Details of Sculptor

Surname

Shenton

Alternative Surname

First Name

Henry Chawner

Initial of Surname

S

Year of Birth/Baptism

1825

Flourished

Year of Death

1846

Biographical Details

He came of a family of artists, his father being Henry Shenton, an engraver, and his uncle, Luke Clennell, a painter. His maternal grandfather was Charles Warren, a line-engraver. Young Shenton was a pupil of William Behnes and attended the Royal Academy Schools in 1843. In 1844 he received a medal from the Society of Arts (2). In 1844 he exhibited his ‘Burial of the Princes in the Tower’ at Westminster Hall, which was described by the Art Union as possessing ‘daring effect’, though apparently it was not finished to a sufficiently high standard (1). The following year Shenton exhibited a figure of Archbishop Cranmer, which was noted in the same journal: ‘This is a standing figure, plainly draped, and executed in style free and broad; and as the essay of a young artist, affords promise of much future excellence’ (3).
Shenton was not to fulfil this promise, for he died prematurely on 7 February 1846. His last address was 11 St James’s Terrace, Camden Town. Apparently he worked under very difficult conditions, for his first group was ‘modelled in a stable with a roof so low that the ground had to be dug away to the depth of several feet, while the only light came through a narrow window in the wall’. It was ‘to the damps and chill of this fireless work-room his friends attribute the first insinuation of that disease which has laid the sculptor in an early grave’. The journal paid the tribute ‘we grieve to hear of the untimely death of a young sculptor, whose future eminence in the profession we have had more than one occasion to predict’ (Athenaeum, 1846, 72).
Literary References: Graves VII, 1905-6, 107; Gunnis 1968, 349