Frank Lynn Jenkins

Born 14 April 1870
Died 1 September 1927

Active: 1896 - 1915

Country of birth: England

Country of death: United States

Sculptor, artist, stone carver

Born in Torquay, Devon. He was the son of Henry Tozer Jenkins, a stonemason, quarry owner and marble merchant who ran H.T. Jenkins and Son in partnership with a younger son, Walter. The firm developed into a business of international standing, which was involved in a number of prestigious commissions, including: Thomas Brock's memorial to Queen Victoria; Lutyens' Cenotaph, Whitehall; and William Goscombe John's monument to the Marquis of Salisbury in Westminster Abbey.

Lynn Jenkins learned to carve in his father's marble workshops and began studying art at the Western College, Weston-super-Mare. He then became a prize-winning student (particularly those awarded by the sketching club) at the South London Technical School of Art (Lambeth School of Art) before entering the Royal Academy Schools in January 1893. Here he won further prizes as well as the City of London Guilds medal (1893), and a British Institution Scholarship of £100 (1894). The teachings of Alfred Gilbert and George Frampton at the RA Schools shaped his subsequent work, as did travels to Paris and Rome.

With the painter and a fellow student, Gerald E. Moira (1867-1959), Lynn Jenkins developed an innovative style of painted, low relief, plaster panels. This technique was used in a commission awarded by the restaurateur Joe Lyons to decorate the entrance to the Trocadero Restaurant, Shaftsbury Avenue. Several other similar schemes followed, among them projects for the: Throgmorton Restaurant, London; Hotel Metropole, Folkestone; Passmore Edwards Library, Shoreditch; and a library in a private house at Beverley, North Yorkshire.

In 1901 Lynn Jenkins married Phoebe Harriet Le Févre, the daughter of Charles ('gentleman') and Henriette Le Févre. It is possible that Phoebe was also an artist because in a meeting following her husband's death, she stated that she 'had often worked with her husband in the moulding and . . . to some extent with the designing.'

Throughout his career Lynn Jenkins created portraits and ideal sculptures, such as Psyche (1904), but his reputation rested primarily on his work as a decorative sculptor. Among the commissions executed for prominent architects of the period were: the exterior sculpture for Rotherhithe Town Hall by Murray and Foster (1897); the statues of St George and St Mary for St Matthews church, Chelston, Torquay by Nicholson and Corlett, (1898); a frieze of low relief sculpture on the exterior of the P&O company's pavilion at the 1900 Paris International Exhibition (for which he was awarded a silver medal) by Thomas Collcutt; a monumental, gilded bronze figure, Count Peter of Savoy, above the entrance of the Savoy Hotel, Strand also for Collcutt (1904); the niche figures of St Dunstan and William Torel for the exterior of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Kensington by Aston Webb (1904); a frieze of bronze, low relief figures on a marble background for Ingram House, Strand by Henry Hare; a pair of allegorical figures for the exterior of Thames House, Southwark Bridge Road by Collcutt & Hamp (1911); and sculpture for garden designs at Knowsley Hall and Luton Hoo on behalf of the architects Romaine Walker and Jenkins (Lynn Jenkins' younger brother, Gilbert). In the schemes for Rotherhithe Town Hall, Lloyds Registry, and Ingram House marble work was provided by his father and brother's firm, H.T. Jenkins and Son. Romaine Walker and Jenkins designed the extensions to the Tate Gallery of 1910 and 1928, and the Duveen Sculpture Gallery, 1937 .

Lynn Jenkins' most important work was an elaborate 80 foot long low relief frieze of electrotyped copper, inset with gold, silver, ivory, semi-precious stones and shell (1901), and a sumptuous bronze and ivory group, 'The Spirit of British Maritime Commerce' (1904), for Lloyds Registry, Fenchurch Street both executed for the architect Thomas Colcutt.

Lynn Jenkins propounded his ideas about sculpture and architecture in lectures at the Royal Institute of British Architects (1899), the Art Workers Guild (1905), and the Architectural Association (1906). He also published a pair of articles about the work of his colleague Gerald Moira in the Magazine of Art (1904). Lynn Jenkins was H.M.Examiner at the Board of Education, and later, in the USA, he also taught in the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design in New York.

Lynn Jenkins was an active member of the Art Workers Guild from 1900. He joined the Chelsea Arts Club in 1897 and was elected chairman in 1901. During his tenure the club moved to the premises it occupies to this day. He was one of the first two directors of the Chelsea Arts Club Ball Company formed in 1913. Lynn Jenkins was a founder member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors (1904) and twice served as chairman of its Council. He became a mason in 1901 in the Arts Lodge for which he acted as organist for some years and became Worshipful Master in 1913.

