Details of Sculptor

Surname

Towne

Alternative Surname

First Name

Joseph

Initial of Surname

T

Year of Birth/Baptism

1806

Flourished

Year of Death

1879

Biographical Details

He was born at Royston, Cambs, on 25 November, 1806, the third of five sons of the Rev Thomas Towne, pastor to the New Meeting House and a director of the London Missionary Society. Little is known of his youth but he probably received much tuition at home since both parents were also teachers. He married a schoolteacher, Mary, and was living in 4 Holland Place, Lambeth at the time of the 1851 census, with two sons, five daughters and three servants. He was then described as an anatomical modeller and his eldest son, Joseph, was a medical student. In 1871 he was listed as a sculptor, living at 10 Holland Place, Lambeth, and by then the family had grown to nine.
Encouraged as a modeller by his father from childhood, in c1825 he took a 33 inch high wax model of a human skeleton to Cambridge to show the professor of anatomy, William Clark. Encouraged by his favourable reception in Cambridge, Towne took the model to London, and entered it in the Society of Arts competition (25). He was introduced to Sir Astley Cooper, a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, who authenticated the model as an accurate rendering of the human skeleton and he was subsequently engaged as a modeller for the new medical school. In 1827, when living at 8 High Street, the Borough, he was awarded a Society of Arts medal, again for an anatomical model (26).
During his 53 years’ association with Guy’s Hospital he completed a prodigious amount of work, producing over 200 anatomical wax models in the first 10 years. He gained an international reputation and received orders for models from countries all over the world, including America, Russia and Australia. Thomas Hodgkin, in a lecture on Towne and his anatomical models, said of him that ‘he was an artist, who had the signal merit of having both created his art for himself and arrived at such a proficiency in it that his works, already numerous, rival, if not surpass, those of the best and most distinguished masters of Florence and Bologna’. Most of his models for Guy’s have survived and are displayed in the medical school museum.
In 1834 he began exhibiting marble busts and occasional statues at the Royal Academy. Several had associations with the hospital, including heads of William Babbington, Thomas Addison and Sir Astley Paston Cooper, which has a large pedestal with a fine relief, also carved by Towne, of three youths carrying a sick man (10, 21, 19).
The Thwaytes monument had a relief in an architectural frame of Christ healing a blind boy (2).The wall tablet to Mary Faviell has a seated mourning husband and a little daughter at prayer (3). The Bishop Otter memorial (4) was singled out in the Builder in an article on Chichester Cathedral and its restoration: ‘The fine marble bust in memory of the amiable and excellent Bishop Otter, is intact, a fact we mention with reference to the sad fall of the tower and spire. The bust is by Towne, and bears a strong resemblance to the good prelate.’ Towne died on 25 June 1879.
Literary References: RSA Transactions, 1826, vol 44, xliv; Census records 1851, 1871; Wilks and Bettany 1892, 415; Graves VIII, 1905-6, 14; Gunnis 1968, 397-8; Pyke 1973, 149-50; Pyke 1981, 40; ODNB (Maynard)