Collection: Frank Dobson 1886 - 1963 Follow artist
Frank Dobson was born in London on 18 November, 1886. The son of a commercial artist, he showed early promise and won an art scholarship aged eleven. On leaving school at the age of fourteen he became a studio assistant to the sculptor William Reynolds Stevens. He then studied at Hospitalfield Art School in Scotland. His work was influenced by his exposure to the modernist art shown in Roger Fry’s landmark exhibition of 1910-11. After spending World War 1 in the Artists Rifles, he showed his first sculptures in Wyndham Lewis’s 1920 Group X exhibition.
Over the years he moved from his early Cubist-inspired sculpture to a more lyrical style based on the female nude form. He also produced a series of notable portrait busts. His work was praised by Roger Fry as ‘true and pure sculpture’ and the critic Clive Bell described his Cornucopia as ‘the finest piece of sculpture which has been produced by an Englishman’
In later years his experimental approach calmed into a beguilingly nuanced classicism, and it is for this that he is best known. By 1924 he was chosen (along with Gaudier) to represent British sculpture at the Venice Biennale, and his work became famous in America, Italy, Belgium and especially Paris.
After World War II he was appointed professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art and awarded the CBE.
'Dobson is celebrated for his rhythmic treatment of mass and volume, for the grandeur and complexity of his figure subjects, for their monumental architectural quality. He dealt in essential forms - distilled shapes - evoking round-limbed and broad-thighed women, as if made for motherhood. He captured in them a sense of movement in stasis, a continuous rhythm that flows through these finely rounded bodies.' Andrew Lambirth
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