Biography

English-born Danish sculptor, a leading proponent of early Neoclassicism in Denmark. He was the son of Simon Carl Stanley (1703-1761), a sculptor of English descent who had been born in Denmark but moved to England. In 1746 the family returned to Denmark. After first training with his father, Carl Frederik Stanley became one of the first students to enter the new Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1755. In 1758 he won the Academy's large gold medal for the sculpture Noah's Sacrifice. The gold medal was accompanied by a six-year travel scholarship and the following year he went abroad to further his education. He first settled in Paris, where he studied under the sculptor Guillaume Coustou II. In 1762 he moved to Rome, where he studied and made copies of Classical sculptures, before returning to Denmark in 1766.

Back in Denmark, in 1768, Stanley was commissioned to design the marble funerary monument to Queen Louise in Roskilde Cathedral. He exhibited sketches for the monument at the Academy's first exhibition in 1769 but it was not completed until 1791. During the 1770s and 1780s he executed various other monuments and contributed to the decorations at the Court Theatre and of the Knight's Hall at Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen.

In 1776 he was accepted as a member of the Royal Art Academy and the following year he received Danish citizenship and was appointed a professor there. From 1784 to 1785 he worked on a series of allegorical and historical reliefs for the plinth of the Trade and Navigation Monument at Lyngby. He produced few works after the early 1790s.

Stanley's most significant work remained his funerary monument to Queen Louise. It is located in Frederick V's Chapel and designed in a severe, Neo-classical style. His admittance piece for the Royal Art Academy was the allegorical Amor patriae, an elegant Neoclassical statue of which several examples exist in various materials.