Frank Dobson (1888-1963) - Nude Female

Important red chalk drawing of a reclining Female nude
Signed and dated by Frank Dobson "Frank Dobson 37"
This wonderful artwork is a female nude study executed in red chalk (sanguine) on paper by the pioneering British modernist sculptor Frank Dobson.
Signed and dated in the lower left corner as "Frank Dobson / 37"
This artwork, upon request, is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by an official Expert for the Chamber of Commerce of Rome and for the Rome Civil Courts.
Professional packaging assured
Worldwide shipping via DHL or FEDEX
This 1937 piece showcases the fluid transition between his early avant-garde influences and the tactile, voluptuous realism that came to define his mature sculptural language.
The drawing utilizes classic sanguine chalk, a medium historically favored by masters for life drawing due to its warm, skin-like earthy tones.
Dobson relies on a highly confident, sweeping contour line to define the silhouette.
The outer boundary lines are repeatedly struck, creating a rhythmic and dynamic boundary rather than a rigid, static enclosure.Instead of using harsh cross-hatching, the artist softens the chalk—likely using a stump, cloth, or his fingers—to create smooth, blended smudges of tone with sfumato effect.
This subtle graduation simulates light wrapping around rounded forms.
The interior torso remains largely untouched by heavy pigmentation, leaving the bare paper to naturally act as the highest light highlight.
As a sculptor, Dobson treats the human figure with an emphasis on weight, mass, and volume.
The massive, stylized rendering of the thighs and hips reflects a direct preoccupation with carving shapes out of solid stone or marble.
The model is depicted in a kneeling or seated position with arms raised behind her head, creating a strong contrapposto-like twist through the torso.
This arrangement emphasizes the sensuous S-curve of the female flank.
Features like the face, fingers, and feet are deliberately generalized, blurred, or truncated.
This choice pulls the viewer's focus away from individual portraiture and redirects it toward pure, universal organic geometry.
A few flaws, as shown in the photos
This drawing, never before on the market, comes from an important European private collection and is beautified by an original frame in gilded wood, in good condition.
Some
The painting is also protected by glass

Dimensions whit frame cm 71 x 58.5


Frank Owen Dobson (London 1886 – 1963) was an important British artist and sculptor.
Dobson began as a painter, and his early work was influenced by cubism, vorticism, and futurism.
After World War I, however, he turned increasingly toward sculpture in a more or less realist style.
Throughout the 1920s and the early 1930s he built a reputation as an outstanding sculptor and was among the first in Britain to prefer direct carving of the material rather than modelling a maquette first.
The simplified forms and flowing lines of much of his sculptures, particularly his female nudes, showed the influence of African art.
From 1946 to 1953 Dobson was Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1953.
While Dobson was one of the most esteemed artists of his time, is now seen as one of the most important British sculptors of the 20th century.

Dobson grew up in Clerkenwell where attended school in Forest Gate.
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.
From 1910 to 1912 Dobson attended the City and Guilds of London Art School in Kennington, after which he returned to Cornwall. In Newlyn, he met Augustus John who used his influence and contacts and in, or around, 1915 Dobson created his first sculpture, a small piece in wood.
In 1915, during the First World War, Dobson enlisted in The Artists Rifles and served in France from October 1916.
In April 1918 he married Cordelia Clara Tregurtha.
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. 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.
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.
Other subjects included Osbert Sitwell, 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.

In 1930 the Tate purchased a larger-than-life sculpture from Dobson and erected it outside the gallery on Millbank.
During the early 1930s Dobson continued to receive portrait commissions, most notably for Sir Edward Marsh and the actress Margaret Rawlings. Dobson worked in other media including textiles and silver, as well.
His silver gilt cup, Calix Majestatis, to mark the coronation of George VI and Queen Elizabeth is now in the Royal Collection.
During 1933 Dobson fractured his left arm which greatly limited his ability for heavy carving and his last monumental stone carving was to be Pax, which was first shown at the London Group in 1935.
At the start of World War Two, Dobson and his second wife [Caroline] Mary Bussell, whom he had married in 1931, 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 personal.
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.
Dobson died in 1963 and his ashes were scattered in the Thames
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
Professional, secure packaging
Worldwide shipping via DHL
For further information, please contact Egidimadeinitaly