Author Woolner Thomas

al heroes, such as Captain Cook and Sir Stamford Raffles. However, his most personal and complex works in sculpture are probably Civilisation and Virgilia. These demonstrate his attempt to express the tension between the static stone and the dynamic desires of the figures represented emerging into solidity from it. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1875 and served as professor of sculpture from 1877 to 1879. Woolner was also a poet of some reputation in his day. His early poem My Beautiful Lady is a Pre-Raphaelite work, emphasising intense unresolved moments of feeling. His later narrative works, Pygmalion, Silenus and Tiresius renounce Pre-Raphaelitism in favour of an often eroticised classicism. Woolner was a close friend of Alfred Tennyson, providing him with the scenario for his poem Enoch Arden. His speculations about human anatomy also impressed Charles Darwin, who named part of the human ear the 'Woolnerian Tip' after a feature in Woolner's sculpture Puck. Thomas Woolner died instantly from a stroke at the age of 67. His wife Alice died in 1912. Their son, Hugh, traveled back to his home in New York from her funeral on the Titanic. He survived the sinking of the ship.[1] - "Virgilia bewailing the absence of Coriolanus" in Strawberry Hill, London - Illustration by Holman Hunt to Woolner's "My Beautiful Lady", published in "The Germ", 1850 Statue of Bishop James Fraser, Albert Square, Manchester. Bust of Thomas Combe.