Torso in Metal from "The Rock Drill"

The pioneering modernist sculptor Jacob Epstein was born on the Lower East Side of New York. He studied art in New York and Paris and settled in London in 1905. Much of his early work, with its explicit sexuality, rough-hewn composition, and indebtedness to non-European sculptural traditions, challenged taboos on what was appropriate for public art and aroused intense controversy. Later, Epstein became known for his bronze sculptures of the heads of public figures. He was also the illustrator for The Spirit of the Ghetto, an early intimate and sympathetic portrait of New York immigrant Jewish life by the non-Jewish journalist Hutchins Hapgood (1869–1944).