George Claude Leon Underwood (25 December 1890 – 9 October 1975) was a British artist, although primarily known as a sculptor, printmaker and painter, he was also an influential teacher and promotor of African art. His travels in Mexico and West Africa had a substantial influence on his art, particularly on the representation of the human figure in his sculptures and paintings. Underwood is best known for his sculptures cast in bronze, carvings in marble, stone and wood and his drawings. His lifetime's work includes a wide range of media and activities, with an expressive and technical mastery. Underwood did not hold modernism and abstraction in art in high regard and this led to critics often ignoring his work until the 1960s when he came to be viewed as an important figure in the development of modern sculpture in Britain. Biography Early life Underwood was born in the west London suburb of Shepherd's Bush. He was the eldest of the three sons of George Underwood, a fine art dealer and he attended Hampden Gurney School. From 1907 to 1910 he attended the Regent Street Polytechnic in central London before studying at the Royal College of Art for three years. While still a student in 1911, Underwood was commissioned to paint a mural for the Peace Palace in The Hague. In 1913 he visited Russia to study the depiction of horses in traditional Russian art. World War I In the First World War, Underwood enlisted in the Royal Horse Artillery before transferring to a field battery unit and then serving as a Captain in the Camouflage Section of the Royal Engineers. He worked with Solomon Joseph Solomon as a camoufleur, creating battlefield observation posts disguised as trees. Underwood's duties on the Western Front included going into No man's land to make detailed drawings of trees which were later replaced with metal replicas used by military observers. He sketched and painted scenes of this work, notably in his 1919 oil painting Erecting a Camouflage Tree, which was intended for the, never built, British national Hall of Remembrance and was in turn purchased by the Imperial War Museum. 1920s and 1930s After the war Underwood attended the Slade School of Art for a year's refresher course and in 1920 received the British Prix de Rome but chose not to go to Italy, instead using the grant to travel elsewhere later in the decade.