The sculptor Albert Bruce Joy, who died 100 years ago on July 22nd, was one of the best-known sculptors of his generation and was the recipient of many prestigious awards. He was “particularly admired for his naturalistic style”, according to the artuk.org website, and was “renowned for his ability to capture an excellent likeness of his subjects”, according to speel.me.uk website.
Born in Dublin on August 21st, 1842, the eldest son of William Bruce Joy, a member of the Royal College of Physicians, Ireland (nothing appears to be known about his mother), he came from a family of Huguenot background. He attended school at Offenbach in Germany and later studied at King’s College, London, and in Paris. His art training began at South Kensington Schools and the Royal Academy in London; his brother George William also studied art and became a painter of portraits as well as historical subjects and genre.
The famous (and also Dublin-born) sculptor John Henry Foley took Bruce Joy on as an apprentice and he remained in Foley’s studio for four years. In 1866, he featured for the first time at the Royal Academy Exhibition and after that exhibited there practically every year until 1923, the year before his death. He also exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1870 to 1914. Following his time with Foley, he went to Rome, where he’s said to have spent around three years studying. But, he said that “he found no teacher to compare with Foley”, according to Ruth Devine, who wrote the entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
He was fluent in French, German and Italian and exhibited frequently on the continent, winning many prizes, such as at the Vienna Weltaustellung (1873) and the Paris International Exhibition (1878); he was the only British fine-arts representative at the Great Antwerp Exhibition of 1885 and received the only award for busts at the Paris Salon in 1896. “These honours brought many commissions for important public monuments and statues. Indeed, he excelled at reproductions of famous people,” according to Ruth Devine.
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One of his most famous public sculptures is his enormous statue of the Liberal MP and prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone (1881), in front of Bow Church, London. Another is his bust of Lord Salisbury (1886), Conservative MP and prime minister, which is in Westminster Abbey, and a third would be his statue of the radical and Liberal statesman, John Bright (1891), in Albert Square, Manchester. Ruth Devine tells us that he found Gladstone and Salisbury most interesting sitters and he remarked “how they were engaging but continued with their political duties and correspondence, obviously unperturbed by his presence”.
Rev H Kingsmill Moore, secretary of the Bishop Berkeley Memorial Committee, commissioned him to execute a recumbent figure of the bishop in Cloyne Cathedral, Co Cork (George Berkeley was Bishop of Cloyne 1734-53), which was completed in 1890. “The letters exchanged with the committee portray him as a businesslike man of few words and a sincere craftsman,” according to Ruth Devine. At that time his studio was on Beaumont Road in London’s West Kensington. That he was the only sculptor to be given access to the body of King Edward VII in order to make his death mask shows the high public esteem in which he was held at the time, and he also did a bust of the king in white marble.
He travelled to the US twice, where he was commissioned to do works, among them the Ayer Lion at Lowell, near Boston, for which, it is said, he used a number of lions as sitters. Ruth Devine remarked that “he was a big man and seemed to enjoy working on large-scale pieces” but she pointed out that he also produced many medallions which were enormously successful, such as that of Sir Gabriel Stokes FRS, the famous physicist and mathematician. Some other of his Irish sculptures are a bust of his father and a full figure in marble of the eminent and pioneering 19th-century physician Robert James Graves, both of which are in the Royal College of Physicians, Dublin, and the seated figure of James Whiteside, lord chief justice of Ireland, which is in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. His statue of the great scientist William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1913), is in Belfast’s Botanic Gardens.
Bruce Joy never married and resided latterly at Bramshott Chase, near Hindhead in Surrey, where he died after a long illness. “He had some interesting views on food values and confined his diet mainly to vegetables, which he believed contributed to his longevity,” according to Ruth Devine.
This would make him a person very much in tune with the tenor of our own times.