1862 - 1929

Sculptor. He was educated at the Nonconformist Grammar School in Bishop Stortford (Herts), and studied art, first at the Cardiff School of Art, then at the Lambeth School of Art, under W.S. Frith, at the Slade School under Professor Fred Brown, and in Paris under Cormon and Puech, and at the Académies Julian and Colarossi. In 1886 he exhibited a Mother of Evil at the Paris Salon. Hampton’s debut at the Royal Academy in 1889 consisted of four portrait busts, and thereafter, although he continued to exhibit subject pieces, his reputation was based principally on his portrait work and on commissions for commemorative statues. For Cardiff he executed a statue of Lord Aberdare, for India, posthumous statues of Queen Victoria for Nagpur and Jubbulpore. Probably his most ambitious works were his two monuments to Charles, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst, Viceroy of India (1910-1916), erected in Hardinge Park, Patna, and at the Gateway of India in Bombay, one of which incorporated reliefs, the other allegorical statues and a lion. His most prominent statue in England was that of the 8th Duke of Devonshire, unveiled in Whitehall in 1911. After Hampton’s death, there was a debate in the letters column of the Times, as to whether he had been anything more than a highly professional purveyor of likenesses in portrait statues.