and spent increasing amounts of time in his old age aboard his steam-launch the Waterlily on the Thames.

Source for Samuel Thompstone bust: Email from Richard Thompstone to PSSA, 30 August 2025

Bibliography (updated 2023): T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. xiv–xv, xviii, 350, 415, 416, 421, 424, 425, 428, 429, 431, 434, 436; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 91–97; E. Manning [E. Thornycroft], Bronze and Steel. The Life of Thomas Thornycroft, Sculptor and Engineer, Shipston-on-Stour, 1932; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, pp. 61–62; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. 197–98, 204–04; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009; M. Stocker, ‘Thornycroft, Thomas (1815–1885)’, ODNB, (2004), 2006; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 71–72; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxxii, xxxiii, 340–44.

Philip Ward-Jackson 2011; revised, September 2025