Oil painting -> List of Painters -> Sir Jacob Epstein

Sir Jacob Epstein

Early Days: Epstein's parents were Polish Jewish refugees living on New York's Lower East Side. His family was middle-class Orthodox Jews, and he was the third of five children. His interest in drawing came from long periods of illness; as a child he suffered from pleurisy. From a young age, Epstein rejected his family's orthodoxy and grew tired of religious ceremony.

Career:

He took an interest in pantheism and anarchism, but claimed in his autobiography that his only real interest was art, and that he was never politically or religiously active as an adult. He studied art in his native New York as a teenager, sketching the city, and joined the Art Students League of New York in 1900. For his livelihood, he worked in a bronze foundry by day, studying drawing and sculptural modeling at night.

Epstein's first major commission was to illustrate Hutchins Hap well’s Spirit of the Ghetto. The money from the commission was used by Epstein to move to Paris. Moving to Europe in 1902, he studied in Paris at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

He settled in London in 1905, and after marrying Margaret Dunlop in 1907 he became a British citizen. Many of Epstein's works were sculpted at his two cottages in Loughton, Essex, where he lived first at number 49 then 50, Baldwin's Hill (see the blue plaque on number 50). He served briefly in the 38th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers aka the Jewish Legion during World War I.