John Henry Foley

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John Henry Foley (born May 24, 1818 in Dublin; died August 27, 1874 in London) was an Irish sculptor.

At thirteen he began to study drawing and modelling at the schools of the Royal Dublin Society, where he took several first-class prizes. In 1835 he was admitted a student in the schools of the Royal Academy, London. He first appeared as an exhibitor in 1839 with his Death of Abel and Innocence and Bacchus, exhibited in 1840, gave him immediate reputation, and the work itself was afterwards commissioned to be done in marble for the earl of Ellesmere. Lear and Cordelia and Death of Lear were exhibited in 1841. Venus rescuing Aeneas and The Houseless Wanderer in 1842, Prospero and Miranda in 1843. In 1844 Foley sent to the exhibition at Westminster Hall his Youth at a Stream, and was, with Calder Marshall and John Bell, chosen by the commissioners to do work in sculpture for the decoration of the Houses of Parliament. Statues of John Hampden and Selden were executed for this purpose, and received liberal praise for the propriety, dignity and proportion of their treatment. Commissions of all kinds now began to come rapidly. Fanciful works, busts, bas-reliefs, tablets and monumental statues were in great numbers undertaken and executed by him with a steady equality of worthy treatment. In 1849 he was made an associate and in 1858 a member of the Royal Academy.

Among his numerous works the following may be noticed, besides those mentioned above: The Mother; Egeria, for the Mansion House; The Elder Brother in Comus, his diploma work; The Muse of Painting, the monument of James Ward, R.A.; Caractacus, for the Mansion House; Helen Faucit; Goldsmith and Burke, for Trinity College, Dublin; Faraday ; Reynolds ; Barry, for Westminster Palace Yard; John Stuart Mill, for the Thames embankment; O'Connell and Gough, for Dublin; Clyde, for Glasgow; Clive, for Shrewsbury; Hardinge, Canning and Outram, for Calcutta; Hon. James Stewart, for Ceylon; the symbolical group Asia, as well as the statue of the prince himself, for the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park; and Stonewall Jackson, in Richmond, Va. The statue of Sir James Outram is probably his masterpiece. Foleys early fanciful works have some charming qualities; but he will probably always be best remembered for the workmanlike and manly style of his monumental portraits. He died at Hampstead, London on 27 August 1874, and on 4 September he was buried in St. Paul's cathedral. He left his models to the Royal Dublin Society, his early school, and a great part of his property to the Artists Benevolent Fund.

See W. Cosmo Monkhouse, The Works of J. H. Foley (1875).

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• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain. The article is available here: [1]