A 1983 poster for the Victoria and Albert Museum shows a letter cutter with corduroy trousers, braces and a shapeless hat standing at the base of an inscription cut into the terracotta wall announcing in flaming gilded capitals its opening as the Henry Cole Wing, now sadly obscured by the new entrance paving. The artist appearing in the photograph was Simon Verity, who has died aged 79, whose later career in the US left much more visible traces, including the array of prophets carved on the west portal of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York.
A master sculptor and stone carver, in the UK he created grottoes, churchyard memorials for a range of 20th-century figures (including John Betjeman) and English ecclesiastical work.
In 1973, Verity carved the massive Portland and Purbeck stone font at Clifton Cathedral in Bristol with flattened doves at its base, and in 1980 a seated king as a controversial addition to the sculpture conservation scheme at Wells Cathedral. This was followed in 1984 by a nude St Peter in an empty niche on the west front at Exeter.
An invitation in 1982 to help restore a Georgian grotto stranded in the grounds of Marlborough college with the shell-worker and jeweller Diana Reynell launched a team of artisans famed for their skill and imagination, and driven by Verity’s ferocious and perfectionist appetite for work, whether restorations – the 18th-century grottoes at Hampton Court House in south-west London, Painshill in Surrey, and Goldney Hall in Bristol – or new construction, notably at Leeds Castle, Kent, in 1987, which surpassed the historic examples in rumbustious imagination of a mythical underworld.
The writer and publisher Barnaby Rogerson, who joined the Painshill team for a summer, described Verity as “a fusion of Boxer, that wonderful hard worker in Animal Farm, combined with a gang leader from the passionate years of a Maoist cultural labour squad”.
To Verity’s dismay, his seasonally themed baroque figures conceived for the pediments of the new Henbury Hall, Cheshire, proved too much for their patron and the three completed ones ended as garden statues, but his sculptures animate other well-known gardens including Barnsley House and Kiftsgate Court, both in Gloucestershire, the Laskett in Herefordshire, and La Mortella on the Italian island of Ischia.
In the background, Verity was designing a stream of churchyard memorials, usually in provincial rococo style, including Nancy Mitford’s at Swinbrook, Oxfordshire; his memorial stone for Betjeman at St Enodoc’s church in Trebetherick, Cornwall was in sprightly Gothic.
Tracking down a suitable artist to commemorate her stepdaughter Sophie Behrens in 1988, Harriet Frazer hardly knew where to turn, but finding Verity determined her to start the Memorials by Artists consultancy, helping families commission commemorative art, and later the Lettering Arts Trust.
By the end of the 1980s, Verity was at work on a much bigger project, the Cathedral of St John the Divine, the cathedral of the Episcopal diocese of New York, where his deep understanding of the practicalities of stonecutting and the principles of Gothic sculpture resulted in an astonishing bridge-building between past and present.
Work on the massive structure began in 1892 but had come to a halt; after James Parks Morton became dean of the cathedral in the 1970s all areas of creative activity were revived, including the masons’ yard. The commission was to lead a team, for Verity insisted on tackling the main west portal, explaining “for me here there were 12 8ft-high blocks of fine Indiana limestone, waiting to be carved into prophets”. Initially, there were funds for six young (mostly women) carvers to be trained on the job, although later Verity worked only with the French sculptor Jean-Claude Marchionni, making it a 10-year task. As the architectural historian John Cornforth explained, “it is remarkable how the figures have taken on a life of their own, seeming to break through the strict bounds of period, with a feel of early Gothic growing out of romanesque”.
Born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, Simon was one of five children of Terence Verity, an architect and art director, and the artist Enid Hill. After schooling at Marlborough college, he had an unconventional artistic training at Daneway House, in Sapperton, Gloucestershire, for five years, with his great-uncle the architect Oliver Hill and his much younger wife Titania, who nurtured Verity and set him to work on letterpress printing, drypoint engraving, linocutting and, by gradual stages, stone cutting.
This penurious paradise, offering a mixture of rustic classicism and late Arts and Crafts, was a magnet for refugees from modernity. Audrey Malan, one of Hill’s old flames, took Verity to Harrow for an afternoon with the artist and poet David Jones – a significant meeting.
After Hill’s death in 1968, Verity found his own way, helped by a fellow artist, Judith Mills, whom he married the following year. Work, life and play were seamless, with whimsical printing from lino and type, stone carving and monuments, part of a bohemian circle of Cotswold creativity at their rented homes in Wiltshire, with their children, Polly, Tom and Johno, becoming work colleagues at an early age and continuing to collaborate in later life.
In the 80s and 90s, commissions for grotto building and garden sculptures continued, with patrons including Elton John and Lord Rothschild, and works also in the private collection of King Charles. Verity discovered the Italian capital while working on fountains and garden sculptures for the American Academy in Rome. Based mainly in New York, he was active in the protest against alterations to the Public Library in 2013 and collaborated on a three-dimensional cast of Manhattan in 1660 at Battery Park.
His last major public work was the stonework and lettering (2007) for what became known as the Queen Elizabeth II September 11th Garden, in Hanover Square, near the site of the World Trade Center, designed by Julian and Isabel Bannerman to commemorate the British and Commonwealth victims of the 9/11 attacks.
Simon’s marriage to Judith ended in divorce and in 2013 he married his long-term work partner, Martha Finney. She survives him, along with his three children, five grandchildren and his three sisters.
• Simon Verity, sculptor, born 1 July 1945; died 11 August 2024
• This article was amended on 9 September 2024. On the west front of Wells Cathedral, Simon Verity carved a seated king, not the Christ in Majesty as an earlier version said.
