[title]
You know you’ve taken your extramarital affairs too far when your wife shoots your lover in the shoulder with a pearl-handled pistol. Up to that point in 1922, Margaret Epstein had been remarkably tolerant of her husband Jacob’s numerous liaisons. She was unable to have children herself and took an unconventional view of her other half’s dalliances, even bringing up the first and last of the five children he fathered without her. But Jacob’s relationship with Kathleen Garman proved too much for this bohemian Bloomsbury household.
Although Epstein (1880- 1959) is better known for his often controversial public sculptures – such as ‘Rock Drill’ (1915), which he described as ‘a machine- like robot... menacing, and carrying within itself its progeny’ (he later dismantled the piece) – his children also proved fertile material for the modernist sculptor’s imagination. They inspired him to produce moving bronzes and drawings of their nascent features. Fittingly, his works celebrating babies and youngsters, including hisown, are on display at the Foundling Museum, which celebrates England’s first home for abandoned children. The exhibition is a fine opportunity to visit a gem of an attraction that boasts paintings by Gainsborough and Hogarth, as well as eighteenth-century interiors preserved from the original Foundling Hospital.
Among Epstein’s family members rendered in metal are two of his grandchildren – the offspring o fhisdaughter Kitty Epstein and Lucien Freud. Sigmund would no doubt have had much to say about this fascinating meeting of art and family.