DOBSON, Sir Frank, RA, ARBS.

Here was another transient member who was already quite famous when he became a short term member. He came to Bristol in 1939 and had already lead a very eventful life and been honoured as a sculptor in bronze, stone and terracotta and also a painter in watercolours. He was born in London on 18th November 1888. The son of Frank Dobson, Snr., an artist and illustrator under whom he studied until until his father died. Then at the age of fourteen he went to work as studio boy in the studio of Sir William Reynolds. Next he went to Newlyn, Cornwall and worked for a picture dealer. When he was eighteen he won a Stephen’s scholarship to Arbroath (Hospitalfield) with a £40 cash award and from there, on to the City and Guild School at Kennington. Times were very hard for him in London and, being unable to sell his paintings, it is recorded that for a long time his only food consisted of bread, cheese and fried fish. It may be that this was the reason why he turned his mind to sculpture, for it was 1913 when he was twenty-three that he made his first wood carving. In 1914, he held his first one-man Exhibition of drawings and paintings at the Chenil Gallery. At the outbreak of World War 1 he joined the Artists` Rifles and saw active service overseas, when, after being blown up five times in one day, he was invalided out. By now he had decided to concentrate on sculpture and held his first exhibition in that sphere, at the Leicester Galleries. In 1922 he was elected a member of the London Group and served as their President from 1923 27. During this period he exhibited In Vienna, Stockholm, Paris and Tokyo. In 1938 he was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and gained considerable fame for his design of the golden Cup of Majesty to commemorate the Coronation of George VI. At the threat of the outbreak of War in 1939 he evacuated to the West and came to Bristol and set up his studio in Clifton Hill. He immediately became a member of the Tribe and while here he was selected to represent sculpture at the International Exhibition in Venice in the Spring of 1940. There is no evidence of his activity in the Studio when he was appointed Official War Artist after 1940, but in 1942 he was made an Associate Member of the Royal Academy and a Full Member in 1953. From 1946 until 1953 he was Professor of Sculpture at. the Royal College of Art and in 1947 he was created C.B.E. The Tribe possesses two of his sketches and a copy of one of his works and a caricature of him by Brother Savage Donald Hughes. Examples of his work can be seen in many galleries throughout England including the Tate Gallery where there are busts of Margaret Rawlings and the Earl of Oxford and Asquith. On 22nd July 1963 he died in London aged seventy-five. (Cecil Broome)