Pencil Drawing by William Charles Thomas Dobson

Red chalk drawing of a reclining Female nude Signed and dated by Frank Dobson This drawing, never before on the market, comes from an important European private collection and is beautified by an antique frame in gilded wood, in almost perfect condition. The painting is also protected by glass Dimensions whit frame cm 71 x 58.5 Every item of our Gallery, upon request, is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Sabrina Egidi official Expert in Italian furniture for the Chamber of Commerce of Rome and for the Rome Civil Courts. Frank Owen Dobson (London 1886 – 1963) was a British artist and sculptor. Dobson began as a painter, and his early work was influenced by cubism, vorticism, and futurism. After World War I, however, he turned increasingly toward sculpture in a more or less realist style. 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. The simplified forms and flowing lines of much of his sculptures, particularly his female nudes, showed the influence of African art. From 1946 to 1953 Dobson was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1953. While Dobson was one of the most esteemed artists of his time, is now seen as one of the most important British sculptors of the 20th century. Dobson grew up in Clerkenwell where attended school in Forest Gate. After eighteen months in Reynolds-Stephen's studio, Dobson moved to Devon and then to Cornwall where he lived, for two years, by selling landscape paintings. In 1906 he obtained a scholarship to study at the art institute in Hospitalfield House in Arbroath and studied there for four years. From 1910 to 1912 Dobson attended the City and Guilds of London Art School in Kennington, after which he returned to Cornwall. In Newlyn, he met Augustus John who used his influence and contacts and in, or around, 1915 Dobson created his first sculpture, a small piece in wood. In 1915, during the First World War, Dobson enlisted in The Artists Rifles and served in France from October 1916. In April 1918 he married Cordelia Clara Tregurtha. Dobson was formally invalided out of the Army in November 1918 and by then had already submitted several drawings to the British War Memorials Committee. Dobson set up a studio in the Tregurtha family home in Newlyn but towards the end of the war he took a studio in Manresa Road in Chelsea and would live there until the start of the Second World War. Throughout the 1920s Dobson focused increasingly on sculpture, exhibited work in several influential exhibitions and played a leading role in a number of artistic groups. He was the only sculptor to take part in the 1920 Group X exhibition. Dobson was a founding member of the London Artists Association and spent three years as President of the London Group between 1923 and 1927. He made bronze portraits of several public figures. At the Group X exhibition he exhibited two sculptures and studies of Ben Nicholson and his bronze head of H. H. Asquith was shown at the Leicester Galleries in late 1921. Other subjects included Osbert Sitwell, Lydia Lopokova and Tallulah Bankhead. Dobson exhibited at the Venice Biennale in both 1924 and in 1926, was featured in the 1925 Tri-National Exhibition which visited London, Paris and New York and was also included in the 1926 European artists exhibition that toured America and Canada. In March 1927 he had his first major one-man exhibition when the Leicester Galleries exhibited twenty-three of his sculptures and several bronzes. In 1930 the Tate purchased a larger-than-life sculpture from Dobson and erected it outside the gallery on Millbank. During the early 1930s Dobson continued to receive portrait commissions, most notably for Sir Edward Marsh and the actress Margaret Rawlings. Dobson worked in other media including textiles and silver, as well. His silver gilt cup, Calix Majestatis, to mark the coronation of George VI and Queen Elizabeth is now in the Royal Collection. During 1933 Dobson fractured his left arm which greatly limited his ability for heavy carving and his last monumental stone carving was to be Pax, which was first shown at the London Group in 1935. At the start of World War Two, Dobson and his second wife [Caroline] Mary Bussell, whom he had married in 1931, moved to Bristol, where a large retrospective of his work was held in March 1940. Dobson lived in the city throughout the Bristol Blitz and like several other artists painted the ruins of churches destroyed in the bombing. Dobson contacted the War Artists' Advisory Committee and offered his services as both a painter and sculptor. WAAC were reluctant to offer sculpture commissions but eventually did offer Dobson a short-term contract for two portrait busts of Naval personal. Later WAAC commissioned some paintings, including one of workers arriving for work at a factory that had been relocated to a tunnel. Dobson was appointed head of sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1946, a post he held until his retirement in 1953. For the Festival of Britain site on the South Bank of the Thames in 1951, Dobson created London Pride. The sculpture was originally exhibited as a plaster cast but was later, after Dobson died, cast as a bronze and placed in front of the Royal National Theatre in 1987. Among his last commissions were a bronze head of Sir Thomas Lipton and the zodiac clock...

An original Jansen pencil drawing depicting an architectural detail "Rosace de Plafond" page 137. Stamped: Jansen, 9 Rue Royale Paris 8e.