1827 - 1913

Stained glass and mosaic designer and sculptor. Born in London into a family said to have had huguenot origins, his mother, Selina (née Hollingsworth), was a portrait painter, who instructed her son in drawing and painting. At the age of eighteen, Clayton modelled a statuette of Narcissus, which 63 years later he had cast in bronze, and which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1908. Clayton’s first ambition was to be a sculptor, but though he enrolled as a probationary student in the Royal Academy’s sculpture school in 1849, he never completed the course. However, from the mid-1840s he was working under Sir Charles Barry on the sculpture of the new Houses of Parliament. He also worked for Anthony Salvin and George Gilbert Scott, the latter generally employing him on drawings which involved the human figure. As late as the 1860s, Clayton is supposed to have played a part in designing the groups around the base of the Albert Memorial, but his interest in historical stained glass and liturgy influenced the architects for whom he worked to push him in the direction of stained glass production. Scott encouraged him to go into partnership with another of his assistants, Alfred Bell. The famous partnership of Clayton and Bell, whose operations were eventually to be conducted from premises in Regent’s Street, was set up around 1857. As well as stained glass, Clayton took an interest in mosaic, and went to Italy in 1863 to prepare himself for the task of designing the tympana and spandrel panels of the Albert Memorial, carried out by the firm of Salviati. Clayton’ group of St George and the Dragon, crowning Scott and Birnie Philip’s Westminster Scholars Memorial, completed in 1861, was a rare example of sculptural work carried out after he had officially turned his attention to stained glass. He was a keen collector of drawings by John Flaxman and Alfred Stevens.