John Edward Carew is believed to have been born in 1782 at Tramore in County Waterford, Ireland. He was son of a stone-cutter named John Carew. He is believed to have trained in Dublin and was certainly in London by 1809, where he obtained the position of assistant to the sculptor Sir Richard Westmacott. From 1823 onwards, Carew was showered with commissions by the 3rd Earl of Egremont and a substantial body of his work may be seen in the collection at Petworth House. The busts there are: The 3rd Earl of Egremont (1831-4); Mrs John (Harriet) King (1831-4) (the 3rd Earl’s Daughter); General Sir Henry Wyndham (1830-2). (the 3rd Earl’s second son) and Lord John Townshend (1830-2). Carew’s groups at Petworth include: Venus, Vulcan and Cupid (c 1827-31). Carew stated that he began work on this colossal group ‘about 1827 or 1828’ and that it was completed before 1831, but his assistant remembered that it was made in London and finished by 1828, so the exact dates are unclear. It was originally intended for this position, to which it was returned in 1992. Vulcan, the god of fire and the blacksmith of the gods, is seated on his anvil inscribed ‘AITNA’ (Etna, the Sicilian volcano – the word ‘volcano’ derives from Vulcan), resting his hammer. He is accompanied by his wife Venus and her son, Cupid, whose wings he forged. Carew declared in 1837 the group Prometheus and Pandora (c1835-7) ‘was begun about two years since’ and it remained unfinished after the 3rd Earl’s death in 1837. Carew subsequently claimed £4,000 ‘when finished’ in his unsuccessful court action against Egremont’s executors. In Greek mythology, Prometheus created the first man from clay, stole fire from the gods to give to mankind, was punished by Jupiter and released from his torment by Hercules. His sister-in-law was Pandora who was fashioned from clay by Vulcan. After Prometheus’s theft of fire, Jupiter’s retribution on mankind was to open Pandora’s box, thus releasing all the world’s evils. Only Hope remained inside. The Falconer (c1827-9), according to Carew’s recollection, was completed before his move from London to Brighton in 1831 and was installed at Petworth in 1829. Unlike his other ideal statues, it apparently has no literary or mythological source; it has been suggested that it may have been intended for the Duke of St Albans, who was Grand Falconer of England. In 1835 it stood at the west end of the central corridor, was moved into the Audit Room after c.1865 and was returned to the North Gallery in 1992. Adonis, 1823-6 – ‘the first commission Lord Egremont gave me’ remembered Carew, was executed as a companion to Arethusa, which the 3rd Earl bought in 1823. The Adonis is in fact on a larger scale and was valued by Carew at £1,500. Adonis, famed for his beauty, is depicted in the throes of his fatal struggle with a boar. Carew executed a full-size copy of the Dog of Alcibiades in stone for the Earl as a memorial to one of his hounds, which had accidentally drowned in the lake at Petworth Park. Carew was also an ecclesiastical sculptor of some repute and his Baptism of Christ may be seen at St John the Baptist Catholic Church at Brighton in Sussex. He also carried out a substantial amount of the interior sculpture at the Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory at Warwick Street in Soho. (The church had been gutted in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780).
In Canada, Carew sculpted the marble statue The Immaculate Conception (1858), which stands before the Basilica Cathedral of St John the Baptist at St John’s in Newfoundland. There, he also executed the statue of St John the Baptist on top of the archway leading into the Piazza in front of the Basilica, as well as the statue of St Francis of Assisi on the east side of the entrance and St Patrick on the west side of the Cathedral’s entrance. Carew was one of the four eminent British sculptors selected to execute the reliefs on the plinth of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. His relief The Death of Nelson faces into Whitehall and, in the far left of it, he clearly depicted a Black sharpshooter (probably Able Seaman George Ryan) standing on the deck of HMS VICTORY at the Battle of Trafalgar, as the mortally wounded Vice-Admiral Horatio, Viscount Nelson is carried off the deck by Sergeant Major Secker, RM. In 1848 Carew’s eyesight began to fail and he gave up the practice of his profession. He died in 1868 at the age of 86 and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery