Frank Dobson

Background

Frank Dobson was born in London, United Kingdom on November 18, 1888, to Frank Dobson and Alice Mary Owen. His father encouraged Dobson's early interest in the arts.

Education

His father sent him to art schools at Epping, Arbroath, and London.

Career

He turned definitely to sculpture in 1913, becoming a leader in the modern movement toward unconventionality, helping to found the X Group, of which he was the London president from 1923 to 1927. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1942. From the beginning Dobson showed a tendency to simplify form into concise and somewhat contorted masses. He soon developed a style following the early classic, somewhat after the manner of Maillol, but with distortions that became an increasingly prominent feature in later work. His works, done in various stones and bronze, include The Concertina Man (1919), Susanna (1925), Source (1944), and portraits of the Earl of Asquith and Oxford (1921), Osbert Sitwell (1923), Lydia Lopokova (1924), and Tallulah Bankhead (1927).

Achievements

• Throughout the 1920s and the early 1930s he built a reputation as an outstanding sculptor and was among the first in Britain to prefer direct carving of the material rather than modelling a maquette first.
  
  From 1946 to 1953 Dobson was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art.

Connections

In April 1918 he married Cordelia Clara Tregurtha.

Father:

Frank Dobson

He was an illustrator of natural history and a painter of birds

Mother:

Alice Mary Owen

Spouse:

Cordelia Clara Tregurtha