Principally a sculptor (he also painted), he was born in Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire. His family moved to London in 1815 and in c.1820 he was apprenticed to Robert William Sievier. He first showed at the Royal Academy in 1825 and exhibited regularly until 1882. In addition to ideal groups and reliefs of sacred and poetic subjects, he received numerous commissions for portrait busts. In 1837, he produced three lions in artificial stone (one larger, two smaller) for Coade and Sealy of Lambeth; the larger lion now stands at the east end of Westminster Bridge and, of the two smaller one is lost and the other is mounted on one of the piers of the Rowland Hill Memorial Gates, Rugby Union Headquarters, Twickenham. He submitted two sculptures to the 1844 Westminster Hall competition and was awarded second premium in the competition for the Wellington Monument in St Paul’s Cathedral. Along with William Calder Marshall, he was rewarded for the quality of his entries for the Wellington competition by being offered a commission for relief panels illustrating biblical subjects, for the walls of the Consistory Chapel, where the monument was first erected. These are now somewhat unsatisfactorily set into the walls below the windows of the South Aisle of the nave of St Paul’s. Woodington’s public commissions include the bronze relief, The Battle of the Nile (1850), for the pedestal of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square; a colossal bust of Sir Joseph Paxton at Crystal Palace (1856); the statues of explorers and navigators, plus pediment sculpture, for the Exchange Buildings, Liverpool (1867; demolished); and figures of Plato, Archimedes and Justinian for the façade of the University of London buildings (now Royal Academy of Arts), Burlington Gardens (1869). He also secured commissions for two of the series of eighteen Magna Carta barons and prelates for the House of Lords: Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, and William d’Aubigny, Earl of Sussex and Arundel (1847–58). He was, from 1851, curator of the School of Sculpture at the Royal Academy and in 1876 was elected an Associate Royal Academician. He died at Brixton and is buried in Norwood Cemetery.
Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. xvii, xxxi, 256, 324; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. xiii, 301–03; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 88–90; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. 161–62; D.A. Cross, Public Sculpture of Lancashire and Cumbria, Liverpool, 2017, pp. 148–49; F. Lloyd et al, Public Sculpture of Outer South and West London, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 297–98; F. M. O’Donoghue (rev. M. Barnes), ‘Woodington, William Frederick (1806–1893)’, ODNB, (online edn), (2004), 2021; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 1403–05; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. 276, 279, 281–82, 283–84.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, Terry Cavanagh, January 2025