Nigel Boonham is a British figurative sculptor whose early work dates back to 1975. He learnt traditional skills and was trained in the making of large-scale works as an assistant for two years the sculptor Oscar Nemon. While working on his first portrait of Sir Geoffrey Keynes Boonham was introduced to the work of the poet and artist, William Blake. Blake’s free imagination and symbolic language have been an inspiration ever since and have helped Boonham develop on the idea that sculpture, including portraiture, can have inner life and meaning.

Boonham’s reputation has grown steadily. Over the past two decades he has made a series of distinguished portrait bronzes including Lord Runcie (Archbishop of Canterbury), Archbishop Daniel Mannix (Archbishop of Melbourne), Peter Jonas and Joseph Needham. Recently he completed an over life-size bronze of Dame Cicely Saunders OM, pioneer of the hospice movement: the first portrait of a woman in the collection of the Royal College of Physicians. His best-known portrait, of Diana, Princess of Wales was unveiled by the Princess herself at the National Hospital of Neurology, London. Boonham’s three-metre bronze statue of Cardinal Basil Hume, set in a memorial garden designed by the sculptor, was unveiled in May 2002 in Newcastle by Her Majesty The Queen in the year of the Golden Jubilee. Elected president of the Society of Portrait Sculptors in 2004.

                      Nigel Boonham

Forest Hill studio 2006

Vauxhall Walk studio, London 1984: First solo exhibition