15 Facts About Hamo Thornycroft

Sir William Hamo Thornycroft was an English sculptor, responsible for some of London's best-known statues, including the statue of Oliver Cromwell outside the Palace of Westminster.

Hamo Thornycroft was a keen student of classical sculpture and was one of the youngest artists to be elected to the Royal Academy, in 1882, the same year the bronze cast of Teucer was purchased for the British nation under the auspices of the Chantrey Bequest.

Hamo Thornycroft was a leading figure in the establishment of the New Sculpture movement, which provided a transition between the neoclassical styles of the 19th century and later modernist developments.

William Hamo Thornycroft was born in London into the Thornycroft family of sculptors.

At the Royal Academy Schools, Hamo Thornycroft won two medals and obtained his first paid commission for a work, a bust of a Dr Sharpey.

In 1871, Hamo Thornycroft visited Italy and Paris and assisted his parents in creating the Poets' Fountain for Park Lane in London, by making several figures of poets in marble and bronze.

In 1876 Hamo Thornycroft won the Gold Medal of the Royal Academy with the statue Warrior Bearing a Wounded Youth.

Hamo Thornycroft created a series of statues in the ideal genre in the late 1870s and early 1880s that sought to reanimate the format of the classical statue.

Hamo Thornycroft's frieze, carved between 1889 and 1893, includes a series of figures representing Arts, Sciences, Crafts, Education, Commerce, Manufacture, Agriculture, Mining, Railways, Shipping, India, the Colonies, and Building.

Hamo Thornycroft continued to be a central member of the sculptural establishment and the Royal Academy into the 20th century.

Hamo Thornycroft was awarded the medal of honour at the 1900 Paris Exhibition, and was knighted in 1917.

Hamo Thornycroft exhibited The Kiss, a large ideal piece he had worked on for three years, at the Royal Academy in 1916, and received a standing ovation from his fellow artists when it was unveiled.

Hamo Thornycroft was awarded the first gold medal bestowed by the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1924, although he had previously, in 1908, declined the offer of the presidency of that body.

Hamo Thornycroft became increasingly resistant to new developments in sculpture, although his work of the early 1880s helped to catalyse sculpture in the United Kingdom towards those new directions.

In 1884, Hamo Thornycroft married Agatha Cox, who was fourteen years his junior.