The lost Victorian who sculpted Churchill

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. As it is, Roberts-Jones (1913–96) found himself constantly battling against artistic fashions and today is barely even talked about.

Born in the Welsh border town of Oswestry, he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy Schools and Goldsmiths College (the latter’s fame as a breeding ground for conceptual excess still a long way into the future). A fledgling career had barely got going before war broke out and Roberts-Jones was posted to India and then Burma, where he served with the Royal Artillery.

His sculptural style was rooted in realism, his hero Rodin; yet, returning to post-war Britain, Roberts-Jones found the vogue was for nuanced figuration straining towards abstraction. The Tate director Sir John Rothenstein recognised — in the likes of Lynn Chadwick, Eduardo Paolozzi and Bernard Meadows —a gifted new generation of British sculptors. Roberts-Jones, in contrast, was dedicated to figurative work and in 1953 founded the (still-active) Society of Portrait Sculptors.

Perhaps his best pieces were the portrait heads he made of friends and family, capturing the subtleties and quirks of sitters he knew well. Yet his fame rests largely on his full-length public sculptures, vast memorials to the likes of Rupert Brooke, Augustus John, and, on Whitehall, the veteran Field Marshals Viscount Slim and Alanbrooke.

In their new book — a monograph, complete with catalogue raisonné— Jonathan Black and Sara Ayres dub Roberts-Jones ‘the last icon-maker’, and they do a good job setting his career in the context of lifelong charges of antediluvianism.