John, Sir William Goscombe

John, Sir William Goscombe (1860–1952). British sculptor, medallist, and lithographer, born in Cardiff, the son of a wood-carver, Thomas John; he assumed the name Goscombe from a village in Gloucestershire near his mother's old home. After studying at Cardiff School of Art and assisting his father in restoration work at Cardiff Castle, he moved to London in 1882 and continued his training at various schools, notably the Royal Academy. Between 1888 and 1891 he spent a good deal of his time abroad (with the aid of a Royal Academy travelling scholarship); he visited Italy, Spain, Greece, and the Near East, and spent a year in Paris, where he met Rodin. On his return he settled permanently in London, but he kept up close connections with Wales throughout his life (for example he designed the regalia used at the investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarvon in 1911). Goscombe John spent his formative years in London at a time when the New Sculpture was coming to the fore, and his work was strongly influenced by its ideas, as for example in the strain of fantasy evident in The Elf (plaster model, 1898, Royal Academy, London; marble version, Glasgow Art Gallery, 1899; bronze versions, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, and elsewhere). He made his reputation with statues of eminent Victorians and Edwardians, including an equestrian figure of Edward VII (casts in Liverpool and Cape Town), but he is now best known for memorials commemorating the Boer War and especially the First World War. Two are particularly highly regarded for their lively sense of dramatic action: the memorial at Port Sunlight (1921), a spectacular ensemble in which soldiers defend women and children around a village cross; and The Response 1914 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1923), showing a procession of patriotic volunteers, led by drummer boys with a winged figure of Victory above. Alan Borg (War Memorials: From Antiquity to the Present, 1991) writes that ‘On the basis of these two works alone', Goscombe John ‘deserves to be recognized as one of the major British sculptors of this century'. The figures in these two works are in bronze, but he also worked in stone, as for example in the granite Memorial to the Engine Room Heroes (Liverpool, 1916). The figures here show a mild degree of stylization, but generally he was a realist and completely out of sympathy with what he described as the ‘Easter Island’ style of modern sculpture. His later works included the Jubilee medal of George V (1935) and the Great Seal of Edward VIII (1936). He left a large collection of his work to the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, where an exhibition was devoted to him in 1979.