1845 - 1938

Veterinary surgeon, sculptor and painter. Born in Ludlow (Shropshire). As a young man, his father dissuaded him from becoming an artist. Instead he trained as a veterinary surgeon, and was gazetted in the army in 1867, thereafter serving for twenty-three years, mainly overseas, in India, Abyssinia, Egypt and South Africa. During these travels he occasionally drew and painted, but it was an encounter with the sculptor C.B. Birch which led to his taking up sculpture. He took a studio in Kensington, and in 1884 showed at the Royal Academy a sculpted portrait of one of his own hunters, under the title One of the Right Sort. Jones’s early sculptures were small scale animalier works, or vivid depictions of military action. Becoming a member of the Savage Club brought him into contact with figures from the art-world, including Whistler. After the turn of the century, through the influence of military friends and with the support of the Prince of Wales, Jones began to receive commissions for public statuary: the Royal Marines Memorial in the Mall, London, unveiled in 1903, and the equestrian statue of a hero of the South African War, General Sir Redvers Buller, for Exeter, unveiled in 1905. Jones’s magnum opus was the Quadriga with a figure of Peace, finally erected on top of the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner in 1912, after a long gestation period, dating back to 1891, when he had executed an Assyrian Charioteer for exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery. In the aftermath of Word War I, Jones attempted without success to secure the commission for the London Memorial to the Royal Artillery. He did, however, sculpt the Cavalry Memorial (1920-24), with its group of St George and the Dragon, for Hyde Park. As with many practitioners for whom sculpture was a second profession or who practised as amateurs, Jones was suspected of employing more conventionally trained sculptors as “ghosts” to complete his work.