Details of Sculptor

Surname

Thomas

Alternative Surname

First Name

John

Initial of Surname

T

Year of Birth/Baptism

1813

Flourished

Year of Death

1862

Biographical Details

A versatile and prolific artist, he was primarily an architectural sculptor, best known as the executant of Charles Barry’s elaborate gothic revival designs for the Palace of Westminster (the Houses of Parliament), but his sculptural activities included portraiture and ‘ideal’ works. Thomas was also a successful architect and designer of interior schemes. He was born at Chalford, Glos, perhaps to an hotel-keeper’s wife, and was left an orphan at the age of 12 or 13. He was apprenticed to a local stonemason and, since he was put to work restoring gravestones, he must have been familiar with many of the medieval churches in his neighbourhood. Thomas was a hardworking and flexible young craftsman, who painted portraits and signboards and engraved brass plates in his spare time. The course of his career was influenced by a visit to Oxford to see an elder brother, William, an architect. There he was apparently so impressed by the buildings that he decided to concentrate his attention on drawing and carving architectural ornaments.
After completing his apprenticeship Thomas settled in the Birmingham area, near his brother. He found abundant work as an architectural carver and was perhaps for a short time an architect’s assistant. A report in the Art Journal (1849, 340) relates that Charles Barry was so impressed by an unidentified gothic monument by Thomas in Huntingdon that he engaged the young man to carve all the architectural ornaments in wood and stone for King Edward VI’s Grammar School in New Street (55). An alternative explanation for his early association with Barry was given in an obituary, which suggested that Thomas obtained work at the grammar school by his own efforts and was there set to work carving ornamental bosses from wax models. There was a shortage of models, so the resourceful young man made one of his own. This was shown to Barry ‘who at once saw that the designer was a man of very superior abilities’ (ILN, 30 Aug 1862, 431). It was the sustained quality of Thomas’s work at King Edward’s School, built between 1832 and 1837, that led Barry to appoint him as overseer of decorative carving at the new Palace of Westminster (80).
Meanwhile Thomas travelled to Belgium, where he studied late gothic secular buildings including the town halls of Ghent, Bruges, Louvain and Ypres. He returned to England with numerous sketches of architectural details. By May 1841 he was supervising carving at the Palace of Westminster, though he was not formally appointed superintendent of stone carving until 1846. By 1843 work was well advanced and Barry reported to the Office of Works that a large quantity of carved stonework was ready to be fixed into position on three fronts (PRO Work 11/9/7, fols 3, 5). That year Thomas showed a painting, View of the workshops at the new Houses of Parliament, at the Royal Academy. The sculptural programme for the palace was extensive and complex: figures of monarchs, angels, saints, heraldic animals and coats of arms were sited on all major elevations, set off by rich gothic ornament. The decoration extended into the grand ceremonial spaces within. Thomas worked closely with Barry, producing detailed drawings from the architect’s outline designs, supervising the modelling workshop and directing the stone carvers. The team working directly under Thomas at Westminster included Robert Jackson, his chief assistant, James Mabey, foreman in the modelling shop and Thomas Garland, an architectural modeller. Several sculptors who later developed their own successful practices worked on the extensive decorative scheme. They included Alexander Munro, John Lawlor, Alexander Handyside Ritchie, Henry Hugh Armstead and John Birnie Philip.
John Thomas took on commissions for other architectural sculpture in various styles while work progressed at Westminster and after its completion in 1853. His sculpture for classical buildings included a pediment group and a series of reliefs representing the cities and towns served by the North Western railway for Philip Charles Hardwick’s Euston Square station (69, 71), as well as a tympanum relief depicting The City of Leeds encouraging Commerce and Industry and fostering the Arts and Sciences for Cuthbert Broderick’s Leeds Town Hall (92). The Free Trade Hall in Manchester, built in a restrained Renaissance revival style to the designs of Edward Walters, is decorated with allegorical figures of the Continents, Trade, Industry, Commerce and the Arts (87). The former West of England and South Wales district bank in Corn Street Bristol, designed by W B Gingell and T R Lysaght ‘in a glorious Venetian Cinquecento’, is encrusted in decorative sculpture including a frieze ‘bulging with putti in various pursuits and coats of arms’ (Pevsner).
