Thomas Duckett Senior

Born in Claughton, Wyre, he was apprenticed to a plasterer before working in Lancaster as a wood carver.^[1][2] Next he was employed by the sculpture firm Franceys and Spence in Liverpool then the architectural and sculptural firm of Francis Webster and Sons in Kendal.^[1]

He set up his own studio around 1844 in Preston, Lancashire, with tomb monuments and busts forming most of his output.^[1] That town commissioned a statue of Robert Peel from him in 1850, now in Winckley Square in the town,^[3] though he failed to win the competitions for Leeds' Wellington Monument and another Peel monument in Bolton, Lancashire.^[1] His works are well-represented in Preston's Harris Art Gallery.^[1]

He and his wife are both interred in the cemetery in New Hall Lane Cemetery, with a monument that has a head on each elevation, possibly carved or at least designed by Duckett himself.^[1][4] Their son Thomas Duckett Junior was also a sculptor.

• Art Journal, 1878, pp. 169, 207
• D.A. Cross, Public Sculpture of Lancashire and Cumbria, Liverpool, 2017, pp. xi, 63, 107–08, 169
• C. Hartwell and N. Pevsner, Lancashire: North (The Buildings of England), New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 237, 240, 410, 468, 505, 523, 707
• K. Johnson, Preston through Time, Stroud, 2011, p. 76
• Preston Chronicle:
  • 6 September 1845
  • 22 November 1845
  • 15 April 1854
  • 9 January 1858
  • 11 June 1859
  • 21 January 1860
  • 12 March 1862
  • 19 March 1864
  • 1 April 1865
  • 19 March 1870
  • 16 February 1878
• I. Roscoe et al., A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 378–79
• A. Taylor (ed. J. Martin), The Websters of Kendal. A Northwestern Dynasty, Kendal, 2004, pp. 51–52, 60