Sir Jacob Epstein, Sculptor, Dead

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28980, 22 August 1959, Page 13

Sir Jacob Epstein, Sculptor, Dead

(Rec. 11.30*p.m.) LONDON, August 21. Sir Jacob Epstein, the eminent British sculptor, is dead, it was disclosed today.

He was believed to have died at his London home on Wednesday night. He was 79.

No ‘further details were immediately available. Jacob Epstein was born in 1880 in the East Side of New York, of Russian Jewish parents. At the age of 21 he went to work in a bronze-casting foundry and began to study sculpture. Next year he went to Europe, and in London

was introduced to a wealthy American woman who financed his study in Paris. On his return to London, he made his 18 figures for the B.M.A. building, his first controversial work. The “Evening Standard” denounced him editorially. (The statutes were removed in 1935.) Soon after, he was commissioned to make a tomb for Oscar Wilde in Paris, which was. unveiled in 1912. The “Evening Standard” thought it “a dignified piece of monumental sculpture.” In 1920, his bronze “Christ,” a gaunt figure wrapped in a winding sheet, was furiously attacked by the press, clergy, and academicians, and defended by Bernard Shaw and others. Since then, many of his large works, mostly with religious subjects, have been the centre of controversy. A parallel activity to his monumental sculpture was a long series of. portrait bronzes, which have been described as containing more of Epstein than of the subjects. He was a short, bold-featured, carelessly-dressed man, who it was once said suggested both Michelangelo and William Blake in appearance.

Epstein became a British subject and was knighted in 1954.