Heavenly Welcome

This is the plaster model for Woolner’s life-size marble relief on the monument in Wrexham Church, North Wales, to Mary Ellen Peel and her son Archibald. It was exhibited in 1867 at the Royal Academy. The monumental alto-relief form gave Woolner the opportunity to work on a large scale, combining ‘serious’, affecting subjects appropriate to a church memorial with the expression of tender, domestic sentiments. Monuments by Flaxman, such as that to Agnes Cromwell, provided precedents for the composition and subject.