Details of Sculptor

Surname

Tyley

Alternative Surname

First Name

James and Thomas & Sons, of Bristol

Initial of Surname

T

Year of Birth/Baptism

Flourished

Year of Death

Biographical Details

Thomas Tyley I c1788 after 1881
James Tyley c1792 -
Jabez Tyley c1824 -
Thomas Tyley II c1826 -
Henry Tyley c1845 -
William Tyley active c1834
The Tyley family maintained their business as monumental masons in Bristol over more than a century. Thomas Tyley I was born in Bath and married Eliza (born c1809), perhaps as his second wife. In 1881 (aged 93) he was living (as he seems to have done through most of his life), at Under Bank tenement in the parish of St Augustine, Bristol. Pigot’s Directory for Bristol, 1830, lists Tyley & Son (not Sons), stone and marble masons, at this address. Thomas I had at least three sons, Jabez, Thomas II and Henry, all marble masons living in the vicinity of St Augustine’s. Jabez is credited with the tympanum sculpture on the principal front of the Victoria Rooms, Bristol (now part of the university), c1841, which has a relief of Dawn in a chariot, with floating genii in attendance (138). In 1881 he described himself as a ‘retired sculptor’.
The Bristol sculptor James Harvard Thomas (1854-1921) was trained in the workshop. J H Thomas’s obituary notes that he once said ‘To learn marble carving I went to Thomas Tyley’s in St Augustine’s, who was then a very old man and had been a pupil of Bacon Jnr [John Bacon II] and retained many of the traditions of the English eighteenth century sculpture’ (letter, Bristol City Archives, inf. Douglas Merritt). James Tyley was probably the brother of Thomas I. There were other Tyley marble masons: James, born c1819 and Thomas, c1820, both spent their mature years in London.
A Thomas Tyley, whose kinship to the above listed family members is unclear, ventured out of the monumental field. He won a Silver Isis Medal in 1811 from the Society of Arts for a group entitled Christ healing the sick, at which date he lived at 23 Upper Marylebone, London (133). In 1830 he carved the dove on the pediment of Holy Trinity, Clifton (137) and in 1839 carved a statue of Sir Charles Wetherell (134). Another member of this generation was James Tyley II, who was apprenticed to John Dunn on 14 March 1807.
The firm was still active in 1864, for in that year it received a commission for a proposed sculpture gallery of British worthies (135, 136). On 22 October 1864 the Builder carried a report of the venture (p 783): ‘In accordance with a proposition in the Builder that busts or portraits of local worthies might usefully be placed in the respective public buildings of the localities in which they lived, it has been proposed by Mr. R. A. Kinglake to form a sculpture gallery of Somerset worthies in the Shire-hall. He has commissioned Messrs. Tyley of Bristol to execute a memorial bust of “Good Bishop Ken” well remembered in the diocese of Bath and Wells. The Marquis of Bath permitted Messrs. Tyeley to make a photograph of the portrait of Ken in the portrait-gallery at Longleat; and Scheffer’s painting of Ken in the Palace, Wells, was also copied for the same purpose, by favour of Lord Auckland. Another subject of sculpture is a memorial bust of the celebrated loyalist, the Rev. Henry Byam, D. D., Rector of Luccombe, Somerset, and chaplain to Charles II. in his exile’.
There are many monuments executed by the Tyleys in the West Country and the list below is not comprehensive. They are by no means all stock compositions. Gunnis considered the best to be the Gore, which has a medallion portrait between two figures of officers in full regimentals (24). Potterton notes of the Stock that it ‘has a figure of a mourning Religion kneeling at an altar, but bored by mourning alone, she is now engrossed in the book which is her attribute’ (22). The Worrall, a tablet to a four-year old child, has a relief of the sleeping child above a touching poem, the whole encased in a black frame (60). Penny illustrates the Rogers, which has a conventional, but crisply carved, broken Ionic column from which sprouts a luxuriant willow tree (75). The Lawless is a cartouche supported by a kangaroo and what may be an ostrich (123).
Literary References: Census returns 1841, 1861, 1881; Potterton 1975, 85; Penny 1977 (1), 29, 31, 119; Read 1982, 220