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Harry Bates

1850 - 1999

Sculptor. Born at Stevenage, Herts., Bates was employed as a stone-carver by the firm of Farmer and Brindley, before entering the South London Technical Art School (1879--81), where he was taught briefly by Jules Dalou. He then went on to study at the Royal Academy Schools, winning a travel scholarship in 1883. The next two years he spent in Paris, in contact with Dalou. He is supposed also to have encountered Rodin. Bates became a leading member of the ‘New Sculpture’ movement, applying the new freedom of modelling associated with the movement to the treatment of Classical subjects, often in a painterly style of relief. His Aeneid Triptych, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885, is now in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow. Bates’s life was short, and his free-standing subject pieces are few. They include Hounds in Leash (bronze), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1889, and now at Gosford House, East Lothian, and Pandora (marble with ivory and bronze), shown at the Royal Academy of 1890, and now in Tate Britain. His Mors Janua Vitae, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1899 (now Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), combines bronze, ivory and mother of pearl, to convey a symbolist message about life after death. Bates’s three public monuments are equestrian statues of Lord Roberts and the Marquess of Lansdowne for Calcutta, and a seated figure of Queen Victoria for Aberdeen. Further versions of the Lord Roberts statue were subsequently produced for Kelvingrove Park, Glasgow, and for Horse Guards Parade in London. Bates provided distinguished sculpture in stone and terracotta to buildings by the architects Aston Webb, John Belcher, J.D. Sedding and Thomas Verity. Sources: S. Beattie (1983); B. Read (1982); J.Sharples, “Harry Bates’s ‘Mors janua vitae”, Burlington Magazine, Dec. 2007.

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