Edwin Whitney-Smith (1878–1952)

Sculptor born in Bath, Somerset, and christened, on 2 September 1878, Edwin Walter Smith. According to Rebecca Colley, the sculptor’s great niece, he added ‘Whitney’ (the surname of his paternal great-grandfather) to ‘Smith’ to make the more distinctive ‘Whitney-Smith’ at about the time he was becoming established as a sculptor. He had studied sculpture at Bath and Bristol schools of art, working, during the same period, for the artist and art teacher William Harbutt (1844–1921), best-known for inventing Plasticene, c.1897, as a non-drying modelling material for his students; Whitney-Smith’s bronze bust of Harbutt (1911) is in Bath’s Victoria Art Gallery. He won his most important commission in the early 1900s: a bronze fountain for the Baltic Exchange building, St Mary Axe, City of London (exh. Royal Academy [RA] 1907). Comprising a female nude standing on a shell and rockwork base and holding aloft a model of a galleon, it was damaged in the IRA bombing of the building in 1992. Although repaired and reinstalled in the replacement building, it was deemed unsuitable for the building’s 2022 refurbishment and sold through Bonhams auction house in July 2022 for £107,400. Signed and dated ‘E. Whitney Smith 1907’, this may be the earliest example of the sculptor’s use of his new name. Although from now on he would sign his works in this fashion (more usually hyphenated, as with his 1908 plaster statuette of Charlotte Gray at Munnings Art Museum, Dedham, Essex), he continued to submit works to the RA as Edwin W. Smith until 1912; not until 1915 does his name appear in official records as ‘Whitney-Smith’. He was a prolific exhibitor at the RA, showing 83 works between 1906 and 1952 (the last one posthumous), but never became a member, despite repeated nominations by some of the leading sculptor Royal Academicians in 1920, 1928, 1932, 1935, 1943 and 1951, and despite being a long-term friend of Alfred Munnings (Royal Academician from 1925, RA President 1944–49) and executing portrait busts of Munnings’s father, John (bronzed plaster 1908, exh. RA 1944; Munnings Art Museum) and of Munnings himself (exh. RA 1946, 1947; versions in bronze in Munnings Art Museum and Royal Academy collection). Whitney-Smith was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1915 but in c.1923 when the Society was dividing its membership between Associates and Fellows, he left. He was allowed to rejoin as an Associate in 1928 but appears to have resigned again in 1932, rejoining in 1935; he was finally elected a Fellow in 1938. He was best known as a portrait sculptor, his busts including the Liverpool shipping magnate, Sir William Forwood (Walker Art Gallery); the bronze founder A.B. Burton (bronze, exh. RA 1923); the comedian Tommy Handley (bronze, exh. RA 1945; BBC collection); and the architect Sir Banister Fletcher (bronze, exh. RA 1948). His life-size bronze bust of the trade unionist and politician Ernest Bevin (exh. RA 1931; Government Art Collection) was copied to a larger scale by the sculptor Ernest Shone-Jones for the Monument to Ernest Bevin, unveiled in 1955 in Tooley Street, Bermondsey, south London. Whitney-Smith’s imaginary figure pieces include The Waking Child (1911; bronze casts in Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston Upon Hull, and Manchester Art Gallery); The Goddess (exh. RA 1921; untraced; photo in Victoria and Albert Museum); and The Scarab (1924, exh. RA 1927; Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, Somerset). He married Ruth Pitt (d. 1950) in 1911 and was father to one son.

Bibliography: D. Buckman, Artists in Britain since 1945 (2 vols: A–L, M–Z), Bristol, 2006; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 195, 208, 210; Mapping Sculpture; National Portrait Gallery: ‘Edwin Whitney-Smith’ (including information, 3 January 2020, from Rebecca Colley); The Times, 11 January 1952, p. 6 (obit.); Who Was Who (online edn. 2007).

Terry Cavanagh, November 2024