Adams Important Irish Art 30th September 2015 : You can Download a PDF Version from the Bottom Menu Down Arrow Icon

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Hawk
Bronze, 32cm high (12½”)
Signed, dated (20)’05 and numbered 2/5
€3,000 - 5,000
Bronze with brown and gold patina, 35cm (13¾”) high, on a stepped and truncated square pyramid stone base, 10.5cm (4¼”) high
Jacob Epstein was born to Russian Polish parents in New York in 1880. By 1902 he was studying in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and then the
Académie Julian. He moved to London in 1905 and took a studio in Fulham. In 1907 he received his first major commission to carve a set of eigh-
teen over-life-sized figures for the façade of the British Medical Council’s new building at Agar Street in London. Despite acute criticism and public
outcry his career continued to flourish and in 1911 he began work on the tomb of Oscar Wilde in Pére Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. This hieratic
carving, completed the following year also provoked an outcry with Epstein’s debt to Assyrian sculpture undisguised.
The model for the present work is Pola Givenchy, who appears in a number of similar works, including ‘Resurrection’(1941). Epstein appears to
have planned this bust for a group which was never executed.
€8,000 - 12,000