Frank Dobson (sculptor)

His mother was Alice Mary Owen and his father, who was also named Frank Dobson, was a commercial artist who specialized in bird and flower designs for greeting card companies.

[5] 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 Newlyn, he met Augustus John who used his influence and contacts to enable Dobson to stage a one-man show at the Chenil Gallery in London in 1914.

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 and was commissioned to paint a barrage balloon site on the Thames estuary.

During the early 1930s Dobson continued to receive portrait commissions, most notably for Sir Edward Marsh and the actress Margaret Rawlings.

His silver gilt cup, Calix Majestatis, to mark the coronation of George VI and Queen Elizabeth is now in the Royal Collection.

[citation needed] At the start of World War Two, Dobson and his second wife [Caroline] Mary Bussell, whom he had married in 1931,[13][14] moved to Bristol, where a large retrospective of his work was held in March 1940.

Among his last commissions were a bronze head of Sir Thomas Lipton and the zodiac clock on the exterior wall of Bracken House in London.

In 1995 the art critic Brian Sewell recalled the great loss of much of Dobson's work after his death: "After his death, his widow asked me to help her clear the studio at Stamford Bridge, and I was appalled at the destruction that she wrought, smashing to smithereens small clay and terracotta models, tearing fine drawings in red and black chalk, hundreds of them, buring [sic?]

I was allowed to save pastel drawings of exotic and rare birds, and watercolours of farmyards and a pastoral life long gone, but for the figures engaged in sexual congress, face to face, head to toe and doggy style as explicit as any by his old friend Eric Gill, Mrs Dobson would accept no plea that they were beautiful, no argument that they were fired by a quality not to be found in the "pure essence" of the torsos that survive, and like a ferociously implacable angel at the Last Judgment, she bent to the business of destruction.