Henry Charles Fehr

Henry Charles Fehr FRBS (4 November 1867 – 13 May 1940) was a British monumental and architectural sculptor active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He produced several notable public sculptures, war memorials and works for civic buildings. These included architectural sculptures for Middlesex Guildhall, for Wakefield County Hall and for Cardiff City Hall. Throughout the 1920s, Fehr created a number of war memorials, often featuring detailed bronze statuary, for British towns and cities. Notable examples of Fehr's war memorials include those at Leeds, Colchester, Keighley and at Burton upon Trent.

Biography Fehr was born in Forest Hill in south-east London into a Swiss family, who had settled in England. Fehr attended the City of London School and is thought to have trained as an apprentice in the studio of the sculptor and stonemason Horace Montford, who supported his application to the Royal Academy Schools in 1885. Although Fehr won several prizes at the Academy, he was narrowly beaten to the 1889 gold medal in sculpture and a travelling scholarship by his fellow student Goscombe John. Fehr was greatly upset, and protested repeatedly, when the Tate moved the sculpture from an internal gallery to the position outside the building where it remains. J.S Gibson & Partners commissioned Fehr for decorative works on several buildings including the West Ham Technical Institute in London, for a school in Scarborough, for Walsall Central Library and, most notably, for the Middlesex Guildhall in Parliament Square. For the same company, Fehr made a coloured plaster relief frieze of scenes from the Wars of the Roses for the interior of Wakefield County Hall in 1898.

In October 1919, as World War I was drawing to a close, the Royal Academy in London held an exhibition of war memorial designs. At the exhibition Fehr displayed statuettes of three figures, Peace holding a dove, a winged Victory and Saint George with a sword and shield. Several other memorials, including those at Lockerbie and Langholm in Scotland, at Eastbourne and at Grangetown in Cardiff, only featured the figure of Victory, holding a laurel wreath and an inverted sword, on a pedestal or obelisk. The memorial on the Bund in Shanghai (destroyed on the orders of the Japanese army in 1943) featured Peace guarding a mother and child.

Fehr first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1887.

Public works 1891–1900

1901–1910

1911–1920

1921–1930

Other works A set of carved relief panels at the former Westwood School, built 1897-1900, in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. 1903 Boer War memorial, a stone tablet and a figure of Justice, on the facade of the Old Library, Dulwich College, London. The identity of the sculptor of the war memorial at Coggeshall in Essex is unknown but has been attributed to Fehr due to its similarity to his nearby Colchester memorial. Statue of Benjamin Disraeli in the Market Square at Aylesbury. Marble, seated statue of Edmund Cartwright in Cartwright Hall, Bradford.