Treasures

AS PART of the Royal Academy 250th anniversary celebrations being held at arts institutions across the country, a new exhibition at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery shines a spotlight on the work of the sculptor, Gilbert Ledward RA.

Ledward trained at the Royal College of Art, followed by the Royal Academy schools.

Perhaps best known for his war memorial commissions, Ledward also has connections to the city of Stoke-on-trent. His parents were born in Burslem. His father, Richard Arthur Ledward, was a pottery modeller and sculptor who had worked for Wedgwood and his mother, Mary Jane Wood, was a descendant of the famous Wood family of Staffordshire potters.

Ledward counted amongst his friends, the writer Arnold Bennett, who was born in Stoke-on-trent and whose most famous novel, Anna of the Five Towns, was based on the Potteries.

The exhibition, Visions in Stone: Gilbert Ledward RA – sculpture and drawings will reunite many objects with significant archival material.

The display will feature objects from the museum’s own collections with significant loans from Leeds Museums and Galleries.

These will include the large stone sculptures, Strands of Man and the Miner, which both stood in the grounds of the museum for many years, and the portrait study in bronze, above, for one of the heads of the guards’ figures on the Guards Division Memorial on Horse Guards Parade, London.

The Guards Division Memorial, built between 1922 and 1926 was one of Ledward’s most important commissions in his early career. It commemorates 14,000 guardsmen who died in the First World War. A row of five guardsmen represent each of the guards’ regiments on the memorial: Grenadiers, Scots, Welsh, Irish and Coldstream. Ledward reviewed several parades of the five regiments before selecting models from the Irish Guards as representative types for the figures.

Visions in Stone: Gilbert Ledward RA - sculpture and drawings opens on December 8 and runs until March 31 2019. Tickets £5, concessions £3.