Alfred Gilbert

Sir Alfred Gilbert RA (12 August 1854 – 4 November 1934) was an English sculptor and goldsmith who enthusiastically experimented with metallurgical innovations. He was a central — if idiosyncratic — participant in the New Sculpture movement that invigorated sculpture in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century.

Alfred Gilbert's parents, Charlotte Cole and Alfred Gilbert, were musicians who lived at 13 Berners Street, London, where Alfred was born. He spent seven years at Aldenham School in Hertfordshire but received his artistic education mainly in Paris (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, under Jules Cavelier), and studied in Rome and Florence where the significance of the Renaissance made a lasting impression upon him and his art. He also worked in the studio of Sir Joseph Boehm, R.A.

On 3 January 1876 he married a first cousin, Alice Jane Gilbert (1847–1916), with whom he had eloped to Paris. They had five children. Bankruptcy made him flee from Britain in 1901 and for the next 25 years he settled in Bruges. His wife left him in 1904. They never divorced, but lived separated, Alice being a patient in a mental hospital.

After Alice's death, of which he received news only after the war, he married on 1 March 1919 his housekeeper Stéphanie Debourgh (Bruges 1863–1937), the widow of Alphonse Quaghebeur (Bruges 1863–1903), a modest typesetter; she, previously a lacemaker, and six of her seven children had lived with Gilbert since 1907 and throughout the War and the German occupation. As he was living underground, the presence of a large family was a good cover for the quantity of food needed in the household.

Gilbert traveled to Rome in 1923, where his fortunes improved, and three years later was able to return to England to complete the "Clarence Memorial", this time under the royal patronage and settled in the study of Lady Helena Gleichen. In that year he was commissioned to produce a final major work, the "Queen Alexandra Memorial" which was released in 1932. Gilbert was knighted for this work and was reelected to the RA, so his later years saw their full rehabilitation in the highest echelons of British artistic society, before his death at age 80 in 1934.

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