Beschreibung:

A rare Bromsgrove guild lead figure of a boy attributed to Louis Weingartner
circa 1920 the back stamped Bromsgrove Guild, Worcestershire 127cm.; 50ins high The Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Arts was established in 1894 by Walter Gilbert who took over a foundry in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. It was first involved with decorative ironwork, but the business soon expanded into a great many other fields. By 1900 Gilbert had gone into partnership with a Mr McCandlish and had taken over further premises in the town which housed bronze and lead foundries, as well as wood and stone carving studios. By 1908 they had established an outlet in London, and as a result of their most famous commission, the iron and bronze gates outside Buckingham Palace, they were issued with a Royal Warrant appointing them metal workers to Edward VII (an honour repeated two years later under George V). Unlike the majority of other contemporary English manufacturers of garden ornaments most of the Guild~s figurative subjects were modelled in the popular styles of the day. At the end of the First World War in 1918, Gilbert left the Bromsgrove Guild and set up a new firm in Weaman St, Birmingham, where he was followed by a number of Bromsgrove Guild craftsmen. Amongst them was Louis Weingartner who had been one of the first and most significant of all the continental craftsmen to join the Bromsgrove Guild. He had been born into a large working class family in Lucerne, Switzerland. Early in his life, Weingartner~s creative talents were identified and as a young man he crossed the alps to further his artistic training in Florence. Having returned from Italy, Weingartner then worked for several years at the Bossart jewellery firm. When exactly he came to England is unknown, but he was working at a studio in London when he first became known to Walter Gilbert. Weingartner was an exceptionally skilled sculptor, metalworker and designer, whose later work ranged from fountains, statues and simple memorials to the Royal Coat of Arms on the Buckingham Palace gates and the magnificent reredos in Liverpool~s Anglican Cathedral. It was said that he was such a perfectionist that he would sit at his work all day without a single break until the model was finished to his satisfaction. Walter Gilbert and Louis Weingartner forged a remarkable creative relationship, collaborating on several of the Bromsgrove Guild~s most famous commissions, which continued after his move to join Gilbert at the Weaman St studio in Birmingham. In retirement Weingartner returned to his native Switzerland where he died in tragic circumstances three years later. The unfortunate man fell under a tram in Lucerne~s Station Square and suffered serious head injuries from which he died two weeks later, aged 72. Very similar lead figures are illustrated in Gilbert and Weingartner~s |Sculpture in the Garden| catalogue, which is undated but probably published in the 1920~s. In the catalogue forward, the lead garden figures are described as having | a delicious feeling of whimsicality rarely met with in sculpture, but when encountered in garden sculpture immediately produces the feeling of entire suitability.... there is another kind of humour in the dreamingly designed and modelled delightful children|. Literature; The Bromsgrove Guild| by Quintin Watt, published 1999 by the Bromsgrove Society. Antique Garden Ornament, John Davis Antique Collector~s Club, 1991, pp 313-316.