Matthew Noble was born at Hackness, near Scarborough in North Yorkshire, on 23 March 1817. He was the son of Robert Noble, a stonemason, and served his apprenticeship with his father. As a young man he travelled to London to study under John Francis (1780-1861), father of the sculptress Mary Thornycroft. Noble exhibited 100 works at the RA in the period 1845-1876. Some of his more popular works were copied in miniature by Copeland’s for production in Parian ware. Noble won the competition to design the prestigious bronze Monument to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1856), which stands at Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester. Noble’s other commissions included the Queen Victoria and Prince Consort statues, both in Salford’s Peel Park (1865) and in Leeds, as well as the statue of Prince Albert (1867) facing Manchester Town Hall in Albert Square. Popular with the Tories, Noble produced monuments to Sir Robert Peel at Salford, Liverpool and Tamworth. His monuments to Richard Cobden and Joseph Brotherton may be seen in Salford and his statue of Isaac Barrow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Noble’s heroic white marble portrait statue of Albert, Prince Consort was commissioned for a fee of £3,000 in 1869 by the Jewish philanthropist Sir Albert Sassoon (1818-96) for the Victoria and Albert Museum in Mumbai (now the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum). The statue was exhibited at the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) before being shipped out to India. Noble’s full-length bronze statue of Oliver Cromwell (1874) in Manchester portrays the Lord Protector in military dress, his right hand clenching the hilt of his sword. ‘Old Noll’s’ uncovered head exhibits a full moustache, suggesting that Noble had studied the painting by Samuel Cooper, as well as Lely’s better-known ‘pimples, warts and all’ portrait. As with Thornycroft’s Cromwell outside the Palace of Westminster, the statue caused uproar. It dismayed local Conservatives and outraged Manchester’s large Irish immigrant population. It was originally erected by the local Liberal politicians outside the Cathedral, facing the Exchange Railway Station. When Queen Victoria was invited to open the new Manchester Town Hall, she replied that she would do so, provided the statue was removed. However, history records that the Town Hall was opened on 13 September 1877 by Manchester’s lord mayor. The statue now stands in Wythenshawe Park, which had been the site of a Roundhead billet during the English Civil War. Noble’s white Sicilan marble statue of Samuel Cunliffe Lister (1875) stands in Lister Park, Bradford. His London works include both Sir Robert Peel (1876) and the Earl of Derby (1874) in Parliament Square, his bronze Franklin Expedition Monument in Waterloo Place, Surgeon General Sir James McGrigor formerly located in the garden of the Royal Army Medical College in John Islip Street, Millbank and General Sir James Outram (1871) in Victoria Embankment Gardens. A master of the portrait bust, the National Portrait Gallery in London has a number of Noble’s busts in its collection; these include the marble William Etty (1850); a marble Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet (1850 and 1851); a marble Francis Egerton, 1st Earl of Ellesmere (c 1858); a plaster cast Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland (1869); a plaster cast William Venables Vernon Harcourt (c. 1872) and a plaster cast of General Sir James Yorke Scarlett (1873). Noble’s bronze bust of Oliver Cromwell may be found in Manchester Town Hall. After a lifetime of poor health, Noble’s constitution was so delicate, that he was effectively killed at the age of 56 on 23 June 1876, by the shock of learning of his son’s death in a railway accident. He was buried at Brompton Cemetery, near Earl’s Court. At the time of his death, many of his commissions were unfinished and these were completed by his studio assistant, J Edwards. Noble’s obituary in the Art Journal noted that it seemed: ‘surprising to those who knew him personally that he should have lived even the comparatively short period of his life, and yet more that he should have been able to continue his labours. Few men have been more esteemed or regarded, not alone for his great ability, the manifestations of talent that very closely approximated to genius, but for rare qualities of mind and heart….He was a gentleman of high rectitude, irreproachable in all the relations of life’ A monument to his memory may be found in St Peter’s Church, Hackness.