sir edgar boehm·1834 - 1890

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Joseph Edgar Boehm was born in Vienna on 4 July 1834. His father Joseph Daniel Boehm was Director of the Imperial Mint and a collector of antique sculpture and the Boehm's were Hungarian in origin.

“ As a practical sculptor Sir Edgar Boehm takes a high place in the English School, but as an artist he scarcely deserved the patronage he received”

In 1848 Joseph travelled to England and worked mostly at the British Museum for three years where he sketched and fell under the spell of the Elgin Marbles. He then studied sculpture in Italy, Paris and Vienna, where at the age of 22 he won the First Imperial Prize in 1856.

His father arranged a job for him, but Joseph had by that point decided he was going to be a sculptor and departed for Paris. He married Louise Francis Boteler of West Derby, Liverpool in 1860 and settled in London in 1862. ‘In the year of his arrival he made his début at the Royal Academy with a bust in the then unfamiliar material, terra cotta. In 1863 he exhibited statuettes in the same material of Millais and his wife. Boehm's work soon became popular, and, from about 1865 to the end of his life, commissions came to him in an unbroken stream from fashionable patrons as well as from government.

For some years he had almost a monopoly in providing statues of public men and of members of the royal family.' Boehm's large output included: St George and the Dragon, the marble statue Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle and the Duke of Kent in St George's Chapel, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, Queen Victoria at the Spinning Wheel, the recumbent figure Archbishop Tait in Canterbury Cathedral, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield in Westminster Abbey and the German Emperor Frederick also at Windsor.

In 1880 he executed the stone figures of Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales on the Temple Bar in Fleet Street. Boehm sculpted Carlyle on Chelsea Embankment, William Tyndale in Embankment Gardens, London and the Wellington Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. Among his busts were: Gladstone, Huxley, Lord Rosebery, Lord Napier, Lord Russell, Francis Drake, Lord Wolseley, John Ruskin, Lord Shaftesbury, Millais (in the Diploma Gallery in Burlington House) and Thomas George Baring, Earl of Northbrook (in the library of Mumbai University).

A representative selection of his busts are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. To critical acclaim, he executed the sarcophagus of Dean Stanley in Westminster Abbey, his memorial to General Charles Gordon in St Paul's Cathedral met with less approval. In 1877 he produced Field Marshal Sir John Fox Burgoyne for Waterloo Place (cast by H. Young of Pimlico), that same year he completed the colossal bronze King Edward VII at Byculla, Mumbai. He sculpted the equestrian statue of Lord Napier, which was erected in front of St George's Gate, Fort William, Calcutta in 1880 and removed in the 1970s to the Temple of Fame, Barrackpore. (After his death a copy by Alfred Gilbert RA was erected at Kensington Gore).

He sculpted the much travelled Baron Lawrence of the Punjab lately resident in London, Lahore and now at Foyle College, Londonderry. In 1887 he executed the head of Queen Victoria for the Royal Mint and the official Jubilee Medal. In 1865 he became a naturalised Briton, he was elected ARA in 1878, RA in 1880 and created baronet on 13 July 1889. He was a member of several foreign academies, lectured at the RA and was Sculptor in Ordinary to Queen Victoria. Boehm died suddenly in his studio on 12 December 1890. He was rumoured to have been the lover of Queen Victoria's daughter, the talented artist Princess Louise (1848-1939) and she was believed to have been with him at the time of his death.

Boehm's chief assistant Édouard Lantéri would become Professor of Sculpture and play an important role in the early days of the Society of British Sculptors. Two stipple engravings of Boehm by George J. Stodart may be seen in the National Portrait Gallery and also a bronze medallion by Lantéri.

The critic Sir Walter Armstrong (1850-1918) wrote Boehm's DNB entry in 1901 and in it offered the following gem of patronising snobbery: ‘As a practical sculptor Sir Edgar Boehm takes a high place in the English School, but as an artist he scarcely deserved the patronage he received. In the large bronze population with which he endowed his adopted country, it would be difficult to find a single true work of art, while some of his productions, notably the Wellington group at Hyde Park Corner fall lamentably short of their purpose'.