James Havard Thomas

James Havard Thomas (22 December 1854 – 6 June 1921) was a Bristol-born sculptor active in London and Capri.

In 1887–88, he served as Secretary for the Provisional Committee for Securing a Suffrage in the National Exhibition of the Arts, and this prominent role insured that Thomas would never be elected to the Royal Academy for the remainder of his career.

He became a fixture of the expatriate community in Capri, and he was the inspiration for the character of Count Caloveglia in Norman Douglas's novel South Wind (1917).

Instead, he developed an elaborate system to accurately measure the complex topography of the human body and to translate it into a three-dimensional medium.

It eschewed traditional compositional rules and the standard techniques sculptors used to pose and to render human bodies.

The sculptor Hamo Thornycroft — a contemporary of Thomas's and a long-standing academician whose innovations of the 1880s had calcified into a conservative narrowness by the twentieth century — was most likely instrumental in the statue's rejection.

Thomas was instrumental in teaching a generation of women sculptors working with direct carving: at the Slade his students included Dora Clarke, H. W. Palliser, and Ursula Edgcumbe.

Thomas' 1916 marble statue of Boudica for Cardiff City Hall was hailed as 'a masterpiece of modern sculpture' and 'a thing of extraordinary beauty' by the Architectural Review.

[9] Thomas was an important foundation for the development of modernism in British sculpture, and his work contributed to the interest in direct carving and to the break with the expectations of the statuary tradition.

[10] Though overlooked today, Thomas was a significant player in the debates around sculptural representation and the modernization of the Classical tradition in the early twentieth century.

Chapter 5: "Figural Equivalence and Equivocation: James Havard Thomas and the Lycidas 'Scandal' of 1905" Gibson, Frank.