Jacob Epstein [also known as Sir Jacob Epstein] was born into an Orthodox Jewish family at 102 Hester Street, Lower East Side, New York City on 10 November 1880. He attended the Art Students League in New York in from 1893 to 1898, taking night classes in 1899. In 1900 his house on Hester Street was destroyed by fire and he lost all his artwork.
In 1902 he received a commission to illustrate 'The Sprit of the Ghetto' by Hutchins Hapgood (New York, NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1902). The money he made from this venture enabled him to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian in Paris between 1902 and 1904. During his time in Paris he visited Rodin.
In 1905 Epstein moved to London and in 1910 became a British citizen. His first significant commission following his move to Britain came from the British Medical Association which asked him to carve a series of 18 figures for their headquarters in the Strand, London (1907-08).
He spent much of the years 1909 to 1913 in Paris and in 1910-11 created the memorial to Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
He lived near Hastings in Sussex, England between 1913 and 1916 and from then on lived principally in London. In 1917-18 he served briefly in the British Army, but never left England.
Epstein worked primarily as a sculptor, however, he also produced some paintings and drawings and designed at least one poster - 'Epping Forest' for London Transport and the London & North Eastern Railway, in 1934.
He was a founder member of the London Group and is credited with giving it its name. He exhibited with them from 1914 to 1930. He also exhibited at the Royal Academy, Cooling & Sons Gallery, Brook Street, Gallery, London Salon, New English Art Club, Redfern Gallery, Arthur Tooth & Sons Gallery, and the International Society of Sculptors, Painters & Gravers in London; Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; and at the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Water Colours in Edinburgh
Among his most notable public sculptures were ‘Day and Night’ for the façade of the London Underground headquarters and St James’s Park Underground station at 55 Broadway, London (1920s); Christ in Majesty' (1957) for Llanduff Cathedral; and 'St Michael' for Coventry Cathedral (1959). During the 1920s and 1930s he produced several portrait sculptures including of the writer Joseph Conrad (1924), the actor Sibyl Thorndyke (1925), the poet Rabindranath Tagore (1926), the politician Ramsay MacDonald (1926 and 1934), the scientist Albert Einstein (1933), the statesman Chaim Weizmann (1933), the dramatist George Bernard Shaw (1934), and of Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia (1936)
Epstein was knighted for his services to art in 1954.
In 1928 he moved to 18 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, London, where he died on 19 August 1959
