Details of Sculptor

Surname

Bridgens

Alternative Surname

First Name

Richard Hicks

Initial of Surname

B

Year of Birth/Baptism

1785

Flourished

Year of Death

1846

Biographical Details

Bridgens is best known as an architect and designer of furnishings, but he also exhibited at least one piece of sculpture early in his career. Little is known of his early life but an obituary described him as ‘the fellow student and intimate friend, in early life of the celebrated Chantrey’, which suggests that he may originally have come from Sheffield (cited by Bullock 1988, 17). As a young man he worked for George Bullock, from whose premises in Liverpool he exhibited at the Liverpool Academy in 1810, 1811 and 1812. His contributions included designs for a monument and for a chimneypiece at Speke Hall, Liverpool, together with a model of A nymph attiring (1). He moved to Bullock’s London premises at 4 Tenterden Street, Hanover Square by 1814, when he sent two more drawings, of Joseph Ridgway’s house at Ridgmont, Horwich, Lancs, to the Liverpool exhibition.
After Bullock’s death in 1818 Bridgens attempted to set up an architectural practice in Birmingham, where James Watt of Aston Hall employed him to design oak furniture in a Jacobean style to match the house. In 1822 he published a volume of engravings of the medieval church at Sefton, Lancs. He may have visited Rome at about that time for in 1822 he exhibited at the Royal Academy ‘an attempt to improve the Barberini candelabrum now erecting in bronze’ and a ‘View of the Forum in Rome - showing the excavation made at the charge of Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire’. In about 1825 he closed the Birmingham practice, which had failed to attract sufficient clients, and moved to the West Indies, where his wife had inherited a sugar plantation. He was in England soon after April 1831 and two years later he published a volume entitled Furniture with Candelabra and Interior Decoration Applicable to the Embellishment of Modern and Old English Mansions, which included influential designs in the newly fashionable Elizabethan and Jacobean revival styles. A second revised edition appeared in 1838. Bridgens was again employed at Aston Hall between 1834 and 1837, where a porch was built to his designs in about 1836 (demol 1856).
Towards the end of his life Bridgens served as Superintendent of Public Works in Port of Spain, Trinidad, a post to which he was apparently unsuited, for he often committed ‘faults which the humbler mechanic could have seen and avoided’ (Bullock 1988, 17). He died in Trinidad in November 1846.
Literary References: Graves I, 1905-6, 278; Gunnis 1968, 61; Joy 1977, 114-7, 143, 175, 256; Glenn 1979, 54-67; Bullock 1988, 17-20; Colvin 1995, 160-1; Grove 4, 1996, 806-7 (Austen); Morris and Roberts 1998, 99