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George Simonds

1843 - 1929

Sculptor. Born in Reading, son of George Simonds of H. & G. Simonds Ltd., brewers, he was educated at Bradfield College. He studied sculpture in Dresden from 1858, with Johannes Schilling, and then worked briefly as an assistant to Louis Jehotte in Brussels (1863-64). In 1864 he travelled to Rome via Florence, establishing himself there and befriending American and Italian artists. His colossal figure of a Falconer was completed in 1870, and a bronze cast of it was erected in 1876 in Central Park, New York, a gift to the city from George Kemp Esq.. The medieval subject of this piece was somewhat exceptional in Simonds’s œuvre. More typical of his poetic classicism was his next ambitious composition, Dionysos (1878-79), of which a marble version is in the Gateshead Art Gallery. Simonds, who returned to England in 1874, found many patrons in the north-east, but the largest concentration of public sculpture by him is in his home-town of Reading: a statue of Queen Victoria (1897), a colossal bronze lion (1886) commemorating the Battle of Maiwand, and a statue of George Palmer (1891), founder of the firm of Huntley and Palmer. His Falconer had been cast in Florence, by Clemente Papi, using the lost wax process, and, as a founder member of the Art Workers Guild, Simonds made great efforts to promote this casting technique. He shares with Alfred Gilbert the credit for having introduced it into this country. Simonds retired as a professional sculptor in 1903, though he continued to dabble. In his old age he was able to indulge his lifelong passion for falconry.

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