Thomas Woolner (1825–1892)

Sculptor and poet. Woolner was born at Hadleigh, Suffolk. He studied under the sculptor William Behnes, before joining the Royal Academy Schools in 1842. In 1844 he sent a group, The Death of Boadicea, to the Westminster Hall exhibition. Friendship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti led to his becoming a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. After failing to win the competition for a monument in Westminster Abbey to the poet Wordsworth, Woolner travelled to Australia in 1852, hoping to make a fortune in the gold fields. When the fortune failed to materialise, he set up a portrait practice in Melbourne. He returned to England in 1854, and gradually won critical acclaim, mainly with his strong, naturalistic portraits. The list of Woolner’s busts reads like a roll-call of eminent Victorians: Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Trinity College, Cambridge, 1856–57); Thomas Carlyle (Castle Ashby, Northants, 1866); W.E. Gladstone (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1866); Cardinal Newman (Keble College, Oxford, 1866); Charles Darwin (University of Cambridge, Botany Department, 1869); Charles Kingsley (National Portrait Gallery, plaster cast, 1875); and Lord Lawrence (National Portrait Gallery, 1882). His public statues include Lord Palmerston in Parliament Square, London (1876), John Stuart Mill in Victoria Embankment Gardens, London (1878) and James Fraser in Albert Square, Manchester (1887). For the further reaches of Empire, Woolner sculpted statues of John Robert Godley for Christchurch, New Zealand (inaugurated 1867), Captain Cook for Hyde Park, Sydney (inaugurated 1879) and Stamford Raffles for Singapore (inaugurated 1887). His model for a memorial at Cawnpore to the British women and children massacred during the Indian Uprising, was rejected in 1861 in favour of the figure of an angel, by Carlo Marochetti, based on a drawing by Louisa Lady Waterford. Woolner was less prolific in ‘ideal’ sculpture. Before leaving for Australia he had executed a playfully grotesque statuette of Puck (bronzed plaster, Tate, 1847). His most ambitious imaginary work was probably Mother and Child, also known as ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ or ‘Civilisation’ (1856–67), sculpted for Sir Walter Trevelyan, and still at Wallington Hall, Northumberland. Woolner also executed a number of funerary monuments, and, at Wigton, Cumbria, the George Moore Memorial Fountain with bronze reliefs of ‘The Seven Acts of Mercy’ (1871). When the poet and critic Francis Turner Palgrave produced a Descriptive Handbook of the works of fine art in the London International Exhibition of 1862, in which Woolner’s work was extolled, it was suggested that Palgrave and Woolner had been complicit in the Handbook’s denigration of the work of such contemporary rivals as Alexander Munro and Carlo Marochetti. Following a controversy in The Times, Palgrave was forced to withdraw the Handbook.  Between 1877 and 1879 Woolner was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy, though he never lectured in this capacity.

Bibliography: Athenaeum, 15 October 1892, pp. 522–23 (obituary); T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. xxiii, 23, 24; D.A. Cross, Public Sculpture of Lancashire and Cumbria, Liverpool, 2017, pp. 155, 166–67, 191–92; W. Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, London, (1904–05), 2nd edn 1913; Illustrated London News, 15 October 1892, p. 475 (obituary); Mapping Sculpture; D. Merritt and F. Greenacre, with K. Eustace, Public Sculpture of Bristol, Liverpool, 2011, p. 82; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, p. xvi; G.T. Noszlopy, Public Sculpture of Birmingham (ed. J. Beach), Liverpool, 1998, pp. 30, 31–32, 142, 143; B. Read, Victorian Sculpture, New Haven and London, 1982, passim; B. Read and J. Barnes (eds.), Pre-Raphaelite Sculpture. Nature and Imagination in British Sculpture 1848–1914, London, 1991, passim; I. Roscoe et al, A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 1409–17; Royal Academy of Arts website: Thomas Woolner RA (1825–1892)’; Saturday Review, 15 October 1892, pp. 442–43 (obituary); T. Stevens, ‘Woolner, Thomas (1825–1892), ODNB (online edn), (2004), 2006; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 74–75, 219, 340; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xxx, 112, 116–17, 139, 182, 193–97, 202, 306, 313–16, 342, 388; A. Woolner, Thomas Wooler R.A., Sculptor and Poet: His Life in Letters, London, 1917; T. Wyke, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, Liverpool, 2004, pp. 16–18, 22, 24, 30, 42, 74–78, 102, 218, 305.</p.

Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011; revised, February 2025