This lecture will provide a detailed overview of Jacob Epstein’s colourful and unconventional life and often controversial career as a sculptor and draughtsman, setting them in their wider cultural context. Born in 1880 in the Lower East Side of New York City to Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, Epstein moved to Paris in 1902 and settled in London in 1905, becoming a British citizen in 1911. In due course he would become one of the grand old men of modern art (he was knighted in 1954), but not before provoking many a scandal in the British art world and beyond.  Although as Henry Moore rightly observed in 1959, Epstein was the man who “took the brickbats for modern art, and as far as sculpture in this country is concerned, he took them first”, we will see that this is far from the whole story, as responses to Epstein’s work were often also fuelled by prudishness, xenophobia and even racism.