From 1895 throughout his life Lynn Jenkins exhibited widely in Great Britain and internationally. Exhibited frequently at the Royal Academy between 1895 and 1915, and in many of the other leading British exhibitions of the same period. These included: the International Society for Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours. He exhibited at the Paris Salon and in the International Exhibitions of St Louis, USA (1904), Dublin (1907), Franco British (1908), Venice (1910), and Rome (1911). After his move to the USA in 1916 he had a solo exhibition at the Reinhardt Gallery, New York (1918), and his work was shown in Fearon (1921) and Duveen galleries, and in the exhibitions of the Architectural League of New York (1921) and the National Sculpture Society (1923). Two of his works, marble group, Madonna and Child (1921), and bronze statuette, Diana (1921), were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of New York.

In 1916 he moved to New York where he remained for the rest of his life. He was elected to associate membership of the National Sculpture Society in 1921 and to full membership in 1923. He was also a member of the Architectural League of New York (1920). In spite of securing a succession of lucrative commissions in America in the 1920s Lynn Jenkins was apparently insolvent at the time of his sudden death at the age of 57 in Sept 1927.

This biography was written by the artist's great-nephew, Martin C. Jenkins used the following sources:
Birth certificate.
Anon. "The Art Movement: Novelty in Decoration at the Trocadero by Mr G. E. Moira and Mr F. Lynn Jenkins", Magazine of Art, 1896-97.
Royal Academy Annual Reports.
Mackay, J.A., 1992,' Dictionary of Sculptors in Bronze', Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1992.
Anon, "A note on some new decorations by Gerald Moira and F. Lynn Jenkins", The Studio, 1896, vol.14, pp.21-27.
Anon, "Some Decorations for a library by Gerald Moira and F. Lynn Jenkins", The Studio, 1896, vol.14, pp.186-191.
Marriage certificate.
Obituary in The Times, 3rd Sept.1927.
Memorandum - John Harrison Memorial, by A.W.Crawford, 29th Sept.1927, held in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania archives.
Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston - alternatively titled Triumph of Youth.
Anon, "A New London Town Hall: Rotherhithe's New Headquarters...", London News, 29 Apr 1897.
Beattie, Susan, 'The New Sculpture',Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1983
Anon, "The decoration of the Peninsula and Oriental Pavilion at the Paris Exhibition", The Studio, vol XX, 1900
Spielmann, M.H., 1903, "Lloyds Registry: A Modern Palace of Art", Magazine of Art, May-Oct 1903.
Physick, J., 'Victoria & Albert Museum: Decorative Sculpture', Phaidon, Oxford, 1982
Anon, 1907, UK Provident Institution, Architectural Review, 1907, Vol.22.
Ward-Jackson, P., 'Public Sculpture of the City of London', Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2003
Photographs in the Jenkins family archives held by Martin C. Jenkins
Lloyds Register archives.
Tate Gallery records.
Lanchester, H.V. & F. Lynn Jenkins, "The Application of Colour to Interior Ornament in Relief", Architectural Review, 1899, p.329.
Art Workers Guild minutes.
Jenkins, F.L.,"Consideration of Sculpture by Architects" reported in The Builder, 27th Jan.1906.
Jenkins, F.L.,"A Great Decorator: Professor Gerald Moira", Magazine of Art, 1903, pp. 524-33 & 1904, pp. 131-137.
Obituary in 'The Builder', 9th Sept.1927.
Chelsea Arts Club minutes held in Kensington Library.
Royal Society of British Sculptors council minutes.
Records held in The Library and Museum of Freemasonry, Great Queen Street, London.
Manifest of Passenger List of 'S.S. St. Paul' on ancestry.co.uk.
Minutes of the National Sculpture Society.
Architectural League of New York records.
Graves, A, FRS, The Royal Academy of Arts: a complete dictionary of contributions . . 1769 to 1904 (London: S.R.Publisher Ltd. (re-publisher), 1970), and Royal Academy Exhibitors 1905-1970, Royal Academy of Arts, 1979.
References for other exhibitions are from the respective catalogues or international exhibition reports, except otherwise stated.
Obituary in 'The Times', 3rd Sept.1927.
Review in "Art Notes", New York Times, 3rd Apr.1918.
American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol.1, 2001.
Various references in letters held in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania archives.

Citing this record

'Frank Lynn Jenkins', Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011 [https://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib2_1203116159, accessed 05 Dec 2023]

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