Josefina de Vasconcellos

Josefina Alys Hermes de Vasconcellos (26 October 1904 – 20 July 2005) was an English sculptor who worked in bronze, stone, wood, lead and perspex. She was at one time the world's oldest living sculptor. She lived in Little Langdale, Cumbria, much of her working life. Her most famous work includes Reconciliation (Coventry Cathedral, University of Bradford); Holy Family (Liverpool Cathedral, Gloucester Cathedral); Mary and Child (St Paul's Cathedral); and Nativity (at Christmas) at St Martin-in-the-Fields (Trafalgar Square).

Biography De Vasconcellos was born in Molesey in Surrey; she was the only child of Hippolyto de Vasconcellos, a Brazilian diplomat and Freda Coleman, an English Quaker.

After drawing lessons at Bournemouth Art School, de Vasconcellos studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London and, after the award of a Bronze Medal for Design in Sculpture during 1923, she studied in Florence under Guido Calore and Libero Andreotti before enrolling in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where she was taught by Antoine Bourdelle, one of Auguste Rodin's assistants. She first exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show in 1926, with The Repentance of St Hubert and completed her first major commission in 1929 for the Church of Saint Valéry in Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy, which included a life-sized reclining figure of Saint Valéry under a stone altar. After its restoration in 1994 it was renamed Reconciliation, and in 1995, to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, bronze casts of this sculpture were placed in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and in the Hiroshima Peace Park in Japan. An additional cast is in the grounds of Stormont in Belfast. To mark the opening of the rebuilt German Reichstag building in 1999, another cast was placed as part of the Berlin Wall memorial. Her husband led her to be received into the Church of England, and the topic of faith came to run through much of her artistic work. The couple adopted two boys, and the family settled in a farmhouse at The Bield in Little Langdale in the Lake District, where she made a studio in an outhouse, as well as decorating the house with carvings and a mural. de Vasconcellos and her husband were also god-parents to at least 20 children. In her 99th year she published She was Loved: Memories of Beatrix Potter (printed by Titus Wilson), an account with letters of the friendship between the two, cultivated over many years, including a number of photographs of her sculptures and other illustrations.