Estimated Price:

   $   

Realized Price:

   $   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

STANDING FEMALE FIGURE

height (excluding base) 58.5cm., 23in.

hoptonwood stone

PROVENANCE

Acquired directly from the artist in September 1937 and thence by descent to the present owner

LITERATURE

Stanley Casson, XXth Century Sculptors, OUP, Oxford 1930, illustrated pl.31;
Stanley Casson (ed.), Artists At Work, London 1933, illustrated facing p.45;
T.W.Earp, Frank Dobson Sculptor, Tiranti, London 1945, p.XV, illustrated pl.16 (incorrectly dated to 1936 and indexed as pl.24);
Neville Jason & Lisa Thompson-Pharoah, The Sculpture of Frank Dobson, Lund Humphries, London 1994, no.58.

NOTE

The present sculpture, which appears to have been unexhibited for over seventy years, is an important re-emergence of a major carving of the mid 1920s. Wrongly dated by Earp to 1936, it is dated by Jason & Thompson-Pharoh to 1926-1928 and thus is wholly contemporary with Cornucopia (University of Hull Art Gallery), one of Dobson's best known and critically praised sculptures.

The early 1920s saw Dobson developing a distinctive personal style, one which combined the influences of pre-war Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska with an awareness of contemporary European work, especially Zadkine and Picasso. However, Dobson's circumstances at the time allowed him a good deal of exposure to a far wider range of sources, especially after his visit to Italy in 1924 and Ceylon in 1925. Immediately on his return, Dobson began work on Cornucopia, on which he was to work for the next two years. The similarities between this sculpture and Standing Female Figure are clear, with both works sharing the contraposto pose, the rounded forms of the figure and the positioning of the left arm behind the back. The critical response to Cornucopia was probably the best of his career, with extensive appraisals from Clive Bell and Roger Fry linking Dobson to Maillol, and Eric Gill praising the piece as one of the sculptures from prehistory to the present day which most pleased him (see note to cat.no.41 in Frank Dobson: True & Pure Sculpture, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge 1981).

The stylised treatment of the features and the fullness of the figure in the present work seem to have a close affinity to the nudes of a number of British artists at the time, and parallels have been drawn with not only Gill, but also Matthew Smith and Mark Gertler. If this is to be seen as part of a theme of figuration in British art in the middle 1920s, a comparison with the work of Dod Proctor may be equally valid. Dobson knew Proctor well, having worked in Newlyn in 1919-20 (his first wife, Cordelia, was the sister of the painter Mary Jewels), and her celebrated 1926 painting, Morning (Coll. Tate Gallery, London) shares much with Dobson's 1924-25 Reclining Nude (Coll. Courtauld Institute of Art, London).

A creamy-grey stone quarried near Matlock in Derbyshire, hoptonwood stone was much used by British sculptors in the inter-war period, notably, Gill, Moore and Hepworth.