Jacob Epstein (1880-1959)

Jacob Epstein was born in New York to Polish immigrant parents. He attended classes at the Art Students League in the late 1890s, and in 1900-1901 worked in a bronze foundry by day and attended drawing and sculpture classes at night school. In 1902 he went to Paris, and studied at the Académie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where one of his teachers was Rodin. He settled in London in 1905 and later became a British citizen.

Epstein produced numerous bronze portrait sculptures, several of which are in the National Portrait Gallery. He also carried out monumental public sculptures, notably, 1906-07 a series of large nude sculptures for the British Medical Association building in the Strand, London (now Zimbabwe House), which were considered far too anatomically shocking for Edwardian tastes, and were subsequently mutilated; the Oscar Wilde memorial in Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris (1911); Rima (the memorial to W.H.Hudson in Hyde Park) (1923); the figures of Night and Day (1928-29) at 55 Broadway, London (St James’s Park tube station); Christ in Majesty, Llandaff cathedral (1954-55); St Michael’s Victory over the Devil, Coventry cathedral, 1958.

The Arts Council staged a major retrospective of his work at the Tate Gallery in 1953. Epstein was knighted in 1954.