Biographical Introduction
According to the Mapping Sculpture site, Fagan, the son of a leather worker, “was educated in Dulwich and then attended South London Technical School of Art (Lambeth School of Art) 1881-5 where he studied under William Silver Frith. Between 1915-1919 he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps at the 3rd London General Hospital with Francis Derwent Wood.” Primarily an architectural sculptor, “who worked in bronze, stone and concrete,” he had a large workshop, and his works include “English cathedrals, the Hamburg-American offices in Charing Cross, a memorial tablet to the Dutch marine artists Willem Van de Velde the elder and the younger, in St. James's Church, Piccadilly, and the municipal buildings in Birmingham. War memorials by Fagan include a memorial tablet in St Mary the Virgin Church, Little Baddow, Essex (1920) and the memorial Upper Norwood, Westow Street, Upper Norwood, South London (1922).”
Works
- Door of Nobel House with Bas Reliefs
- Chemistry Lecture
- Jacquard Punch Card Loom
- Modern Farming
- Locomotive pulling a train across a viaduct with a dirigible and early helicopter in the sky above
- Astronomers in an observatory
- Man and animals, then and now (2 panels)
- Primitive transportation: men dragging a section of a huge tree trunk
- Building a house of reeds
- Neolithic agriculture
- Neolithic agriculture: men pulling ploughs
- Creating material for clothing from animal hides
- Peacocks
- Mercury and portrait heads
Bibliography
“William Bateman Fagan.” Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951. University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011. Web. 1 June 2013.
Created 1 June 2013
Last modified 28 January 2020