John Francis Kavanagh

John Francis Kavanagh (24 September 1903 – 18 June 1984) was an Irish sculptor and artist. In 1930 he was awarded the British School at Rome Scholarship in Sculpture.

In 1933 he was appointed Head of Department of Sculpture and Modelling at the Leeds College of Art.

He was an Associate member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors from 1935, elected a Fellow in 1945 and later became a member of its Council. In 1951 took up the post of Senior Lecturer in Sculpture at the Elam School of Fine Art, Auckland, New Zealand.

John Francis Kavanagh was born in Birr, Co Offaly, Eire, eldest son of John Michael Kavanagh and Maud O'Hare. At the age of 16 he had an accident in which he suffered severe spinal injuries which left him walking with the aid of a stick. During his recovery he would make clay models and decided that he had a talent for sculpture. He studied at the Crawford School of Art, Cork, (1919–1921) and then the Liverpool School of Art (1920–21). In 1925 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, London, for sculpture studying there, 1925–30, under Gilbert Ledward, Henry Moore, William Rothenstein, A. Ernest Cole, and Charles Sargeant Jagger. In 1930 he modelled the elephants outside the New Residence in New Delhi, India, as part of Jagger's design.

In 1929 he won a RCA travelling scholarship which took him to Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Then in 1930 he won the Rome Scholarship in Sculpture (British Prix de Rome) with "Workers Lifting Steel" for two years and remained at the British School in Rome until 1933 with a grant from the trustees of the Bird Fund of the Royal Academy. "Workers Lifting Steel" was posthumously cast in bronze by the Leicester Galleries in 1994 and was described at the time 'as good as anything of the kind by a student that Ledward had ever seen'

He followed the tradition of classical sculpture and the human figure, as shown by some of the work at this period. His work "Classical Male Athletes" from this period was recently included in the exhibition "The Mythic Method: Classicism in British Art 1920-1950" at the Pallant House Gallery.

"The work which Mr. Kavanagh has produced during his three years in Italy is marked by originality, a fine sense of design and excellent technique, and no less than three examples of his studies were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1933. There is no doubt that he has used his Scholarship well, and has undoubtedly benefited by his close and conscientious study, and the Faculty were unanimous in offering him their warm congratulations upon the results of his work."

Two works from this period were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1933: Tanith and Wanda Tiburzzi, which won the bronze medal at the Paris Salon in 1935; Wanda Tiburzzi was an Italian woman that he persuaded to model for him..

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