Description

19 x 19 x 29cm.    1974.

John Doubleday. Bronze : ‘The Magic Eye’.

Provenance : Private Collection.

Born near Maldon in 1947, John Doubleday has lived most of his life in the nearby village of Great Totham. He studied sculpture at Goldsmiths College, long before it was fashionable. He is renowned internationally for his public sculpture, which has been a feature of his career since the mid-seventies.

His work is to be seen in many countries – almost all of it figurative, cast in bronze, and mostly it is based on portraiture. The most recent commissions have been in heroic scale. Completed recently have been a sculpture of Col. Jabara, (the first jet air ace), for the USAF Academy, Colorado Springs; An eagle sited near Peterborough, which commemorates those French prisoners of the Napoleonic War who did not survive to return to France; A large work in his own locality to commemorate the confrontation between the Saxons and Vikings at the Battle of Maldon in August 991 and the sculpture of Nelson to commemorate the bicentenary of Trafalgar, installed adjacent to the Trafalgar Cemetary in Gibraltar.

Double-take would describe his two representations of Sherlock Holmes: The first was erected at Meiringen on the Sherlock Holmes Society of London pilgramage to the Reichenbach Falls of 1991 and the second was installed outside Baker Street Station in 1999. He also has completed two sculptures of Charlie Chaplin, the first in Leicester Square, the second in Vevey, Switzerland. In a similar vein, he has two statues in bronze of Isambard Kingdom Brunel at Bristol and Paddington Station in London.