Epstein, Sir Jacob 1880-1959
British sculptor

He was born in New York City, USA, a Russian-Polish Jew, and studied at the �cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1902). He became a British subject in 1907, and his early commissions included 18 nude figures for the fa�ade of the British Medical Association building in the Strand, London (1907-08) and Night and Day (1929) for the London Transport Building. These and later primitivist sculptures, such as the marble Genesis (1930, Granada Television), the Ecce Homo (1934), and the alabaster Adam (1939), resulted in great controversy, and accusations of indecency and blasphemy. He modelled many impressive bronze portrait heads of famous people, such as Joseph Conrad, Albert Einstein, T S Eliot and George Bernard Shaw, and of children, such as Ester (1944), his youngest daughter. He also executed two bronze Madonna and Child works (1927, Riverside Church, New York; 1950, Holy Child Jesus Convent, London). In the 1950s, his last two large commissioned works, the aluminium Christ in Majesty (Llandaff Cathedral) and St Michael and the Devil (Coventry Cathedral), won more immediate critical acclaim.

Bibliography: Richard Buckle, Jacob Epstein, Sculptor (1963)