1882 - 1951

Sculptor. Born in Switzerland of English and French parents, he first studied art at Ashton-under-Lyne. He drew animals at Manchester Zoo. A cast he made of a dead lion brought him to the attention of the painter Herbert Dicksee, who helped further his career in art. Blundstone moved to London, and attended first the South London Technical Art School, and then the Royal Academy Schools. The RA travelling studentship enabled him to visit Egypt, Greece and Italy. After the First World War, Blundstone received commissions for war memorials for the Prudential Assurance Company’s London office, for Stalybridge, Lancs., and for Folkestone. In the 1920s he assisted Gilbert Bayes in the Modelling Department of the Sir John Cass School. As with Bayes, Blundstone’s work in the inter-war period took on a pronounced déco quality, especially in small domestic bronzes, but the same quality can be detected in his Memorial to Samuel Plimsoll on the Victoria Embankment (1929). At the end of his life, Blundstone sculpted a Wendy Memorial, a counterpart to Sir George Frampton’s Peter Pan, for Hawera in New Zealand. This was incomplete when the sculptor died and some final touches had to be given to it by Gilbert Bayes before it was despatched.