Stephen Makepiece Wiens was born Siegfried Makepiece Wiens [1] in Forest Hill, Kent, England on 26 February 1871 and was the son of German-born parents. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London, where he won Landseer Scholarship, the Creswick Prize and a British Institute Scholarship. He subsequently worked as a sculptor and painter.

He exhibited at the International Society of Sculptors, Painters & Gravers, Royal Society of Portrait Painters and Royal Academy; Royal Birmingham Society of Artists; Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; and the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin.

In 1907 his bronze 'Girl and Lizard' was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest. Shortly before the outbreak of World War One Wiens was engaged on a design for a monument to his grandfather, Ferdinand Freiligrath which was to be erected at Rolandseck-on-the-Rhine, the model for it being mentioned in The Studio Magazine, August 1913.

The 1901 England and Wales census records that both Stephen Wiens and his father were deaf, a fact not recorded in the previous census. The 1911 census notes that Stephen Wiens had been partially deaf for 18 years.

Wiens lived in Sutton, Surrey; Liverpool; London; Hove in Sussex; and, from 1937, Worthing, Sussex, where he died on 25 June 1956.
_____

[1] He changed his first name to Stephen in 1920.

_{Text source: Art History Research net (AHR net)}

Portrait sculptor and painter, of German background and educated partly in that country although born in London. Studied at Royal Academy Schools from 1890 and showed at RA from 1893. In 1920 he changed his name from Siegfried to Stephen. Tate Gallery holds his bronze Girl and Lizard, a Chantrey Purchase in 1907. This was included in Some Chantrey Favourites at RA, 1981. Died in Worthing, Sussex, where he had lived from 1937 and where the Museum & Art Gallery holds several works by him.