| Honorific Prefix: | Sir |
| Birth Date: | 1850 3, df=y |
| Birth Place: | London, England |
| Death Place: | Oxford, England |
| Occupation: | Artist |
| Known For: | Sculpture |
Sir William Hamo Thornycroft (9 March 185018 December 1925) was an English sculptor, responsible for some of London's best-known statues, including the statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the Palace of Westminster.[1] [2] He was a keen student of classical sculpture and was one of the youngest artists to be elected to the Royal Academy, in 1882, the same year the bronze cast of Teucer was purchased for the British nation under the auspices of the Chantrey Bequest.
He was a leading figure in the establishment of the New Sculpture movement, which provided a transition between the neoclassical styles of the 19th century and later modernist developments.
William Hamo Thornycroft was born in London into the Thornycroft family of sculptors. Both his parents, Thomas and Mary, and his grandfather, John, were distinguished sculptors. As a young child, Hamo was sent to live with an uncle on a farm in Cheshire until, aged nine, he began studying at the Modern Free Grammar School in Macclesfield, before in 1863 returning to London as a pupil at the University College School. He subsequently, from 1869, studied at the Royal Academy, where his primary influence was the painter-sculptor Frederic Leighton. While a student, Thornycroft assisted his father, Thomas, on the monumental sculptural group Boadicea and Her Daughters, later installed beside Westminster Bridge in London. At the Royal Academy Schools, Hamo Thornycroft won two medals and obtained his first paid commission for a work, a bust of a Dr. Sharpey.
In 1871, Thornycroft visited Italy and Paris and assisted his parents in creating the Poets' Fountain for Park Lane in London, by making several figures of poets in marble and bronze.[3] The fountain was subsequently destroyed in the Second World War.[3] During the first half of the 1870s he exhibited works on a regular basis at the Royal Academy, showing Fame, the Sharpey bust, a bust of Mrs Mordaunt and a model for an equestrian statue of Lord Mayo. In 1876 Thornycroft won the Gold Medal of the Royal Academy with the statue Warrior Bearing a Wounded Youth.[4]
Thornycroft created a series of statues in the ideal genre in the late 1870s and early 1880s that sought to reanimate the format of the classical statue.[5] These included Lot's Wife (1878) and Artemis and her Hound (1880 plaster, 1882 marble). In 1880 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy,[4] and produced the Homeric bowman Teucer (1881 plaster, 1882 bronze), and the Mower (1884 plaster, 1894 bronze), arguably the first life-size freestanding statue of a contemporary labourer in 19th-century sculpture.[3] [6] Both Artemis and her Hound and Teucer combined classical compositions with a increased sense of naturalism to imply movement and energy.[3] A companion piece to the Mower, the Sower, was exhibited in 1886 at the Royal Academy. When, in 1894, the critic Edmund Gosse coined the term "The New Sculpture", he formulated its early principles from Thornycroft's work.[5]
After 1884, Thornycroft's reputation was secure and he won commissions for a number of major monuments, most notably the innovative General Gordon in Trafalgar Square and since moved to Victoria Embankment Gardens.[3] Other significant works he created included an effigy of Harvey Goodwin, Bishop of Carlisle (1895; Carlisle Cathedral),[7] and the statues of Oliver Cromwell (Westminster), Dean Colet (a bronze group, early Italianate in feeling, outside St Paul's School, formerly in Hammersmith and now in Barnes, London), Alfred the Great (Winchester), the Gladstone Memorial (in the Strand, London) and Mandell Creighton, Bishop of London (bronze, erected in St Paul's Cathedral). Other significant memorials were built in several cities then in the British Empire.[4] [8]
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) Council commissioned Thornycroft to produce a detailed sculpted frieze for their headquarters at Chartered Accountants' Hall for a cost of £3,000.[9] Thornycroft's frieze, carved between 1889 and 1893, includes a series of figures representing Arts, Sciences, Crafts, Education, Commerce, Manufacture, Agriculture, Mining, Railways, Shipping, India, the Colonies, and Building.[10] The figure of the architect is based on the Hall's architect, John Belcher, and the sculptor on Thornycroft himself. The figure of the solicitor is H. Markby of Markby, Stewart & Co., who acted for ICAEW in its early years.[11]
Thornycroft continued to be a central member of the sculptural establishment and the Royal Academy into the 20th century. He was awarded the medal of honour at the 1900 Paris Exhibition,[4] and was knighted in 1917.[8] In 1901, he began a series of small bronze statuettes for the home market while continuing to work on large commissions. His single largest work, the monument to Lord Curzon, was unveiled in Calcutta in 1913.
Thornycroft exhibited The Kiss, a large ideal piece he had worked on for three years, at the Royal Academy in 1916, and received a standing ovation from his fellow artists when it was unveiled. He was awarded the first gold medal bestowed by the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1924, although he had previously, in 1908, declined the offer of the presidency of that body. Thornycroft's last major work was the tomb effigy of Bishop Huyshe Yeatman-Biggs which was shown at the Royal Academy in 1925 and subsequently installed in Coventry Cathedral.
Thornycroft became increasingly resistant to new developments in sculpture, although his work of the early 1880s helped to catalyse sculpture in the United Kingdom towards those new directions. In sum, he provided an important transition between the neoclassical and academic styles of the 19th century and its fin-de-siècle and modernist departures.A blue plaque commemorates Thornycroft at 2b Melbury Road, Kensington,[12] his studio designed by his lifelong friend the architect John Belcher, .[13] [14]
In addition to his parents, Thornycroft's grandfather John Francis was also a distinguished sculptor. His brother, Sir John Isaac Thornycroft, became a successful naval engineer; their sister, Theresa, was the mother of the poet Siegfried Sassoon; Theresa and sisters Alyce and Helen Thornycroft were artists.
In 1884, Hamo married Agatha Cox (1865 - 1958), who was fourteen years his junior. At a dinner in 1889, Agatha was introduced to Thomas Hardy, who later described her as "the most beautiful woman in England" and admitted that she was one of the models for the title character in his novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles.[15] Agatha and her husband were interested in the concept of "artistic dress", and a dress worn by her (presumed to be her wedding dress) is held in the costume collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, donated by their daughter, Elfrida Mary Manning, née Thornycroft (1901 - 1987), who was also his biographer.[16] [17]