1894 - 1937

Rayner Hoff was born on the Isle of Man in 1894 and was 29 when he arrived in Sydney in 1923 to be Drawing and Sculpture Master at East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School) in Darlinghurst. He reorganised the course and introduced a five-year diploma he based on the program taught at London’s Royal College of Art, at which he himself had studied and he’d received many accolades.

He set up a private studio at East Sydney Tech and encouraged his students to help him work on various commissions. He created a dynamic school of sculpture that attracted a group of gifted students, and in 1923 he was made lecturer-in-charge of the school’s entire art department.

Rayner’s influence on the Sydney art scene is legendary. Although he was known as Australia’s most successful public sculptor during the 1930s, he’s now mainly remembered for the impressive public sculptures he created in 1934 for the Anzac War Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park.

He also completed many private commissions, such as General Motors Holden’s ‘proud lion rolling a stone’ logo, a version of which is still used on Holden cars today. In 1927, he was awarded the Wynne Prize for his marble portrait of experimental filmmaker Len Lye, and many of his sculptures are held in Australia’s major public collections.

He, his wife Annis (née Briggs) and their two daughters lived in a two-bedroom brick cottage in Kenneth Street, Tamarama (now 23 Kenneth Street) from 1928 to his death in 1937. In 1934, at the height of his fame as a sculptor, the cottage was featured in an article in the August issue of the national lifestyle magazine Australian Home Beautiful. The spread was illustrated with photos by pioneering Australian pictorialist photographer Harold Cazneaux (1878–1953), who’d obviously enjoyed shooting images such as the sunroom with views across the sea. Other photos from the period include the cliff path than ran behind the home and is in the same position today.

Rayner loved Bondi Beach, swam at it often, visited it with his family and students, and used locals as the inspiration for some of the figures he sculpted. Tragically, his life was cut short in November 1937 during a surfing session, after he suffered a severe attack of pancreatitis. He died at Waverley’s Delaware Private Hospital, at age 42. Annis and their two daughters stayed in the Kenneth Street home till Annis’s death in 1961.

Courtesy the National Art School Collection, Museum of Applied Art and Science, Australian War Memorial, Mitchell Library and the Henstock family