Charles Leonard Hartwell was born at Blackheath in Kent on 1 August 1873. He studied at the City and Guilds School, Kennington, under William Silver Frith and from 1896 at the RA Schools; then privately under Onslow Ford and Hamo Thornycroft. He exhibited at the RA from 1900. He was elected ARA in 1915 and RA in 1924. He was awarded the Silver Medal of the RBS for The Goatherd’s Daughter in 1929. Hartwell sculpted a number of war memorials and in 1920 various ideas for a war memorial in Eldon Square, Newcastle were considered, among them a statue of Lord Kitchener. The leading London sculptor Alfred Drury was commissioned in January 1921. The agreement was that he should go to Newcastle and submit his final design for approval and that the work should be complete by Armistice Day 1922. Subsequently, however, for reasons which have not been unearthed, Drury withdrew and the commission went instead to Hartwell. The Laing Art Gallery tried to keep Drury involved with a plan for bronze allegorical figures by him to be incorporated in Hartwell’s design, but this was rejected. The architects, Cackett & Burns Dick, were responsible for the large pedestal of Hartwell’s memorial. They believed that the memorial should be large. ‘A sense of bigness is essential – not the bigness of arrogance or domination – but sufficient, relatively to the surroundings to typify the magnitude of the subject, and a certain mass is necessary beyond what is afforded by the more generally familiar forms of monument of moderate cost. To heighten the effect, all elaboration of architectural detail, however good in itself must be avoided, and the addition of anything suggestive of the trappings of military might would be destructive of the deep emotions that should be stirred at the sight of the Memorial.’ Costing £13,260, the memorial was eventually unveiled by Earl Haig on 26 September 1923. Reviewing Hartwell’s sculpture, a cast of which he had made for the Marylebone War Memorial outside Lord’s Cricket Ground in London, the local press remarked on its colossal size and the allusion it made to the George and Dragon on the regimental crest of the Northumberland Fusiliers. After the ceremony, Haig was taken to see Goscombe John’s The Response at Barras Bridge (same regiment). In the early 1970s, the memorial in Eldon Square was the subject of a bitter dispute between Harry Faulkner-Brown, the architect appointed in 1971 to the square, and the Royal British Legion. Faulkner-Brown, supported by Councillor Walter Wilson and the City Planners, wanted to turn the square into the ‘Trafalgar Square of the North’ and he saw the removal of Hartwell’s memorial as integral to his plans. The Royal British Legion, however, was adamant that it should not be removed. The Journal tried to help by suggesting possible alternative locations. This, however, did little to pacify the opponents of the move; an angry letter in the Evening Chronicle scornfully recommended the Green outside the home of the infamous council leader, T Dan Smith in Spital Tongues, on the grounds that he was ultimately responsible for promoting Faulkner-Brown’s proposal. In the end, in 1974, despite threats by Faulkner-Brown that he would resign if the memorial was not removed, the Legion was victorious and it stayed put. Hartwell’s well-travelled bronze portrait statue of General Sir Alexander Taylor was exhibited at the RA in 1914, shipped out to India and erected outside Delhi’s Mori Gate to commemorate Taylor’s part in the recapture of that city during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. In 1956 the statue was removed by the Indian authorities on ‘sensitivity’ grounds. It was repatriated to England, free of charge, by the P&O Steam Navigation Company and assigned to the London County Council by deed of gift. It was then re-erected at Coopers Hill, Egham, site of the former Indian Engineering College, where it stands today on the campus of Brunel University. Hartwell sculpted the bronze Memorial to Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson immediately beneath the Great Eastern Railway Memorial at Liverpool Street Station in London. The Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest acquired Hartwell’s A Foul in the Giants’ Race (1908) and his Dawn (1914). Both may be seen in the collection of the Tate. His bronze sculpture Edward, Prince of Wales was donated by the Board of Trade to the National Museum of Wales in 1949. Hartwell died at Aldwick, Sussex on 12 January 1951.