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Sir William Hamo Thornycroft

1850 - 1925

Sculptor. Born in London, son of the sculptors Thomas and Mary Thornycroft. From 1868 he studied sculpture under his father and at the Royal Academy. In 1871 he travelled to Paris and Rome, and on his return assisted his father with the completion of the Poets Fountain (1875) for Park Lane (demolished). His early Royal Academy exhibits were much influenced by the poetic classicism of the painters Leighton and Watts. In 1875 he won the RA Gold Medal with his group, A Warrior Bearing a Wounded Youth from the Battle. His first major success was Artemis (shown in plaster at the Academy in 1880 and commissioned in marble by the Duke of Westminster). In 1881 his RA exhibit, Teucer, was purchased by the Chantrey Trust, and in the same year he was elected ARA (RA in 1888). His Mower (1884, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and Sower (1886, Kew Gardens) introduced a note of contemporaneity into works that were nonetheless ideal. Success brought with it increased demand for public statuary, principal examples being General Gordon (1888, first erected in Trafalgar Square, now Victoria Embankment Gardens), Oliver Cromwell (1899, outside Westminster Hall), the Gladstone Memorial (1905, Strand, London) and the Lord Curzon Memorial (1909--13, Calcutta). Thornycroft became a founder-member of the Art Workers’ Guild in 1884. He was a major contributor to what was immediately recognised as an important realisation of the aims of the Guild, the architectural sculpture for John Belcher’s Institute of Chartered Accountants in the City of London (1889--92). Hamo Thornycroft was knighted in 1917.

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