Alastair Smart

The lost Victorian who sculpted Churchill

A review of Abstraction and Reality: The Sculpture of Ivor Roberts-Jones, by Jonathan Black and Sara Ayres. This follower of Rodin has a solid legacy, though his most famous commission was 'a most unpleasant business'

‘While some observers were impressed, others felt the depiction of a doddery Churchill propped up on a walking stick unbecoming’ [Getty Images/iStock/Shutterstock] 
issue 16 August 2014

  • Abstraction and Reality: The Sculpture of Ivor Roberts-Jones

    Jonathan Black and Sara Ayres

    Philip Wilson Publishers, pp. 320

Ivor Roberts-Jones was in many ways the right artist at the wrong time. Had the sculptor been born a few decades earlier and worked in the Victorian age, when statues of the builders and defenders of empire were erected proudly and prolifically across the land, he’d surely have received no end of garlands.

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