Jim Mathieson

James William Mathieson, sculptor: born Calcutta, India 21 June 1931; married 1959 Edna Skinner (one daughter, and one daughter deceased; marriage dissolved 1976), 1981 Judith Craig (one stepson); died London 12 April 2003.

For Jim Mathieson, making sculpture was an obsession. "It is done with a sense of love in creating something tangible. The satisfaction comes from making it, as I do not actively try to sell it. Money is only of interest to me to pay for materials." Despite this unworldly attitude, Mathieson became a successful professional artist, a prominent member of the Society of Portrait Sculptors. "His figurative work was superb and he was one of the best portrait sculptors in the country," judges the society's president, Anthony Stones.

Mathieson said that many of his figurative pieces were "involved with the concept of the victim". In some ways he was a victim: of circumstances that prevented his early entry into the art world; of a system that prevented him from pursuing postgraduate studies; of the period he practised in, during which his type of work was generally out of critical favour; and of the cancer that finally wore down even his steely determination to create.

He was born in Calcutta in 1931. His father, William, served in the Army and the Indian Police. Jim and his older brother David were sent to the Lawrence Royal Military School, Simla, in the hope that they would become army officers. As the British prepared to leave India, in 1946 the family moved to Britain, for a while living in Arbroath, in Scotland, where Jim and David both began apprenticeships as toolmakers, then settled in London. Jim had shown early artistic talent, but his father refused to fund art studies and his mother was unable to get him a grant.

From 1946 to 1949, Jim Mathieson attended Westminster College of Commerce. He completed his National Service in the intelligence section of the Gordon Highlanders and, after serving in Germany, in 1952 he joined the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company. Although a special section was created with Mathieson in charge, he hated his dozen years as an insurance accounts clerk. He decided to become a psychotherapist and successfully obtained O and A levels.

At the same time, he was becoming politically active. He demonstrated against the 1956 Suez war and became involved in CND. He helped set up its branch in Bermondsey and Southwark, becoming chairman, and was a member of the spin-off, direct-action group Committee of 100, and also joined the Communist Party. His activities with the Committee of 100 led to arrest and imprisonment in custody for three days pending trial. A further arrest, ending in his being fined and bound over, stemmed from his speaking for CND at a speakers' corner in East Street, Walworth, a site the authorities reckoned too prominent.

These activities undermined his aspirations to be a psychotherapist. He still wanted to be a sculptor and in 1964 began attending part-time classes at the Sir John Cass School of Art. He had married Edna Skinner in 1959 and, after his first daughter, Julia, died aged only six months, in 1965 he quit insurance and began a full-time sculpture course at the City and Guilds School of Art.

He was 34, too old for many art schools. The course lasted four years, his wife supporting him – their second daughter, Catherine, was born in 1966. While still studying, Mathieson was chosen to cast the Prince of Wales's crown for the crowning ceremony at Caernarvon Castle.

After obtaining his diploma, Mathieson was judged too old to pursue a postgraduate course at the Royal College of Art or Royal Academy Schools. He had begun part-time lecturing in sculpture at Sir John Cass while at the City and Guilds, so now he taught there and at Ealing School of Art, from 1969 to 1979.

He had a show at the Archer Gallery in 1972 and took part in numerous mixed exhibitions, including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. The Society of Portrait Sculptors (SPS) had been founded in 1953, and it was an obvious body for Mathieson to join. He began to get commissions, and in 1979 decided to give up lecturing to sculpt full-time.

After his first marriage was dissolved in 1976, in 1981 Mathieson married Judith Craig, who has recently retired as the head of the portrait studio at Madame Tussaud's waxwork museum. Between 1984 and 1998, he was commissioned by Tussaud's to model portraits, heads and full figures, a useful economic sideline to his own work. Among many personalities depicted were the ballet dancer Darcey Bussell and the American television presenter Oprah Winfrey.

For Mathieson, the sculptures of Rodin – especially The Gates of Hell – and Brancusi and Arp and the paintings of Bosch were particular inspirations. He was a modeller like Rodin, employing clay or wax, works that were cast in resin-aluminium and eventually bronze. Twice he destroyed the contents of his studio to make room for new work. Finished clays "had to be discarded because the work seemed deficient to me", he wrote:

Analysing my faults and looking failure in the face has formed my artistic growth. If I can make a few sculptures that genuinely satisfy certain criteria, the sacrifices will all have been worthwhile.

Exhibiting societies commonly hit low points, sometimes never to re-emerge. When Anthony Stones came back from New Zealand in 1983, he showed with the SPS for two years, then saw it go into abeyance. It was relaunched about seven years ago. Mathieson, one of its oldest members, "was valued for his wise counsel", says Stones:

At an annual general meeting he would pick something up from an oblique angle which everybody else had missed. He was an original thinker, and he marched to Jim's drum.

When Mathieson learned, in 1992, that he had cancer, he was determined to continue working. Several years before he had embarked on a new sculptural phase, between commissions. This was

a series of abstract sculptures trying to capture the idea of sexuality in plants and animals. Making them is an all-consuming commitment to capture an essence of an idea that transcends realism.

An operation failed to eliminate the cancer. Mathieson would not take morphine beyond what would permit him to sculpt. His studio in west London was in an idyllic setting, with a pond, woods around and a golf course beyond. Judith Mathieson recalls that "he would stand there, tears rolling down his face, clench hands, raise fists above his shoulders and breathe and breathe into the pain, willing it to go away" before resuming work.

A high point in Mathieson's career was his one-and-a-quarter-times-life-size bronze statue of William Hogarth. The alert, graceful figure of the 18th-century painter, complete with palette, brushes and attendant dog, was completed despite the cancer. It was unveiled in Chiswick in 2001 by the editor of Private Eye, Ian Hislop, and the painter David Hockney. "It is the best sculpture of a painter since Alfred Drury completed his Sir Joshua Reynolds outside the Royal Academy," says Anthony Stones.

David Buckman