Details of Sculptor

Surname

Williams

Alternative Surname

First Name

James, of Ipswich

Initial of Surname

W

Year of Birth/Baptism

1798

Flourished

Year of Death

1888

Biographical Details

His commissions in Suffolk included reredoses, fonts and gable crosses as well as busts of well-known men. The son of a Monmouthshire smallholder, he was one of the many migrant poor who settled in Ipswich in the early 19th century, at a time when the stimulus of the Oxford Movement brought employment for stone masons in a growing number of church restorations. After a few years in Wickham Market, where he and his wife kept a general shop, he moved to Ipswich in 1845 where he rented a house, shop and warehouse in Queen Street. He appears to have learnt the rudiments of his art as a sculptor through church restoration. After restoring 13 fonts by removing the whitewash and ‘amending’ carvings destroyed by the Puritans, he made an octagonal font of his own, copied from one at Newbourne, with compartments filled with angels alternating with Evangelical symbols, illustrating what could be done in imitation of medieval sculpture.
Turning from his work as a restorer of church interiors he experimented with portraits busts which he exhibited in Queen Street (2). From the 1851 census it is known that he employed 6 men and 13 labourers, but had no assistants, which suggests that he took on refined carving work himself. He modelled busts in clay from which moulds and casts were produced (3). His burgeoning sucess enabled him to invest in land and by 1854 he owned seven properties; two years later he moved to a spacious house in the vicinity, Tintern Villa. Concurrent with the busts, he continued his ecclesiastical work. In 1857 he made an ambitious stone reredos for the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (9). The exhibition committee rejected it since ‘works in stone were not anticipated’, but the indignation voiced in the Ipswich Journal brought him attention and the following year the rector of St Mary, Brome, bought a reredos from him that sounds very like the one intended for Manchester (10). Williams provided another reredos for the International Exhibition of 1862 (13). The main section was finished in time for an exhibition held by the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology at the Athenaeum, Bury St Edmunds in 1861, and was shown in a prime position at the head of the room, where it attracted considerable attention. The Bury Free Press of 24 August 1861 noted ‘I would invite your special notice to the considerable effort ... the work of a Suffolk artist...It is for the reredos of a church and is the work of Mr Williams of Ipswich. I think you will agree with me in according to it the meed of your praise’. It was duly exhibited in 1862, attracted the attention of churchmen and led to further ecclesiastical commissions.
He continued to model or carve busts, some of them as large as 33 inches in height (5, 6). A demand for images of more modest proportions was met with a half-sized head of James Ransome, copied from a full-sized model produced several years earlier (8).
Advancing years and failing sight stemmed the flow. Williams died on 23 January 1888, aged 89 and was survived by his third wife. His lengthy obituary concluded: ‘His studio was a “study”. At every turn you met with the faces of Suffolk and Ipswich men who occupied prominent positions ... and here and there were to be seen the “mortal remains” of some of his bolder ventures, such as a marble reredos with saintly figures, mythological subjects and a good deal of other work ... By his death Suffolk loses a sculptor of great skill’ (Ipswich Journal, 3 Feb 1888). In tracing his development from a stone mason and decorative carver working in the context of the rapidly expanding world of church restoration to a figurative fine art sculptor, Read summarises his career: ‘Williams it seems to me was a competent, solid, honest Victorian sculptor. His career mirrors at a local scale that of national figures and his art reflects the age in which he lived’. Read concludes ‘There is surely no reason why this should not be a compliment to any artist’.
Literary References: Brown, Reynolds and Read 1985, 21-30