1871 - 1926

Sculptor. He was born at Keswick. He studied in Karlsruhe and then returned to England in 1889, where he attended the classes in modelling of E. Lantéri at the South Kensington School. He then went on to the Royal Academy Schools. While pursuing his artistic education, Wood worked as a modeller for the ceramic firm Maw & Co. and for the Coalbrookdale Iron Co. As a young man he also worked as an assistant to Alphonse Legros and Thomas Brock. In 1895, he won the RA’s Gold Medal with his group of Daedalus and Icarus, a bronze cast of which is in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. After a visit to Paris in 1897, he became Modelling Master at the Glasgow School of Art. In Glasgow, Wood executed some notable pieces of architectural sculpture, including very large allegorical figures for the parapet of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery (c.1898). He returned to London in 1901. He was a prolific creator of mythological and literary pieces, in a graceful eclectic style. His portrait busts are frequently elegant and forcefully characterised, though his marble portrait of Henry James, now in the Boston Public Library, impresses by its reserve. His public statues include Sir Titus Salt at Saltaire, Yorks., General Wolfe at Westerham, Kent, and Henry Royce, at the Rolls Royce Engineering Centre outside Derby. During the First World War, Wood had to confront many severe cases of mutilation while working for the London General Hospital on facial masks. In 1919, his sculpture entitled Canada’s Golgotha, depicting a Canadian sergeant crucified by the Germans, was withdrawn from the Royal Academy, after a formal complaint from the German government.. The design which he and Sir Edwin Lutyens presented for London’s Royal Artillery Memorial was turned down in favour of a much less euphemistic statement by C.S. Jagger. However in 1925 his Machine Gun Corps Memorial was unveiled at Hyde Park Corner. The figure of David on the memorial presented an image of physical perfection, far from the horror of modern warfare, a late example of the neo-Renaissance style of the ‘New Sculptors’ of the turn of the century.