page_title: Josefina de Vasconcellos
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: Josefina de Vasconcellos / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: The Hand by Josephina de Vasconcellos. Next to the War Memorial Hall, St Bees School.
context_page_description: Josefina Alys Hermes de Vasconcellos was an English sculptor who worked in bronze, stone, wood, lead and perspex. She was at one time the world's oldest living sculptor. She lived in Cumbria much of her working life. Her most famous work includes Reconciliation; Holy Family; Mary and Child; and Nativity at St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
context_section_description: de Vasconcellos was born in Molesey in Surrey; she was the only child of Hippolyto de Vasconcellos, a Brazilian diplomat and Freda Coleman, an English Quaker.
  After drawing lessons at Bournemouth Art School, de Vasconcellos studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London and, after the award of a Bronze Medal for Design in Sculpture during 1923, she studied in Florence under Guido Calore and Libero Andreotti before enrolling in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where she was taught by Antoine Bourdelle, one of Auguste Rodin's assistants. She first exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Show in 1926, with The Repentance of St Hubert and completed her first major commission in 1929 for the Church of Saint Valéry in Varengeville-sur-Mer, Normandy, which included a life-sized reclining figure of Saint Valéry under a stone altar. After she returned to England, de Vasconcellos enrolled in the Royal Academy Schools and was placed second in the 1930 Prix de Rome contest.
  During the Second World War de Vasconcellos began working on a number of large sculptures including The Last Chimera, which is now in the grounds of the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh and The Hand, a memorial in green slate to a friend killed in the war which now serves as a war memorial for St Bees School in Cumbria. After the war de Vasconcellos and her husband Delmar Banner established a studio in London, while maintaining their home in the Lake District. A joint exhibition of their work was held in December 1946 at the Royal Watercolour Society Gallery off Bond Street with some larger sculptures, including The Last Chimera displayed on a Piccadilly bombsite. This exhibition helped establish de Vasconcellos in the British art world. She became a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy and at the Paris Salon. In 1948 she became the first female fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors, serving on its council and organising committee, and was also a founding member of the Society of Portrait Sculptors in 1953. Subjects of her portrait busts and sculptures included Lord Denning, Edith Sitwell, Roger Bannister, Norman Nicholson, General Sir William Platt, James Cameron and, in perspex, Tenzing Norgay. Other notable commissions included the Prince of Peace (1950), a war memorial in Aldershot (repaired in 1998). In 1955, with the help of students from St. Paul's School, she created Mary and Child, a work that remains in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral. In 1959, she was commissioned by the vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square in London to construct a Nativity scene of life-sized figures, which became a regular fixture of the church's Christmas display. In the 1990s she designed a memorial to the pilots who were based near her Lake District home during World War Two.
  In 1977, the department of peace studies at Bradford University commissioned a sculpture that de Vasconcellos entitled Reunion. After its restoration in 1994 it was renamed Reconciliation and in 1995, to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, bronze casts of this sculpture were placed in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and in the Hiroshima Peace Park in Japan. An additional cast is in the grounds of Stormont Castle in Belfast. To mark the opening of the rebuilt German Reichstag building in 1999, another cast was placed as part of the Berlin Wall memorial.
  Throughout her life de Vasconcellos undertook numerous large commissions often carved in a flowing, naturalistic style. This contrasted with the more abstract styles of, for example Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. de Vasconcellos' subjects were frequently religious and many of her sculptures are in parish churches and cathedrals around Britain, including the cathedrals in Blackburn, Bristol, Carlisle, Gloucester, Liverpool, Norwich and Wells and in parishes such as St Bees Priory and St Mary's Church, Warrington. The National Art Gallery in Rio de Janeiro, Sheffield Art Galleries, Glasgow Art Galleries and the Civic Centre in Southampton all hod examples of her work.
  de Vasconcellos was also an activ
caption: The Hand by Josephina de Vasconcellos, War Memorial Hall, St Bees School.
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