Frank Owen Dobson CBE (18 November 1886 – 22 July 1963) was a British artist and sculptor and during his time was considered one of the best sculptors in Europe. He was a contemporary of Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore.
Dobson is now seen as one of the most important British sculptors of the 20th century.
Early life
Dobson was born in central London and grew up in Clerkenwell. 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. The younger Dobson attended school in Forest Gate and then in Harrow. 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. In, or around, 1915 Dobson created his first sculpture, a small piece in wood. 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. The simplified forms and flowing lines of much of his sculptures, particularly his female nudes, showed the influence of African art.
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. 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. 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 personnel. 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 on the exterior wall of Bracken House in London.
Frank Dobson Square was constructed by London County Council in 1963, the year of Dobson's death to commemorate his life and work. The centrepiece of the square was the Woman and Fish fountain, a sculpture designed and completed by Dobson in 1951.
While Dobson was one of the most esteemed artists of his time, after his death his reputation declined with the move towards postmodernism and conceptual art. However, in recent years a revival has begun.