Percival Ball
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Percival Ball (17 February 1845 – 4 April 1900) was an English sculptor active in Australia.
Ball was born in Westminster, London and studied at the Royal Academy of Arts schools in England winning several gold medals. Between 1865 and 1882 he exhibited 24 works at Royal Academy exhibitions. About 1870 he went to Paris and then to Munich and Rome, where he lived for some eight years; his work in marble received high praise.
Ball came to Sydney Australia in 1884, seeking warmer climes to relieve his asthma and bronchitis. After six months there he moved to Melbourne and completed the statue of Sir Redmond Barry which now stands in front of the public library in Melbourne, as a consequence of the original sculptor, James Gilbert, having died after modelling the statue in clay. Ball was then given other commissions, including the statue of Sir William Wallace at Ballarat; Francis Ormond at Melbourne, and some portrait busts, now in the national gallery at Melbourne. In 1886 he was commisioned to sculpt a marble bust of Bishop Moorhouse, now at the La Trobe Library. In 1898 he was commissioned by the trustees of the national gallery at Sydney to design a panel for the facade of the building. He completed his designPhryne before Praxiteles and then left for England to superintend the casting. He died there in 1900.
[edit] References
- Serle, Percival. (1949). "Ball, Percival". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
- Ken Scarlett, 'Ball, Percival (1845-1900)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol.7, Melbourne University Press, 1979, pp 160-161.
- This article incorporates text from the public domain 1949 edition of Dictionary of Australian Biography from
Project Gutenberg of Australia, which is in the public domain in Australia and the United States of America.
