John Bell (sculptor)

John Bell (1811–1895) was a British sculptor, born in Bell's Row, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. His family home was Hopton Hall, Suffolk. His works were shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and he was responsible for the marble group representing "America" on the Albert Memorial in London.

He was born in 1811, and educated at Catfield rectory, Norfolk. He studied sculpture in the Royal Academy schools, and exhibited his first work at the academy, a religious group, in 1832. The next year he exhibited A Girl at a Brook and John the Baptist at the academy, and two statuettes at the Suffolk Street Gallery, followed by Ariel in 1834. At the Royal Academy in 1836 he showed Psyche feeding a Swan and Youth, Spring, and Infancy.

In 1837, the year in which Bell established his reputation, his works at the Academy included Psyche and the Dove and a model of The Eagle-Shooter, the first version of what was to become one of his most celebrated statues; he also exhibited two busts, Amoret and Psyche, at the British Institution. His Babes in the Wood was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition two years later. There are marble versions at Osborne House, and Norwich Castle.

In 1844 Bell entered his Eagle Slayer and Jane Shore in the competition held for sculpture for the new Houses of Parliament. A cast-iron version of the Eagle Slayer - the first statue ever to be made from the material - was produced for The Great Exhibition of 1851, where it stood under a canopy surmounted by the eagle. It was later placed outside the South Kensington Museum, and is now in the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. He also exhibited a sculpture of Shakespeare at the 1851 exhibition, which was widely reproduced, for example on the front page of Recollections of the Great Exhibition. It was also used by John Leech as the centrepiece of his cartoon Dinner-time at the Crystal Palace, published in Punch.

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