National Galleries of Scotland

Albert Toft (English, 1862 - 1949)

Toft was born in Birmingham and was apprenticed as a modeller first at Elkington and then at the Wedgwood pottery in Staffordshire. He attended evening classes at art schools in Hanley and in Newcastle-under-Lyme and won a scholarship to the National Art Training School in South Kensington in 1881, where he was considered to be Edouard Lanteri's star pupil. He set up his studio in London and produced portrait busts, bronze statuettes and bas-reliefs in the fluid style of the New Sculpture movement of the closing decades of the nineteenth century.