Sculptor born in Liverpool, a son of the stone and wood carver, William Henry Wilcoxson (1860–1943). He studied firstly at Liverpool’s School of Architecture and Applied Art and subsequently the Royal Academy Schools (1909–12) where, in his first year, he was awarded a silver medal for a model of a bust from the life and a one-year Landseer Scholarship for sculpture. From c.1911, he worked as an assistant in the studio of the sculptor, Francis Derwent Wood. He exhibited his first work at the Royal Academy, a bronze bust of his father, in 1913. In 1915, he enlisted in the Royal Field Artillery but in January 1917 was treated for severe shell shock. He subsequently entered the Royal Army Medical Corps, joining the department of his former employer, Derwent Wood, at the Third London General Hospital, Wandsworth, making masks for soldiers with facial disfigurements resulting from war wounds. In February 1920 he married Jeanie Hickson, and at the Royal Academy, 1922, exhibited a portrait head of his daughter, born the previous year. In 1921, he became a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors (RBS) and in 1923, at the division of the members into Associates and Fellows, was elected an Associate; he was elected a Fellow in 1938. He had been a member of the Art Workers’ Guild from 1922 but resigned in 1927. In addition to producing sculpture, he worked as a teacher; he was an instructor in the School of Sculpture, Royal College of Art, 1919–24, and subsequently a teacher of modelling at St Martin’s School of Art (he is recorded at the school in 1938/1939 but may have been there earlier; prospectuses for 1924–37 are lost). Although he lived until 1974, he exhibited for the final time at the Royal Academy in 1940; this was the model for his last known commission, a bronze statue of Captain Francis Light, which had been unveiled in George Town, Penang, Malaysia, on 3 October 1939 (subsequently relocated several times, by 2020 it was in the grounds of Fort Cornwallis). The change of his RBS membership from Fellow to Honorary in 1947 suggests that he had by then retired from active work as a sculptor.
Wilcoxson produced chiefly figurative sculpture. Among the many busts he executed are those of the educationalist, A.H. Gilkes (exh. RA 1915; now Dulwich College); Francis Derwent Wood (exh. RA 1918); the first Labour prime minister, Ramsay Macdonald (marble exh. RA 1924); and the surgeon Berkeley Moynihan (bronze exh. RA 1926; now Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, mounted on a display case containing bronze casts of the subject’s hands). He produced war memorials for Ripon, North Yorkshire (unveiled 1921), and Hale, Cheshire (unveiled 1922); war memorial tablets for the Royal Army Medical Corps (Westminster Abbey, unveiled 1922) and the London School of Economics (unveiled 1923); and in 1931 was commissioned to carve an additional set of unit badges for Sir Edwin Lutyens’ Royal Naval Division War Memorial (Horse Guards Parade, London; unveiled 1925). His church monuments include the tomb of Bishop Lewis Clayton (with a full-length effigy in Portland stone), Peterborough Cathedral (model exh. RA 1921) and a memorial tablet to Archdeacon Henry Armstrong Hall (exh. RA 1924) in the Church of St Oswald, Methley, Leeds, West Yorkshire. His commemorative mural tablet to Mary Ward (signed and dated 1922) is at Mary Ward House, Tavistock Place, London. Wilcoxson had a family connection with Malaysia (his brother, William James Wilcoxson, was managing director of the Straits Trading Company in the 1920/1930s) and, in addition to producing the statue of Francis Light for George Town, he provided the sculpture for Denis Santry’s Rajah Brooke Memorial for Kuching, Sarawak (unveiled 1924); a statue of Dr Loke Yew for Kuala Lumpur, Selangor (1928); and a statue of Queen Victoria for Penang (1930). He also executed a statue of Sir Hariram Goenka for Calcutta (Kolkata), India (study for statue exh. RA 1938).
Bibliography: Mapping Sculpture; W. Kineton Parkes, Sculpture of To-Day. Volume 1: America, Great Britain, Japan, London, 1921, pp. 88, 128; Pinang Gazette and Straits Chronicle, 24 January 1938, p. 9 (Francis Light statue); Royal Academy of Arts website: Frederick John Wilcoxson’; M. Steggles and R. Barnes, British Sculpture in India. New Views and Old Memories, Kirstead, Norfolk, 2011, p. 144; The Straits Budget: (i) 8 August 1924, p. 8 (‘The Sarawak Memorial. Bronze Tablets by London Artist’), (ii) 12 October 1939, p. 7 (unveiling of Francis Light statue); The Times: (i) 14 February 1920, p. [1] (marriage announcement), (ii) 18 June 1921, p. [1] (birth of daughter), (iii) 14 July 1922, p. 6 (unveiling of Mary Ward memorial), (iv) 26 January 1923, p. 7 (unveiling of LSE war memorial), (v) 12 April 1937, p. 18 (photo of model of Francis Light statue); P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 70, 71; T. Wyke, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, Liverpool, 2004, pp. xiv, 384, 391–92.
Terry Cavanagh, January 2025