Bates was born on 26 April 1850, in Stevenage in Hertfordshire. He began his career as a carver’s assistant, and before beginning the regular study of plastic art he passed through a long apprenticeship in architectural decoration working from 1869 for the firm of Farmer & Brindley. In 1879 he went to London and entered the South London School of Technical Art (formerly known as Lambeth School of Art, now the City and Guilds of London Art School). There he studied under Jules Dalou and won a silver medal in the national competition at South Kensington. In 1881, he was admitted to the Royal Academy schools, where in 1883 he won the gold medal and the travelling scholarship with his relief of Socrates teaching the People in the Agora, which showed grace of line and harmony of composition. He immediately went to Paris, where he took up an independent studio (on Dalou’s suggestion) (1883-1885). He was influenced by Rodin, who advised him on occasion about his work. A head and three small bronze panels (the Aeneid), executed by Bates in Paris, were exhibited at the Royal Academy, and selected for purchase by the Chantrey Bequest trustees; but the selection had to be cancelled because they had not been modelled in Britain. Bates returned to Britain in 1886, and was elected to the Art Workers Guild. His Aeneas (1885), Homer (1886), three Psyche panels and Rhodope (1887), all showed marked advance in form and dignity. Bates’s primary skill lay in the composition and sculpting of relief sculpture, and it is in this medium that he achieved his most technically and aesthetically refined work. The freestanding ideal sculpture remained the most important of sculptural genres, however, and Bates gradually turned to statues such as the 1889 Hounds in Leash, which is essentially a relief composition translated to three dimensions. In this work, Bates demonstrated his ability to convey muscular intensity and movement and led to his greater success and ambition. His next major statue, the 1890 Pandora, is more truly a figure in the round, and in this work Bates experimented with polychromy and mixed materials, making it self-consciously into a paradigmatic example of his artistic priorities. The box she holds is an actual decorative casket made of ivory and gilt bronze and elaborately carved with scenes from the Pandora legend. It was exhibited in 1890 at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and purchased within the following year for the Chantrey Bequest. He died on 30 January 1899 at his residence, 10 Hall Road, St. John’s Wood, N.W. He was buried at Stevenage on 4 February.