SWARN + RSA200 Lecture
5pm, Friday 6 Nov 2026
The Hepburn Room (1st Floor), University of Glasgow
Sculpting for the public domain: the memorials and animal sculpture of Phyllis Bone, Alice Meredith Williams and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen
With the Royal Scottish Academy celebrating the 200th anniversary of its Foundation, and as we approach 11 November, Armistice Day, it seems an ideal moment to highlight the career of the RSA’s first woman Academician, the sculptor, Phyllis Bone, and the significance of her contribution to the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle. This opened to the public on 14th July 1927, almost exactly a year before the Equal Franchise Act became law across the UK.
This lecture will consider Bone and her sister sculptors whose work was also placed in the public arena at this time: Alice Meredith-Williams, whose bronze equestrian group The Spirit of the Crusaders for the Paisley War Memorial, which was unveiled in 1924 and who, like Bone, made sculpture for the Scottish National War Memorial. In New York; Anna Hyatt Huntington’s equestrian statue of Joan of Arc, which was installed in 1915, and in Copenhagen, another equestrian monument to King Christian IX by Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen was unveiled on the15th November 1827.
These key commemorative monuments evidence the ways in which, by the end of the First World War, women across the western world were making major advances as professional sculptors, with greater access to training, anatomical study, and international travel, all central to their securing professional recognition in the all-important public domain.
More information here
No booking required
