SYDNEY HARPLEY (1927-1992) RA FRBS
The work of Sydney Harpley always surprised and delighted: dancers, acrobats,
girls on swings were posed and executed with equal audacity and elegance. Sydney
Harpley was born in Fulham, London on 9 April 1927. The son of an electrician
and cabinet maker, he grew up in Dagenham, and spent the war years as an evacuee
in Berkshire and Bedfordshire. Though talented in both art and music, he left
school at the age of fourteen to take up an apprenticeship as an electrician
in a dynamo factory. He went on to work at an American air base, and would later
cite aircraft as a formative influence on his artistic development, describing
planes as ‘sculptures in space’. Even more instrumental in his decision
to become a sculptor was his encounter in Cairo with the carved head of Ramases
II, made during National Service with the Royal Engineers (1945-48). On his
return home, he took evening classes in drawing while working at a factory in
Roehampton making artificial limbs. In 1951, he became a full-time student of
sculpture at Hammersmith School of Art, and two years later began to study under
John Skeaping at the Royal College of Art.
While still a student, Harpley established the single female figure as his favourite
form; he exhibited examples at the Young Contemporaries and at the Royal Academy,
and sold his first pieces to the National Gallery of New Zealand and the artist
Fleur Cowles. In 1956, the year of his first marriage, he returned to Hammersmith
as a part-time teacher and began to receive commissions for portrait busts and
public figure groups. In 1963, he fully established himself, winning a competition
to create an over life-size portrait memorial to Jan Smuts, and being elected
to the fellowship of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. From 1972, he taught
part-time at Leicester polytechnic, and while in the city met his second wife
Jo, an art historian specialising in costume. Marrying in 1981, they moved to
Radigan Farm, Somerset (1986) and then to Kilkenny, in Ireland (1989). At the
height of his career, Harpley became a Royal Academician (ARA 1974, RA 1981)
and had a number of successful international solo shows, including two at the
Chris Beetles Gallery in 1987 and 1990. He died in Dublin on 9 March 1992.
The Estate of Sydney Harpley is represented by Chris Beetles Limited.
