Height of bronze: 17cm (6.6in)
Provenance: Captain V.G. Head, late Royal Irish Fusiliers, late No.6 Commando, late 6th King’s African Rifles and Eritrea Police Field Force.
Patinated bronze. Standing figure modelled in field service order with pillbox hat, webbing,and barefeet for the 1928 Askari Monument, Kenyatta Avenue, Nairobi, for the fallen of the King’s African Rifles and Carrier Corps. Signed to the reverse of the base ‘ “Myrander” / Sc London’. Overall height: 19.8 cm (7.7in). Raised on a detachable custom base.
James Alexander Stevenson ARCA, FRBS (1881-1937) was born in Chester, studied at the Chester School of Art and, in 1900, was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. Stevenson visited Italy on a travelling scholarship in 1905 and was a Landseer Scholar in Sculpture in 1906. He exhibited from the Royal College of Art in 1906 and signed all of his work under the pseudonym ‘Myrander'. From 1911 to 1914 he was modelling master at the Regent Street Polytechnic. `After the Great War he was employed on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's Memorials to the Missing in East Africa and was involved with the crafting of the bronze askari which adorn the following memorials in Africa: Nairobi African Memorial, Kenya (1924); Mombasa African Memorial, Kenya (1926); Dar Es Salaam Memorial, Tanzania (1927); Nigeria Memorial (1931). He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1906, and at the Paris Salon, the International Society, and other exhibitions. His public works include busts of George V for the Shanghai Club; Sir Ernest Shackleton, and a number of portrait reliefs of Lord Kitchener for the United Services Museum, London, and for Khartoum, Cairo, Kashmir, Lahore, Johannesburg, and Paris. His statue of Sir John Millais is in the Victoria & Albert collection, and his statue of Justice is at the Law Courts. Among his memorials is an eagle at Norman Cross, Peterborough, to the French prisoners taken during the Napoleonic Wars.