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Edward Onslow Ford was born in Islington, north London, the son of a London businessman. His family moved to Blackheath while he was a child and he was educated there at the Blackheath Proprietary School. Encouraging his strong artistic interests his mother took him to Antwerp to study painting at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten. From there they moved after a time to Munich where Ford studied under Michael Wagmuller, who advised him to transfer to sculpture. He returned to England in 1874, settling in Blackheath and exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1875. In 1884 he took a studio in Fulham opposite that of Alfred Gilbert and the pair became good friends. He established a very successful practice making large memorial works, portrait busts and a series of statuettes and allegorical female nudes. In the forefront of the New Sculpture movement he was one of the first English sculptors to publish small replicas of his statues.