Gilbert Ledward was born in Chelsea, London, on 23 January 1888, the third of four children of the sculptor, Richard Arthur Ledward, and his wife, Mary Jane (née Wood), who was descended from a Staffordshire family of master potters and figure makers. His father died in 1890, at the age of 33, when Gilbert was only two.
Ledward was educated at St Mark’s College, Chelsea, but left in 1901, when his mother decided to take her family to live in Karlsruhe, Germany. (This family included a fifth child, Olive, who seems to have been born in 1892, and was probably the half-sister of Ledward.) He returned alone after a year, and took up a place at Chelsea Polytechnic, later transferring to Goldsmiths’ College School of Art, where he obtained a London County Scholarship that enabled him, in 1905, to go to the Royal College of Art. He
studied there for five years under Edouard Lantéri, the college’s first Professor of Sculpture and Modelling.
In 1910, he moved to the Royal Academy Schools and, while studying there, began to practise as a sculptor and became Modelling Master at South London Technical School of Art. He would exhibit more than 120 works at the Royal Academy of Arts between 1911 and 1960.
In 1911, Gilbert Ledward married Margery Beatrix Cheesman, the sister of a fellow student, and they settled at 37 Hotham Road, Putney, close to Ledward’s mother. They would have two daughters and a son. In the same year, Gilbert’s elder sister, (Phyllis) Hilda, married the sculptor, Newbury Abbot Trent, while in the following year his younger sister, Enid, married the painter, Percy Hague Jowett.
1913 proved a particularly important year for Ledward in the development of his career. He completed his first major commission, a stone calvary for the churchyard of St Lawrence, Bourton-on-the Water, Gloucestershire. He also won three major awards: the first Scholarship in Sculpture from the British School at Rome and both the gold medal and travelling studentship from the Royal Academy Schools. He travelled to Rome to begin his three-year scholarship, and in the summer of 1914 travelled through Italy, making sketchbook drawings (which are now in the collections of the Royal Academy). However, his travels and his residency in Rome were brought to an abrupt end by the outbreak of the First World War.
On his return to London, Ledward continued his work as a sculptor, and in 1915 took a studio at 14a Cheyne Row, and completed Awakening, the bronze figure of a young woman, which stands on Chelsea Embankment. However, late in 1916, he became a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery, and returned to Italy to see active service, being mentioned in despatches. In April 1918, he was recalled to England and
seconded to the Ministry of Information as an official war artist. In that capacity, he produced plaster reliefs of men in action that provided the foundation for his subsequent war memorials.
These memorials included collaborations with the architect, Harold Chalton Bradshaw, who had been Ledward’s contemporary in Rome as the recipient of the first Rome scholarship in Architecture. Their most significant work together comprised the award-winning Guards Division Memorial on Horse Guards Parade, in London (1922-26 [see 42]), and the Ploegsteert Memorial to the Missing in Hainaut, Belgium (1926-29). Particularly impressive among Ledward’s other memorials is the bronze relief at the base of Blackpool War Memorial and Cenotaph, which was designed by the Lancashire architect, Ernest Prestwich (1922-23).
Ledward was elected an associate of the Royal British Society of Sculptors in 1921, and a fellow two years later. Between those two elections, he moved to Pembroke Walk Studios, in Kensington. In 1926, he became Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, and inherited as his assistant Henry Moore, who was ten years his junior. unfortunately, students so preferred Moore to Ledward that he had to put an ultimatum to the Principal, Sir William Rothenstein, that ‘either he goes or I do’ (Moriarty, 2003, page 58). As Rothenstein refused to end Moore’s appointment, Ledward resigned. Nevertheless, Ledward was influenced by Moore’s practice, if not his style, and during the 1930s turned away from modelling in clay to carving directly in stone. A striking example of this change of approach is Monolith, which was inspired by Adrian Stokes’s analysis of the work of the early Renaissance sculptor, Agostino di Duccio, in The Stones of Rimini (1934). It was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest in 1936 for the Tate Gallery (and remains the only work by Ledward in that collection).
In 1930, Ledward was appointed a member of the Faculty of Sculpture and Council of the British School at Rome. In 1932, he joined the selection committee of the Chantrey Bequest (remaining on it until 1950) and was elected an associate of the Royal Academy (becoming a full Academician in 1937). In the same year, he revived his working partnership with Chalton Bradshaw, by contributing the coat of arms to the architect’s design for the entrance to the Penmaenbach road tunnel in North Wales. He was also briefly a member of the Art Workers’ Guild (1933-38), an association that probably relates to his establishing a firm, in 1934, called ‘Sculptured Memorials and Headstones’, which promoted the better design and craftsmanship of memorials in English churchyards. He was supported in this by Eric Gill and Sir Edwin Lutyens, among others. In 1938, he became a member of the Advisory Committee of the Royal Mint.
Through the late 1930s and into the 1940s, Ledward produced a number of statues of recent and reigning British monarchs: carved images of both King George V and Queen Mary and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth for the restored cloister of Norwich Cathedral (1938); bronze images of George V for Kampala, uganda (1939), and Nairobi, Kenya (1940); and a bronze statue of George VI for Hong Kong (1947).
Following the end of the Second World War, Ledward again received commissions to produce memorials. These included heraldic sculptures on the entrances to shelters designed by the architect, Philip Hepworth, for the Reichswald Forest War Cemetery in Germany (opened in 1946), and the Combined Services Memorial for Westminster Abbey (unveiled by
Sir Winston Churchill in 1948).
In 1949, Ledward won the competition, organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in celebration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, to design a fountain for the centre of Sloane Square. The result – combining a life-size figure of Venus with a frieze of King Charles II and Nell Gwynn, who had lived near the square – was eventually installed in 1953.
Ledward also marked the accession of Queen Elizabeth by designing the Coronation Crown Piece, of which more than five million were minted. Then, in 1953, he designed the first Great Seal for Queen Elizabeth, and this was used for official purposes until 2001, when it was replaced by one designed by James Butler.
Ledward served as President of the Royal British Society of Sculptors in the years 1954-56 and as a trustee of the Royal Academy during the year 1956-57. He was awarded an OBE in 1956.
Ledward died at a nursing home at 31 Queen’s Gate, South Kensington, on 21 June 1960. His final work had been Vision and Imagination, a Portland stone frieze produced for Barclays Bank, Broad Street, in the City of London. It was saved from destruction in 1995, by the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, when the building was demolished.
His work is represented in the collections of the Royal Academy of Arts, and numerous public collections, including the Imperial War Museums; and The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery (Stoke-on-Trent).
Further reading:
Catherine Moriarty, ‘Ledward, Gilbert (1888-1960)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004,
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34463;
Catherine Moriarty, The Sculpture of Gilbert Ledward, Aldershot: Lund Humphries/ Leeds: Henry Moore Foundation, 2003;
Peyton Skipwith, Gilbert Ledward: 1888-1960: drawings for sculpture: a centenary tribute, London: Fine Art Society, 1988
