Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good and plates condition. Ex library so some stickers stamps and marks but pages are great. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> For many years Lady Epstein was the constant witness of the sculptor’s work dis- cussing with him everything he did occasionally venturing a criticism-the only person possibly ever to do so; and from being the most regular student of the master’s sculpture and drawings became in the natural course of events the great- est expert on them. It follows that any drawing he gave her would be given for a special purpose: either that it was the best of a batch or had some particular quality they both admired; or that it was unique the only scribble made in preparation for carving a monument; or that it was the project for some unrealised sculpture; or it might be a rare sketch surviving from an early period all other traces of which had been dispersed or destroyed. In fact most of these are early works over half having been made before the end of the first war. Kathleen Epstein has herself written the notes on the drawings from her collection. Epstein of course drew long before he sculpted. He was largely self-taught though in his ‘teens he attended for a term or two one of New York’s few art schools. When his family moved from the Jewish quarter in Lower East Side Man- hattan he was so attached to the characters he observed and drew in the street markets and sweat shops that he stayed behind: and from early days he tells us in his autobiography he could always sell his drawings. It is unfortunate that Lady Epstein’s collection contains none of his remarkable studies of Ghetto types which (influenced by the caricatures of Steinlen and Forain and perhaps by draw- ings of Toulouse-Lautrec seen at Durand-Ruel’s gallery on Fifth Avenue) were so much broader and bolder in style than anything else being done in America. (SP)