Robert Thomas

Robert Thomas was born in 1926 in Cwmparc Rhondda; he died in 1999. From 1947 to 1949 he studied at Cardiff Art School (NDD Sculpture), and from 1949 to 1952 at the Royal College of Art in London (ARCA Sculpture). He is a member of the RBS & SPS and lived in London until 1971. He then returned to Wales to live in Barry, Glamorgan. He is married to the textile designer Mary Gardiner.

Statement: "Robert Thomas's focussed brand of a 'streamlined heroic humanist realism' (as Peter Stead describes it in his obituray on the sculptor in the Guardian in 1999) was the result of involvement with a less wide range of modernism. An early fascination with paintings and sculptures of Gauguin and Ancient India led quite quickly towards an alignment with the various strands of the classical tradition. These ranged from the modern classicizing approaches of a Maillol or a Manzu, to Ancient Egyptian, Greek & Roman sculpture and the works of Donatello and Michelangelo.

There is also something of the abstracting tendency of Frank Dobson (his erstwhile professor at the RCA) and of the streamlining used by his friend Ernest Race to be discerned. Thomas's self-imposed tasks were to record the contemporary Welsh meritocracy and to produce his 'free figure' sculpture, like Independence representing the post-war emergence of woman (quoted ad lib from Branching Out by his son Ceri Thomas, 2002)

Teaching Experience: 1953-71 sculpture lecturer at Gravesend, Maidenhead & Ealing Art Schools

Awards: 1963 wins national sculpture competion, Sir Otto Beit bronze medal; 1966 Sir Otto Beit silver medal; 1967 Rhondda Recognition Award.

Commissions: numerous (e.g.1966 statue Reflection for Birmingham City centre; 1974 statue Mother & Infant for Blackburn Lancashire; 1987 statue of Aneurin Bevan for Cardiff City; 1996 bust of Aneurin Bevan for the House of Commons).