Early life and career John was born in the
Canton area of
Cardiff, the eldest son of Thomas John, a wood carver from
Llantrithyd and Elizabeth (née Smith), from
Randwick, Gloucestershire. As a youth John assisted his father in the restoration of
Cardiff Castle and
Castell Coch during 1874 which was being overseen by
William Burges. He initially studied in his home town, attending the
Cardiff School of Art throughout the 1870s and also took anatomy classes from a local painter. John then studied at the
South London School of Technical Art under
Jules Dalou and
William Silver Frith and then at the
Royal Academy Schools, where he won the gold medal and a travelling scholarship in 1887. Following the success of
Morpheus, John created a series of exhibition pieces that embraced the naturalistic style of the
New Sculpture movement and cemented his reputation.
The Elf was highly praised when shown at the
Royal Academy in 1898 and was subsequently reproduced both in bronze and marble to become among John's most popular works. Before the outbreak of the First World War, John had been commissioned to create a memorial to the 244 engineers who had died with the sinking of the
RMS Titanic in 1912. The monument consists of a cross on an octagonal base on an elevated podium. There are large bronze sculptural groups with a total of 11 figures and 12 relief panels on the podium. The main sculpture group shows three soldiers, one shielding a child and one lying wounded with a figure of a nurse approaching him. In bronze, John created a procession of deep-relief figures representing the volunteers and those they were leaving behind. The procession is led a winged angel, an allegory of renown, blowing a horn above two drummer boys followed by uniformed soldiers and men in civilian clothes, some of whom are saying goodbye to women and children. From 1892 John lived at Greville Road,
Kilburn, London (in a house that had previously belonged to
Seymour Lucas), and is buried in
Hampstead Cemetery. The memorial statue of his wife, which he designed when she died in 1923, was stolen from the cemetery in 2001 and recovered after a few months; it was then put into storage, but was stolen again in 2007. == Public monuments and memorials ==