Details
GAUDIER-BRZESKA, Henri (1891-1915). Autograph letter signed to Frank Rutter (addressed to Rutter as director of the Leeds Art Gallery), n.p. [London], 3 September 1914, on a letter card, one page, 8vo.
'Will you please send my group of stags in alabaster which you had in exhibition at Leeds to my sister ... I am leaving for the scuffle so everything is in her hands'.
'The Stags', in brown veined alabaster, was one of the three late masterpieces of Gaudier's short life. Ezra Pound described them as the most original, most exclusively his own creation, and owing least to any outside influence.
Gaudier, who had been living in London, enlisted in the French army on the outbreak of 'the scuffle'. The champion of Vorticism, he belonged to the pre-war circle of Wyndham Lewis, Epstein and Fry; his work influenced Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. He was killed in an infantry charge at Neuville Saint-Vaast, aged only twenty-three. The 'sister' whose address, in Soho, he gives, was Sophie Brzeska, the Polish woman with whom from 1910 he enjoyed an intense but probably platonic relationship. They did not marry, but he left his work to her.
'Will you please send my group of stags in alabaster which you had in exhibition at Leeds to my sister ... I am leaving for the scuffle so everything is in her hands'.
'The Stags', in brown veined alabaster, was one of the three late masterpieces of Gaudier's short life. Ezra Pound described them as the most original, most exclusively his own creation, and owing least to any outside influence.
Gaudier, who had been living in London, enlisted in the French army on the outbreak of 'the scuffle'. The champion of Vorticism, he belonged to the pre-war circle of Wyndham Lewis, Epstein and Fry; his work influenced Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. He was killed in an infantry charge at Neuville Saint-Vaast, aged only twenty-three. The 'sister' whose address, in Soho, he gives, was Sophie Brzeska, the Polish woman with whom from 1910 he enjoyed an intense but probably platonic relationship. They did not marry, but he left his work to her.
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