Edward William Wyon - Biography

(1811-1885). Son of Thomas Wyon, chief engraver of the seals at the Royal Mint. He joined the Royal Academy Schools in 1829, on the recommendation of E.H. Baily. In 1831 he began to exhibit wax portrait medallions and busts at the Royal Academy. Wyon worked for the Art Union, producing in 1842 its first sculpture offer, a reduction of John Flaxman’s St Michael and Satan, described by the Art Union Journal as a ‘glorious work’. Also for the Art Union he created a Tazza, ‘modelled from a Greek design’, which was shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851. He modelled portrait busts and reliefs of scenes from Shakespeare, for interpretation in ‘statuary porcelain’ by Wedgwood. Wyon’s statue of Britomart (1856--61), for the Mansion House, marked his début as a monumental sculptor. In 1846 he produced a bronze statue of Richard Green, shipbuilder and philanthropist for East India Dock, London, and an extensive programme of architectural sculpture for the internal courtyard of Drapers’ Hall, in the City. In 1869, he produced figures of Galileo, Goethe and Laplace, for the University of London building in Burlington Gardens. Wyon executed a number of characterful reliefs for funerary monuments, including two in bronze for the monument to the Revd F. Robertson, in Brighton Cemetery (1853). Sources: R. Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors, 1660--1851, London, 1968; P. Atterbury (ed.), The Parian Phenomenon, Shepton Beauchamp, 1989. [CL2003]

The works of Edward William Wyon: