Frank Dobson, pioneer of modern British sculpture

Reclining Nude / 1924

Frank Dobson was born in Acton Street, St Pancras, London on 18 November 1886. His father was a commercial artist, and young Frank was introduced to the technical aspects of painting at an early age. His father also fostered in him a love and respect for fine art by taking him on frequent visits to the National Gallery.

In an extended interview with the writer and academic Stanley Casson broadcast by the BBC in 1933 Frank Dobson set out his intentions and ideas concerning his sculpture. 'The primary appeal of sculpture', Dobson declared, 'is to the emotion which results from contemplating the peculiar and apparently static evolutions which take place when a number of forms are superbly assembled'. Questioned by Casson about what he meant by this, Dobson expanded further: 'All the finest works of sculpture which I have seen have a peculiar still quality, which I call static. Underlying this, the forms ... or the multiple of them, are assembled in such a fashion that one is aware of a continuous and beautiful movement within the whole which I like to call rhythm. One limb is given a fullness which leads up to another shape…' Dobson apologised that it was difficult to define something which he struggled precisely to put into words. But moreover, that it was exactly this need to represent some indefinable emotion, which stood outside the strictures of spoken language - and summoned by the rhythmic relation of sculpted forms one to another - which made him a sculptor.

Sir Osbert Sitwell, Bt / 1923

Margaret Rawlings / 1937

Noon / 1935

Rhonda / 1930

As many artists Dobson had a tragic experiences in his early age, that eventually marked his artistic vision and influenced his personality.

Frank was heavily influenced by his artist father during his childhood, which undoubtedly determined much of his life's direction. But at the age 14 Dobson abruptly severed their close relationship by his father's early death. Dobson's father had suffered a stroke while fishing at Snaresbrook, he died before reaching hospital at age forty-four. Dobson ran away from home, sleeping under railways arches or wherever he could find shelter for eight weeks until writing to his aunt and being taken in by her in Hastings. This also caused Dobson to sever all further connections with his mother.

He joined Hastings School of Art and attended in the evenings. After a few months and with a loss of patience from his aunt with his lifestyle she requested he get a job. Dobson answered a newspaper advertisement for the role of 'studio boy' with the sculptor William Reynolds-Stephens, who at the time was President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors.

It’s amazing that Dobson was to decide to become a sculptor fifteen only years later, and he was not inspired by his old master whatsoever. At this moment Dobson had no aspirations of a career as a sculptor. His intentions were to become a painter like his father and to produce art to be housed in the National Gallery or Royal Academy.

After returning to London, he continued his studies at the City and Guilds School, Kennington, then again lived in Cornwall, where he shared a studio with Cedric Morris in Newlyn.
His early work consisted mainly of paintings.

He made his first carving in 1913, but his first one-man exhibition - at the Chenil Gallery, London, in 1914-consisted of paintings and drawings. After the First World War (when he served in France with the Artists' Rifles), he finally started turning increasingly to sculpture, and had his first one-man exhibition as a sculptor in 1920, at the Leicester Galleries, London.

During the 1920s and 1930s Dobson gained an outstanding reputation. In 1925 Roger Fry described his work as 'true sculpture and pure sculpture ... almost the first time that such a thing has been even attempted in England'.

The monumental dignity of his work was in the tradition of Maillol, and like him Dobson found the female nude the most satisfactory subject for three-dimensional composition, as in Cornucopia (University of Hull, 1925-7), described by Clive Bell as the finest piece of sculpture by an Englishman since - I don't know when'.

His work was more stylized than Maillol's, however, and his sophisticated simplifications of form made him one of the pioneers of modern sculpture in Britain.