Charles Bell Birch

Temple Bar marker topped by Birch's heraldic Dragon. Temple Bar marker in front of the Royal Courts of Justice. Statue of Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield by Charles Bell Birch, 1883, outside St. George's Hall, Liverpool Charles Bell Birch (28 September 1832 – 16 October 1893) was a British sculptor.

Biography Birch was born at Brixton in south London, the son of the author and translator Jonathan Birch (1783–1847) and his wife Esther (née Brooke). As a child he showed artistic promise, and at the age of twelve he was admitted to study at Somerset House School of Design. In the following year, 1845, his father moved to Germany, and Birch attended the Royal Academy in Berlin, where he produced his first significant work, a bust of the British Ambassador to Berlin, the Earl of Westmoreland. For ten years he was principal assistant to John Henry Foley R.A.

Birch won a significant prize of £600 in an open competition in 1864 from the Art Union of London for his marble work The Wood Nymph, which was judged to be the "best original figure or group". Subsequently, at least eight copies of this statue were cast in bronze for locations in Britain and throughout the British Empire. In 1891 he was one of eight eminent artists who were invited to submit designs for new British coinage.

Adrian Jones and Horace Montford were pupils of Birch.

Selected works Wood Nymph (1864), his first really popular work Statue of William Earle (soldier) (1887) outside St George's Hall, Liverpool Fountain (1889) in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney Statue of Queen Victoria (1896), at the north end of Blackfriars Bridge in London Statue of William Ward, 1st Earl of Dudley, (1888) Castle Street, Dudley, England Bust of Prince Frederick William of Prussia, taken from sittings before his marriage with the Princess Victoria The Last Call, a group representing the attempt to save the Residency at Cabul in 1879 An equestrian statuette of William III, created for the King of the Netherlands A series of illustrations for Lord Byron's poem Lara created for the Art Union of London (1880)