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Basil Gotto

1866 - 1954

Sculptor, painter, soldier, journalist and theatre manager. He was born in London and educated at Harrow. The painter George Clausen persuaded his father to send him to Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian. He returned to London in 1887 and was accepted at the Royal Academty Schools on presenting a Hercules in clay. Gotto’s unpublished autobiography claims that his statue of Victory, shown at the Royal Academy in 1889, was cast in bronze by Alfred Gilbert and was the first English example of casting by the cire perdue process. He set up a studio in Glebe Place, Chelsea. Something of a polymath, Gotto worked as a newspaper correspondent during the Boer War. He later executed the Middlesex Yeomanry South African War Memorial for St Paul’s. After World War II, during which he served as a musketry instructor, Gotto sculpted the Caribou “bellowing defiance” which commemorates fallen Newfoundlanders on five of the battlefields of the Western Front, and of which there is another cast in Bowring Park, St John’s, Canada. After executing other war memorials, Gotto turned to painting portraits. In the interwar period he was much involved in London theatre life, and played character parts in some early films. As well as belonging to the Royal Society of British Sculptors, he was president of the Chelsea Arts Club, and inaugurated the Chelsea Arts Club Ball. In later life he immersed himself in local government.

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