Sculptor and clay modeller, born in Farncombe, Surrey. After leaving school he was taken on as an apprentice by Mary Watts in her Potters’ Arts Guild (established 1898) at Compton, Surrey. From 1900 Wren also worked as an assistant on the sculptures then being produced by Mary Watts’s husband, the painter and sculptor, George Frederic Watts. Following G.F. Watts’s death in 1904, Wren executed the miniature wall-monument to him at Compton, with its reclining effigy, flanked by relief renderings of two of Watts’s paintings. He also sculpted the small figure of Watts at the centre of the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, in Postman’s Park, London.
Ancestry website: (i) England and Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index. 1884. Q2; (ii) 1901 England Census. Surrey. Compton. ALL. District 10; (iii) 1921 England Census. Surrey. Guildford. 05; (iv) England and Wales, Civil Registration Death Index. 1968. Q1.
Bibliography: Mapping Sculpture; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003, pp. 295–98.
Philip Ward-Jackson, 2003; revised, Terry Cavanagh, June 2025