Thomas’s success as an architectural sculptor encouraged him to venture into the realm of fine art, an unusual step for a craftsman without formal fine art training. His portraiture included a number of busts exhibited at the Academy (41-46), a statue of Thomas Attwood for Birmingham (32) and two statues, of Stephen Langton, the medieval Archbishop of Canterbury (29) and William Longespee, Earl of Salisbury (30) for the chamber of the House of Lords. The Langton and Longespee were not part of the scheme controlled by Barry but were commissioned by the Royal Fine Art commissioners, who also ordered statues from well-established sculptors like Patrick MacDowell and Thomas Thornycroft. Thomas’s ideal works include a group of Boadicea (25) commissioned by Sir Morton Peto, who made and lost his fortune in the construction industry, a figure of Rachel the daughter of Laban (26) and a plaster equestrian statue of Lady Godiva, now at Maidstone museum (33). Thomas also submitted a design in competition for the national memorial to Arthur, Duke of Wellington, for St Paul’s Cathedral (9), which was praised in the Builder. He exhibited regularly at the RA from 1842 onwards and showed a statuette of Ariel directing the storm at the British Institution in 1850 (17).
Among his important architectural commissions are two Jacobean revival style mansions: Somerleyton Hall, Suffolk, which was extended and adapted for Sir Morton Peto, and Preston Hall, Aylesford, Kent, built for Peto’s business partner Edward Ladd Betts. Thomas was also employed as an interior designer by John Houldsworth, the industrialist and patron of the arts, decorating his new town house at 1 Park Terrace, Glasgow in an eclectic mix of fashionable styles including Elizabethan and Gothic. When the Corporation of Brighton bought the Royal Pavilion from Queen Victoria in 1850 John Thomas designed nine chimneypieces to replace the original Regency ones which had been removed (49). He designed a fantastic Chinoiserie chimneypiece and large dragons and griffons above chandeliers in the music room, made in papier-maché by Charles F Bielefield.
One of his most discerning patrons was Prince Albert, who commissioned numerous works for the Royal palaces. The exterior walls of Balmoral are enlivened with Thomas’s fanciful, medieval inspired reliefs of St Andrew, St George and St Hubert and his depiction of the Royal family attending the Highland Games (88). He designed elaborate interior schemes for the private audience chamber and Royal print room at Windsor Castle and for the Royal dairy at the home farm, Frogmore. They are richly embellished with plasterwork, woodwork, painted decoration, ceramic tiles and fountains, all executed from his designs.
Thomas married twice. He died at his home in Blomfield Road, Maida Vale, at the age of 49, leaving a widow and one daughter and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. Soon after his death several major works went on display at the International Exhibition (33, 35, 39, 40, 54, 101). Initially the exhibition authorities prevaricated about displaying his model for a colossal monument to Shakespeare and it was suggested by a writer in the Builder (1862, 275) that the stress attendant on this disappointment hastened his death. He was still working on several projects, including statues of Sir Hugh Myddelton and Joseph Sturge when he died (36, 38).
During his lifetime Thomas was admired for his versatility and energy and he produced an enormous quantity and range of work in relatively few years, generally to a high standard. One critic suggested that his diversity was his weakness: ‘His best works were not equal to the best works of Foley, Bailey, Durham and such men; it was impossible that they could be. These men devote their whole lives to producing a small number of works of a highly refined character. Thomas’s works on the contrary are innumerable; and in every material - stone, wood, glass, porcelain, iron and brass; on wood and on paper; now a palace then a church or a Royal dairy; a whole village of labourers’ cottages, an armchair, a pulpit, a sideboard, a stained glass window, a garden seat or a splendid reception room in the palace of the Queen of England’ (ILN, Aug 30, 1862, 232).
EH
Literary References: AJ, 1849, 340, 1862, 144; Heffer 1861-62, 111-120; Builder, 1862, 275; ILN, 30 Aug 1862, 231-2; DNB, LVI, 1898, 184-5; Pevsner, Somerset: N & Bristol, 1958, 424; Gunnis 1968, 388-90; Physick 1970, 50, 163-4; Read 1976, 232-245; Read 1982, passim; Smith 1998, 266-278; Read 2000, 253-269; Curl 2001, 243; ODNB (Stevens)
Will: PPR, 26 April 1862, fol 248, effects under £25,000
Collections of Drawings: two albums of photographs, drawings and engravings of his works, compiled by a family member, probably around the time of his death, RIBA Drawings Coll, THOMAS, J, 2 vols (RIBA Drawings Cat 15, 1972-84, 35-9)
Miscellaneous Drawings: design for staircase lamp pedestals for Somerleyton Hall, VAM P&D pressmark H.2-d; design for a claret jug, to be decorated with reliefs by Maclise, pencil, VAM P&D E.5909-1910; design for a claret jug decorated with The Triumph of Bacchus, 2 sheets, pencil, VAM P&D E.5910, 5911-1910
Portraits of the Sculptor: Charles Louis Baugniet, 1847, lithograph, RIBA Drawings Coll, THOMAS, J, vol I, fol 1; self portrait, marble relief, c1850, Knox/Longstaffe-Gowan Coll; anon, engraving (Read 1976, 241 repr)