Frank Owen Dobson (18 November 1886 – 22 July 1963) was a 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, after his death his reputation declined with the move towards postmodernism and conceptual art. However, in recent years a revival has begun. Dobson is now seen as one of the most important British sculptors of the 20th century. Early life Dobson was born in central London and grew up in Clerkenwell. His mother was Alice Mary Owen and his father, who was also named Frank Dobson, was a commercial artist who specialized in bird and flower designs for greeting card companies. The younger Dobson attended school in Forest Gate and then in Harrow. When his father died in 1900, the fourteen year old Dobson was sent to live with an aunt in Hastings. There he attended evening classes at the Hastings School of Art and was then trained as an apprentice with Sir William Reynolds-Stephens. 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 to enable Dobson to stage a one-man show at the Chenil Gallery in London in 1914. In, or around, 1915 Dobson created his first sculpture, a small piece in wood. World War One In 1915, during the First World War, Dobson enlisted in