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Description: bronze with a dark brown patina on a bronze base

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Dimensions: height 80cm., 31 1/2 in.

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Provenance: Mr and Mrs E.V. Straude, by whom gifted to the Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1973
Acquired from the above by the present owner

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Exhibited:

London, Leicester Galleries, Carvings and Bronzes by Jacob Epstein, May 1933, no.9, illustrated in the catalogue (another cast).

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Published: J. Epstein, Let There Be Sculpture, London, 1940 (another cast illustrated);
R. Black, The Art of Jacob Epstein, New York, 1942, p.240, no.188, pl. 203 (another cast illustrated);
R. Buckle, Jacob Epstein Sculptor, London, 1963, p.209, plates 321-2 (another cast illustrated);
E. Silber, The Sculpture of Epstein, Oxford, 1986, p.42, no.232, plate 25 (another cast illustrated).

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Notes: VARIOUS PROPERTIES
Conceived in 1932 and cast in 1934, the present work was executed while the sitter Isobel Nicholas was an art student. Buckle hailed the portrait as 'a triumph...the sculptor's mastery shows itself in the way that, observing narrowly every minute graduation of plane and outline, he knows by instinct or experience just where to exaggerate the curl of a lip, the length of a neck, the elegance of a waist or wrist, the outward jut of the breast...a picture of savage sophistication' (Buckle, op.cit., p.209). Isobel married three times, first to the political journalist Sefton Delmar, then Constant Lambert and finally Alan Rawsthorne. She made a name for herself as a painter as well as designing two ballets with choreography by Sir Frederick Ashton (Tiresias of 1951 and Madame Chrysantheme of 1955). In later life as Isobel Rawsthorne, she became a favourite model of Francis Bacon.