Rayner Hoff

Rayner Hoff
war memorials
Notable work	Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney King George V Memorial, Old Parliament House, Canberra William James Farrer Monument, Queanbeyan
Signature

George Rayner Hoff (27 November 1894 – 19 November 1937) was a British-born

Hoff was born on the Isle of Man, the son of a stone and wood carver of Dutch descent. He began helping his father on architectural commissions at a very young age and attended the Nottingham School of Art where he studied drawing, design, and modelling, from 1910 to 1915. During World War I, he was in the British Army and fought in the trenches in France, an experience from which he was to draw most passionately in the creation of his various war memorials. Later in the war, he made maps based on aerial photographs.

Returning from the trenches following the War he enrolled in the

Hoff came to Australia as a young man of 28. He soon adapted himself to Australian conditions, and his quiet, slightly whimsical personality made him generally liked. He was a quick worker and an artist of great originality, although his work, originally based on the Greeks, shows he had paid attention to tradition. He had studied much that was best in Italian work of the Renaissance, the Assyrian friezes, the attempt to retain only the essentials, characteristic of some of the moderns, and the simple sincerity of the Chinese.

His modelling is in a lyrical, classical art-deco manner which effortlessly combines sensuous curves with geometric line patterns.

Hoff's coming to

Rayner also produced a variety of smaller work, built up a fine school of sculpture, and in 1934 was commissioned to design the Victorian centenary medal. His use of a ram's head as the design for one side of it was much criticised, and it is not one of his most successful efforts. At the time of his death on 19 November 1937 he was engaged on the George V Memorial for Canberra. He had recently been commissioned to design part of the new coinage for the Commonwealth, and earlier in 1937 had become an invited foundation member of Robert Menzies' anti-modernist organisation, the Australian Academy of Art.^[3]

Among his works is the emblem of the Holden Australian car company, a stylised 'Lion and Stone' symbol representing a legend of man's invention of the wheel.

Architectural sculpture

The Anzac War Memorial, completed in 1934, is the main commemorative military monument in Sydney, designed by C. Bruce Dellit, has an exterior adorned with monumental figural reliefs and sculptures by Rayner Hoff, and is arguably the finest Art Deco structure in Australia.

• Medallions for various University of Sydney buildings, 1924
• Egyptian Room, Royal Arch Masonic Temple at 23-35 New Canterbury Road, Petersham 1927.
• The Spirit of Womanhood, National War Memorial, Adelaide, South Australia, 1927–30
• Figures and panels,
  Anzac War Memorial, Hyde Park
  , Sydney, Australia, 1931–34
• Theatre Arts & Pan Liberty Theatre, Sydney, Australia, 1934
• Ride of the Valkyries relief panel, Hotel Manly, Manly, Australia, 1935
• Panels, Hotel Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 1935
• Relief panels, City Mutual Life Insurance building, Sydney, Australia, 1936
• Mercury, Transportation House, Sydney, Australia, 1938

Other works

• War memorial panels, Dubbo, New South Wales
• Australian Venus, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1927
• Sacrifice, figure inside Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney, 1934
• Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal for outstanding research by an Australian mathematician or physicist, first awarded in 1935.^[5]
• Bust of William Farrer in Queanbeyan, New South Wales, 1937
• King George V Memorial
  , Canberra, 1937-53 (designed by Hoff and finished by John Moorefield following Hoff's death)
• Bronze memorial plaque to John Irvine Hunter in Wesley College, University of Sydney

Death

Hoff died on 19 November 1937, eight days before his 43rd birthday, and was survived by his wife and two daughters.^[6]

Further reading

• Daele, Patrick and Roy Lumby, A Spirit of Progress: Art Deco Architecture in Australia, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1997
• Edwards, Deborah, This Vital Flesh: The Sculpture of Rayner Hoff and His School, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1999
• Hedger, Michael, Public Sculpture in Australia, Craftsman House, 1995
• Hutchison, Noel S. Hoff, George Rayner (1894 - 1937), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 9, Melbourne University Press, 1983, pp 322–323.
• Inglis, K.S., Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 1998
• Serle, Percival (1949). "Hoff, George Rayner". Dictionary of Australian Biography. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.
• Sturgeon, Graeme, The Development of Australian Sculpture 1788–1975, Thames & Hudson, London, 1978
• Beck, Deborah, Rayner Hoff: The life of a sculptor, NewSouth Publishing, 2017

References