John Henry Foley (24 May 1818 – 27 August 1874), often referred to as J. H. Foley, was an Irish sculptor, working in London. He is best known for his statues of Daniel O'Connell for the O'Connell Monument in Dublin, and of Prince Albert for the Albert Memorial in London and for a number of works in India.
While much contemporary Victorian sculpture was considered lacking in quality and vision, Foley's work was often regarded as exceptional for its technical excellence and life-like qualities. He was considered the finest equestrian sculptor of the Victorian era. His equestrian statue of Henry Hardinge, 1st Viscount Hardinge for Kolkata was considered, with its dynamic pose of horse and rider, to be the most important equestrian statue cast in Britain at the time. His 1874 equestrian statue of Sir James Outram, 1st Baronet for Kolkata was also widely praised and, like the Hardinge statue, was also considered an important symbol of British imperial rule in India. Foley's pupil Thomas Brock completed several of Foley's commissions after his death, including the statue of Prince Albert for the Albert Memorial.
Biography
Early life
Foley was born 24 May 1818, at 6 Montgomery Street, Dublin, in what was then the city's artists' quarter. The street has since been renamed Foley Street in his honour. His father was a grocer and his step-grandfather Benjamin Schrowder was a sculptor. At the age of thirteen, he followed his brother Edward to begin studying drawing and modelling at the Royal Dublin Society school, where he took several first-class prizes. In 1835 he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in London, where he won a silver medal for sculpture. Foley became a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1861 and an associate of the Belgium Academy of Arts in 1863. After the Great Exhibition closed, the Corporation of London voted a sum of £10,000 to be spent on sculpture to decorate the Egyptian Hall in the Mansion House and commissioned Foley to make sculptures of Caractacus and Egeria. In 1854, Foley submitted a design for the proposed monument to the Duke of Wellington to be sited in St Paul's Cathedral which was rejected. The art critic Edmund Gosse viewed Foley as having smoothed the ground for the development of the New Sculpture movement in British art. The statue was regarded as the most important equestrian statue to be created in Britain during the Victorian era and a bronzed plaster version was displayed at the London International Exhibition of 1862. In 1868, Foley was also asked to make the bronze statue of Prince Albert to be placed at the centre of the memorial, following the death of Carlo Marochetti, who had originally received the commission, but had struggled to produce an acceptable version. By 1870, Foley's full-sized model of Albert was complete and had been accepted. However a series of illnesses slowed Foley's progress and by 1873 only the head of the statue had been cast in bronze while hundreds of other parts were still individual plaster figures. Foley died of pleurisy in 1874, blamed by some on the extended periods he had spent working surrounded by the wet clay of the Asia model.
When Foley died, his student Thomas Brock took over his studio and his first job was to complete the figure of Albert which he did within eighteen months. By then, the Albert Memorial had already been unveiled without the statue of Albert. Other pupils and assistants were Charles Bell Birch, Mary Grant and Albert Bruce Joy. The statue of Lord Dunkellin was decapitated and dumped in the river as one of the first acts of the short-lived "Galway Soviet" of 1922.