Epstein, Sir Jacob

Epstein, Sir Jacob (1880–1959). American-born sculptor (and occasional painter and illustrator) who settled in England in 1905 and became a British citizen in 1911. He was born in New York into a family of Polish-Russian Orthodox Jews. After prospering as a tailor, his father had gone into property. From 1894 to 1902 Epstein studied sporadically at the Art Students League whilst working at various jobs; he discovered a ‘love of the purely physical side of sculpture’ when he spent several weeks cutting ice on Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, and this encouraged him to find work in a bronze foundry, 1900–1. At the same time he attended evening classes in sculpture at which he was taught by George Grey Barnard, whom he admired greatly, referring to him as ‘my old master'. In 1902, on the proceeds of his illustrations for The Spirit of the Ghetto by the journalist Hutchins Hapgood, Epstein moved to Paris. There he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, and visits to the Louvre aroused an interest in ancient and primitive sculpture that lasted all his life and powerfully affected his work. In 1905 he moved to London, where he executed his first important commission in 1907–8: eighteen Portland stone figures, over lifesize, for the façade of the British Medical Association's headquarters in the Strand. They aroused a furore of abuse on the grounds of alleged obscenity and were mutilated in 1937 after the building was bought by the government of Southern Rhodesia. Such verbal attacks and acts of vandalism were to become a feature of Epstein's career.

The next outcry came with his tomb of Oscar Wilde (Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, 1912), a magnificently bold and original piece featuring a hovering angel inspired by Assyrian sculpture; it was banned as indecent until a bronze plaque had been placed over the angel's sexual organs, and after the plaque was removed in a night raid by a group of artists and poets, a tarpaulin was placed over the tomb and remained in place for two years. Epstein carved the tomb in London (it is in Hopton Wood stone), but he spent a good deal of time in Paris during the initial period of controversy; he met Brancusi, Modigliani, and Picasso there and was influenced by their formal simplifications. Back in England, he associated with the Vorticists (although he was never officially a member of the movement), and at this time he created his most radical work—The Rock Drill (1913–15), a robot-like figure that was originally shown mounted on an enormous drill; he said it symbolized ‘the terrible Frankenstein's monster we have made ourselves into’ (casts of the torso are in the Tate Gallery, London, and elsewhere).

Epstein's later work was generally much less audacious than this, but his public sculptures were still attacked with monotonous regularity, their expressive use of distortion being offensive to conservative eyes even when they were immune to charges of indecency ( David Sylvester cites a story of an old lady saying about a figure of Christ: ‘I can never forgive Mr Epstein for his representation of Our Lord—so un-English'). Often Epstein was mocked as well as censured, and in the 1950s some of his works were even acquired by showmen to be displayed in a kind of seaside freakshow. Rima, a stone relief memorial to the naturalist W. H. Hudson in Hyde Park, London (1922), roused perhaps the greatest storm of any of Epstein's works. It was daubed with green paint and a number of well-known figures petitioned for its removal; they included Dicksee and Munnings (present and future presidents of the Royal Academy) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Muirhead Bone came to its defence with a letter in The Times, signed by an equally impressive line-up, including Dobson, Kennington, and George Bernard Shaw. In the face of such controversy Epstein concentrated increasingly on bronze portrait busts, which found a more appreciative audience than his monumental works. Many notable men and women sat for him and he portrayed them with psychological intensity and great mastery of expressive surfaces, carrying on the tradition of Rodin ( Frank Rutter, indeed, called him ‘the greatest modeller since Rodin').

It was only after the Second World War that Epstein's work began to achieve public acceptance, and in the 1950s he belatedly received a stream of honours (including a knighthood in 1954) and of major commissions. In 1956 he wrote: ‘I am inundated with requests for work on buildings, large works which I don't know I will ever be able to accomplish. I was for so long without any commissions, I don't feel like turning down anything that comes my way: but it is all coming too late I'm afraid.’ Almost all these commissions were in bronze, including the huge St Michael and the Devil (1956–8) at Coventry Cathedral, but Epstein was also a formidable carver and two of his finest late works are in stone: Lazarus (New College Chapel, Oxford, 1947–8) and the Trades Union Congress War Memorial (Congress House, Great Russell Street, London, 1956–7). Epstein published an autobiography, Let There Be Sculpture, in 1940 (a revised edition, entitled An Autobiography, came out in 1955). The Sculptor Speaks (a series of his conversations on art) appeared in 1931. A few days after Epstein's death, Henry Moore paid tribute to his central role in the development of modern sculpture in Britain: he ‘took the brickbats … the insults … the howls of derision with which artists since Rembrandt have learned to become familiar. And as far as sculpture in this century is concerned, he took them first.’