1878 - 1961

Sculptor. Born in Glasgow, he served a five-year apprenticeship in a stonemason’s yard, and trained in the Glasgow School of Art (1906--7). In 1907 he came to London, and started exhibiting at the RA in the following year. In his pre-war statuettes, such as The Catapult (RA 1911) and The Kelpie (RA 1914), he showed remarkable skill in figure composition in the round. From 1916 to 1918 he performed military service in France and Palestine. As a sculptor of First World War memorials, Dick’s most impressive contribution was the gigantic lion crowning the Menin Gate at Ypres, erected in 1927. Between the wars, he distinguished himself with monumental architectural sculptures, many of them for City buildings. His magnum opus was the sculpture for the Kitchener Memorial Chapel in St Paul’s (1922—5) carried out in collaboration with the architects, Detmar Blow and Mervyn Macartney. Other architects with whom he collaborated were Edwin Lutyens, Sir John Burnet, James Lomax Simpson and Reginald Blomfield. He was President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors from 1933 to 1938. In 1938 he became the King’s (later the Queen’s) Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland. He executed effigies of George V and Queen Mary for St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and later, in 1947, the standing figure of George V for Old Palace Yard, Westminster. His public sculpture from the post-war years also includes the equestrian Lady Godiva for Coventry (c.1950) and Franklin D. Roosevelt for Grosvenor Square, London (1950).