Anthony Caro
by Gillian Devine

Anthony Caro 8 March 1924 – 23 October 2013.

Anthony Caro’s work as a sculptor was hugely influential and he is often seen as Britain’s finest sculptor since Henry Moore, for whom he worked as an assistant after studying at the Royal Academy.

Anthony Caro lived in Churt, during his childhood and youth. He was born in New Malden, Surrey. When he was three, his father, a stockbroker, moved the family to Barford Court, a large house with attached farm, in Churt. Caro was educated at Charterhouse School where he was introduced to Charles Wheeler (a well-known sculptor and president of the Royal Academy) and in the holidays he studied at the Farnham School of Art (now the University for the Creative Arts) working in Wheeler's studio. He later earned a degree in engineering at Christ's College, Cambridge. In 1946, after time in the Royal Navy, he studied sculpture at the Regent Street Polytechnic before pursuing further studies at the Royal Academy Schools from 1947 until 1952. One of his early works was a Processional Cross which he made for St John’s Church, Churt where his father is buried in the churchyard.

Anthony Caro’s breakthrough show was held at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, where he exhibited large abstract sculptures brightly painted and standing on the ground. This shifted the ways in which sculpture was exhibited and his work was hugely influential on twentieth-century British sculpture.

In 1949, Caro married the painter Sheila Girling (1924–2015). Caro was knighted in 1987 and received the Order of Merit in May 2000. He was awarded many prizes, including the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture in Tokyo in 1992 and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Sculpture in 1997. In 1996 he won, with Norman Foster and Chris Wise, the competition to design the Millennium Footbridge across the Thames.