Details of Sculptor

Surname

Winchester

Alternative Surname

First Name

William

Initial of Surname

W

Year of Birth/Baptism

c1715

Flourished

Year of Death

1772

Biographical Details

The son of Henry Winchester of Wimbledon, he was apprenticed to Thomas Dunn on 30 April 1729 and became free of the Masons’ Company on 14 June 1739, at which time he ‘live[d] with Mr. Dunn’ (Masons’ Co Assistants, fol 10). In 1763 he was listed in Mortimer’s Director as a citizen and mason of Holborn (p 49). He took three apprentices, two of them family members, through the auspices of the Masons’ Company. Henry, the son of Henry Winchester, a mason, joined him in 1757, and Henry Winchester, the son of a butcher, in 1765. James Fleming of Whitechapel also arrived in 1765. Winchester signs the large churchyard monument to James Adams, 1765, a work that Gunnis notes illustrated in Palm’s Stifford and Its Neighbourhood (1872).
Literary References: Gunnis 1968, 437; Webb 1999, 13, 36
Archival References: Masons’ Co, Court Book, 1722-51 (1729); Freemen, fol 73 (1739); Court Book, 1751-96 (1 Oct 1772)