37.5cm (14.7in) x 25cm (9.8in) x 21cm (8.2in)
Patinated bronze. Seated figure of Colonel T.E. Lawrence CB, DSO (1888-1935) in Arab dress, cross-legged, and raised on a wood plinth. Signed to the reverse ‘Elsie March’.
Known to the world as 'Lawrence of Arabia', Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Tremadoc, North Wales. After Oxford, he worked as an archaeologist in Syria, 1909-14. In the war against the Ottoman Empire, Lawrence was adviser to the future King Faisal, and led the triumphant Arabs into Damascus (1918). He told the story of his war in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a Triumph (1926). To escape his notoriety, Lawrence changed his name and rejoined the army in 1922 as Gunner J.H. Ross, and the RAF (1923-35) as Aircraftsman T.E. Shaw. In The Mint (1936) he described the harsh life of the ranks. He was killed in a motorcycle accident.
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Elsie March RBA (1884-1974) worked as both a portrait painter and sculptor, and with her seven brothers formed an artists’ collective based in a seventeen room house, Goddendene, at Locksbottom, near Farnborough, Kent. In the 1920‘s Goddendene’s seven acre grounds accommodated three large studios, including a foundry capable of the production of large scale bronze sculpture. Of Elsie’s seven artist siblings two, Sydney and Vernon, were sculptors. The other five artist siblings were Edward, Percival, Frederick, Dudley, and Walter. It was not uncommon for the siblings to collaborate on public works; among the first of which was the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers South African War memorial at Omagh, County Tyrone. The March family further produced First World war memorials at Lewes, Sydenham and, most notably, the National War Memorial of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. Official recognition of the March family’s output was made in the 1924 in the form of a visit by the George V and members of the Royal Family to Goddendene.
Elsie’s career was divided between portrait painting and sculpture, that included metalwork often silver, sometimes ornamented with enamels. Her paintings were regularly exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists, and at the Royal Academy and the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts,
Later in her career she focussed on sculpture, winning in 1943 the Lady Feodora Gleichen Fund prize for women sculptors. Her 1939 bronze portrait bust of H.G. Beasley (1882–1939), British anthropologist, collector and museum curator, is in the British Museum and her large sculpture of Winston Churchill is displayed in Bromley Library. Other recorded works include a bust of Lawrence of Arabia dated 1936.
A retrospective exhibition of Elsie’s work was held in the Grosvenor Hotel, Park Lane in the Autumn of 1981. A terracotta bust of Lawrence dated 1936 was included in Sotheby’s sale of 168 works by six members of the March family in 1982.