Susan Durant

Susan Durant was born on 8 July 1827 in Stamford Hill, then in Middlesex and now part of London, the daughter of silk broker George Durant. She studied at Dickinson's Academy in London before traveling to Paris to train as a pupil and studio assistant of the French sculptor Baron Henri de Triqueti, a relationship that continued even after she had established her own studio in London.

Through Triqueti's introduction, Durant gained access to the British royal family and became a favored court sculptor, serving as sculpture instructor to Princess Louise and receiving repeated royal commissions, including twelve medallion portraits for the Albert Chapel at Windsor. She exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1847 to 1873, appearing there 20 times with 38 works, largely portrait busts and medallions, and also showed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester, the Society of Female Artists, the British Institution, and the 1862 International Exhibition in London. In 1861 she was commissioned, the only woman among fourteen sculptors, to produce a figure from English literature for the Egyptian Hall at the Mansion House in London; her Faithful Shepherdess was installed there by 1863 and is described in later scholarship as the first major public work commissioned from a female sculptor in England. In 1867 her monument to King Leopold I of the Belgians was installed in St George's Chapel, Windsor.

Durant died on 1 January 1873 at the Hotel de l'Athenee on the Rue Scribe in Paris. Contemporary accounts attribute her death to pleurisy, compounded by an underlying illness for which she had undergone surgery some months earlier. She was buried in the 56th division of Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Modern art-historical scholarship, including the University of Glasgow's Mapping Sculpture project and the Victorian Web, treats Durant as a significant figure in the study of Victorian sculpture and of women's professional access to it. She is consistently described as one of the first women to achieve sustained critical and financial success as a sculptor in Britain, and her Leopold monument at St George's Chapel is described as having been much admired when it was installed in 1867. No verbatim review from a named contemporary critic in a major period outlet could be confirmed in available sources.

The market database MutualArt reports a single auction record for Susan Durant: a sculpture titled Ruth, sold at the French auction house Ader in 2026 for USD 234,791. This figure comes from one source only, and the exact sale date, sale currency, and a second corroborating record could not be confirmed, so it should be treated as provisional rather than an established benchmark. Her surviving sculptures are otherwise concentrated in institutional and museum holdings, including the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut, Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, University College London, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, rather than circulating through the private and auction market that defines most artists on this site. No gallery or estate currently represents her work.

Durant's work almost never appears at auction. The one located price reference, a reported 2026 sale of Ruth at Ader for USD 234,791, comes from a single market database and could not be independently corroborated, so it should not be treated as an established benchmark; any future sale should be treated as a rare event rather than a data point in a trend. There is no catalogue raisonne; attribution instead rests on Royal Academy exhibition records, contemporaneous accounts, probate records, and the museum and institutional collections that hold her documented works. Given the thinness of the record, collectors should treat any offered work with particular care around provenance back to a named 19th-century owner or exhibition.