William Brodie

Who was William Brodie?

William Brodie was a Scottish sculptor. He was the son of John Brodie, a Banff shipmaster, and elder brother of Alexander Brodie, another sculptor.

He was elected Associate of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1857, and Royal Scottish Academician in 1859 . In 1876 he was appointed Secretary of the RSA, a post he held until his death.

When he was about six years old, his family moved to Aberdeen. William Brodie was later apprenticed to a plumber, but studied in his spare time at the Mechanic's Institute, where he amused himself by casting lead figures of well-known people. He soon began to model small medallion portraits which attracted the attention of John Hill Burton. It was Burton who encouraged him to go to Edinburgh in 1847. Here Brodie studied for four years at the Trustees' School of Design, learning to model on a larger scale, and also executing a bust of one of his earliest patrons, Lord Jeffrey.

About 1853 he went to Rome, where he studied under Lawrence Macdonald, and it was with the latter's assistance that he modelled "Corinna, the Lyric Muse", a work which Copeland reproduced in miniature in "Parian" four years later.