English sculptor William Hamo Thornycroft was BOTD in 1849. Born William in London to a family of distinguished sculptors, he was raised in rural Cheshire, studying at a grammar school in Macclesfield, returning to London in his teens as a pupil at the University College School. He studied under his father Thomas Thornycroft at the schools of the Royal Academy of Arts, assisting his father with the public sculpture Boadicea and Her Daughters. After visiting Italy and France, he returned to London in 1871, assisting his parents in the creation of the Poets’ Foundation in Park Lane. He rose to fame with his 1881 statue of the Homeric bowman Teucer, raising eyebrows over his choice of a working-class figure as his subject. He became one of the most famed sculptors of the late Victorian period, bridging the Neo-Classical style of his father’s generation with increased naturalism to imply movement and energy. His close friend and birthday twin, the art critic Edmund Gosse, coined the term “The New Sculpture” to describe a new artistic movement led by Thornycroft, Frederic Leighton, and Alfred Gilbert. Thornycroft received a number of major public commissions, winning high praise for his 1888 sculpture of English military leader Gordon of Khartoum, de-emphasising Gordon’s military authority and presenting him lost in thought with his foot on a Bible. His 1889 statue of statesman Oliver Cromwell, commissioned by Lord Rosebery and unveiled outside the Houses of Parliament, prompted fierce public debates around whether the anti-monarchist Cromwell deserved a public memorial. Thornycroft’s other notable works included sculptures of King Alfred the Great, Prime Minister William Gladstone, Queen Victoria and Lord Curzon, and a sculpted frieze for the Institute of Chartered Accountants representing industry and the arts. After the success of his mother and child sculpture The Kiss, Thornycroft was knighted in 1917. He married Agatha Cox in 1884, a woman 14 years his junior, with whom he had four children. Biographers and historians have speculated about Thornycroft’s friendship with the closeted gay Gosse, the extent to which he might have returned Gosse’s affections, and their wider circle of gay and bisexual friends. He died in 1925, aged 75.