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Wheeler's Greatest Challenge

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Thursday 7 April 2011

Wheeler's Greatest Challenge

I was recently given a copy of "High Relief" the autobiography of Sir Charles Wheeler the sculptor. The cover shows him working on "Earth", one of his massive figures at the Ministry of Defence in London.
The biggest challenge of his career was not carving the monumental MOD figures but rather producing two far more modest lion heads, that support the balcony at India House in Aldwych.
They were carved from Swedish black granite and he writes "So hard was the stone that I kept a boy running from studio to smithy so that my chisels could be remade after a dozen or so blows for they then became quite blunt."

High relief: The autobiography of Sir Charles Wheeler, sculptor

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