James Havard Thomas (22 December 1854 – 6 June 1921) was a Bristol-born sculptor active in London and Capri. He became the first Chair of Sculpture at the Slade School of Art in London. He was known for his painstakingly precise sculptures resulting from elaborate and time-consuming processes for achieving sculptural realism. He emerged from the same roots as the "New Sculpture" in Britain, and his career runs parallel to (and in dialogue with) that movement. Biography Thomas was born in Bristol, at 16 St Michael's Hill in 1872. He first studied at the Bristol School of Art, then at the South Kensington School of Art. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1872. In 1879, he went to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts under Pierre-Jules Cavelier. In 1885, he exhibited his marble statue Slave Girl to much acclaim in London. Thomas was associated with the New English Art Club and its attempts to reform the Royal Academy of Arts. In 1887-88, he served as Secretary for the Provisional Committee for Securing a Suffrage in the National Exhibition of the Arts, and this prominent role insured that Thomas would never be elected to the Royal Academy for the remainder of his career. Soon after the failed attempt to reform the academicians, in 1889, Thomas departed for Italy. He lived in Naples, Valle di Pompeii, and, most extensively, Capri, where he studied the lives of peasants, while also designing a system by which he could accurately determine the three-dimensional representation of the human form. He became a fixture of the expatriate community in Capri, and he was the inspiration for the character of Count Caloveglia in Norman Douglas's novel South Wind (1917). In keeping with his disdain for the Royal Academy, Thomas repudiated the techniques of academic sculpture. Instead, he developed an elaborate system to accurately measure the complex topography of the human body and to translate it into a three-dimensional medium. Taxingly for his models, Thomas would take weeks to minutely map the human body using an armature that allowed him to translate the complex forms into a numerical system which, in turn, allowed it to be recreated in a sculptural material (his preference came to be wax over mahogany). Thomas resettled in London in 1906. Upon returning to Britain, his statue Lycidas (1905) was intended as an exemplar of his hard-won method. A complex and