Robert Burns - A New National Statue for the 21st Century
Our Project
The Club has ambitious plans to commission His Majesty the King’s Sculptor in Ordinary, Professor Alexander Stoddart, to create a new statue in bronze, of Robert Burns for Greenock. The photos you see on this page are of the macquette of the propsed artwork which Prof. Stoddart created and which he unveiled at a seminar held in Greenock in March 2020.
There are more statues of Burns throughout the world than any non-religious person, other than Columbus and Queen Victoria. The club would like to add Greenock to that long list, in recognition of the importance of Robert Burns to the area since 1801.
Several sites for locating the statue are being considered and support for the project is gathering pace. The Greenock Regeneration Forum and the Inverclyde Cultural Partnership have already indicated their endorsement and discussions are continuing with the Council as well as other community representatives.
Such is the significance of our project that he Robert Burns World Federation has agreed to it being referred to as the National Statue of Robert Burns for the 21st Century
Our fundraising campaign to raise the fee for the statue has commenced and we welcome funding enquiries from anyone interested in becoming involved with the project. In the first instance, please click on the link below to message us.
Robert Burns
A Maquette of The Design
Alexander Stoddart FRSE
Prof. Alexander Stoddart
Prof. Stoddart is a Scottish sculptor who, since 2008, has been the Monarch’s Sculptor in Ordinary in Scotland. He works primarily on figurative sculpture in clay within the neoclassical tradition. He is best known for his civic monuments, including 3m bronze statues of David Hume and Adam Smith (philosophers, during the Scottish Enlightenment) on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, and others of James Clerk Maxwell, William Henry Playfair and John Witherspoon.
Prof. Stoddart says of his own motivation,
"My great ambition is to do sculpture for Scotland primarily through large civic monuments to figures from the country's past.”
Alexander Stoddart was born in Edinburgh and raised in Renfrewshire, where he developed an early interest in the arts and music and later trained in fine art at Glasgow School of Art. He read History of Art at the University of Glasgow. In 1998, he was awarded a Doctorate by the University of Paisley.
