1788 - 1867

Sculptor and designer for metalwork. Born in Bristol, son of a ship’s carver. After school, he worked for two years in a merchant’s counting house, before taking lessons in wax-modelling. Baily was converted to the ‘higher aspirations’ of monumental sculpture by John Bacon the Elder’s monument to Mrs Draper in Bristol Cathedral. He sent work to London, for inspection by John Flaxman, who then took him on as a pupil. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1808. In 1817, he was appointed chief modeller to the gold and silver smiths, Rundell and Bridge, and designed for the firm for the next 25 years. Baily’s statue of Eve at the Fountain was rapturously received when shown at the Royal Academy. Executed in marble in 1821, it was purchased for the Bristol Literary Institute (now in Bristol Art Gallery), and Baily was elected a Royal Academician in the same year. This was the paradigm of much Victorian ‘ideal’ sculpture. During the 1820s, Baily executed relief sculpture for the Marble Arch and for Buckingham Palace. He had a very large practice in funerary monuments, which ranged from the routine to the theatrical and grandiose. Examples of the latter are the monuments to Sir W. Ponsonby in St Paul’s Cathedral (1820) and to Lord Holland in Westminster Abbey (1840). Baily’s public portrait statues were however admired for their restraint and for the uncompromising modernity of their costume. He sculpted the colossal marble figure of Nelson for Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square (1839--43), the monument to Sir Robert Peel for Bury, Lancs. (1852), and the deliberately prosaic portrait of George Stephenson (1854), for the Great Hall of Euston Station (now in the National Railway Museum, York). Despite his having been one of the most esteemed Victorian statuaries, Baily experienced financial difficulties in the last years of his life. Source: Roscoe (2009).