Thomas Brock

Sir Thomas Brock (1 March 184722 August 1922) was an English sculptor and medallist, notable for the creation of several large public sculptures and monuments in Britain and abroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most famous work is the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, London. Other commissions included the redesign of the effigy of Queen Victoria on British coinage, the massive bronze equestrian statue of Edward, the Black Prince, in City Square, Leeds and the completion of the statue of Prince Albert on the Albert Memorial. Biography Brock was born on 1 March 1847 in Worcester. He was the only son of a painter and decorator and attended the Government School of Design in Worcester, after which he undertook an apprenticeship in modelling at the Worcester Royal Porcelain Works. In 1866 he became a pupil of the sculptor John Henry Foley and also enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools, where he won a gold medal for sculpture in 1869. He met and befriended Frederic, Lord Leighton, whose emphasis on realism and naturalism in sculpture led Brock to become part of the New Sculpture movement and to develop his talent for sympathetic and realistic portraiture. After Foley's sudden death in 1874, Brock finished several of his commissions, including the monument to Daniel O'Connell in Dublin and a large bronze equestrian statue of Lord Canning for Kolkata. It was his completion of Foley's statue of Prince Albert for the Albert Memorial which first brought Brock to prominence and secured his position as an establishment sculptor. He also assisted in the casting of Lord Leighton's greatly influential 1877 sculpture An Athlete Wrestling with a Python. Brock was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1883 and became a full member in 1891. He was a founding member, and the first president, of the Society of British Sculptors. Brock's group The Moment of Peril (now in the garden of Leighton House) was followed by The Genius of Poetry, at the Carlsberg Brewery in Copenhagen. A plaster model for Eve was shown at the Royal Academy in 1898; a marble version (1900) is in the collection of the Tate and Brock also cast some smaller bronze replicas and other imaginative works that mark his development.