Jacob Epstein’s Second Portrait of Euphemia Lamb adapts the classical format of the portrait bust. The flat base of the bronze, shorn of the socle used in so many traditional busts, gives a sense of Epstein’s artistic projectile—moving away from conventional forms of working towards a more transgressive practice. The sensual quality of the sitter’s body is communicated: it is cropped to include the beginnings of her arms and her breasts, the latter partially concealed behind a strapless slip, adorned with a protruding angular bow. The modelling and detailing are naturalistic and vital, and the line of her shoulders and the curve of her back suggest a sense of the model’s posture. To treat a named sitter with such freedom was unusual in this period. It suggests the complicity of the model and the artist. While Euphemia Lamb was indifferent to social propriety, Epstein pursued his own distinctive artistic and erotic purposes with abandon. The crop is closely related to the habits of Auguste Rodin. Epstein cut the arms above the elbow and the bust is included; a slip presses tight against the breasts. This contrivance affords a greater sense of the body, rather than merely providing a head-and-shoulders portrait as had been the case for busts in the classical tradition. Rodin often took apart the human body to make sculpture redolent of antique fragments, deconstructing it and creating impersonal formalised units. The female body became a special site of activity, its erotic potential encouraging greater invention. Sometimes shorn of head and limbs, thereby throwing attention onto the bust and pudenda, the fragmented body gained an erotic charge. To Epstein, Rodin was ‘a revivifying force’: ‘With Rodin, modelling became interesting and individual for its own sake’. Epstein studied in Paris in 1902–05, first at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and then the Académie Julian, and his formative work suggests a close study of Rodin (it was likely from Rodin that Epstein learned to use a flattened base in his bronzes, for example). In his memoirs, Epstein described being taken to visit Rodin by the English painter Frederick Cayley Robinson in 1902 or 1903: 'He asked me one day if I would like to go to Rodin’s atelier as he had the entrée, and one Saturday afternoon we went together to the rue de l’Université where Rodin had several studios adjoining one another, given him by the State. […] Rodin, himself short, bearded, with a sort of round flat cap on his head, looked calm and watchful at the same time. […] I did not speak to Rodin as I had only just arrived in Paris and knew no French. I was quite content to look at things, and watch Rodin himself.' Although he later developed some personal enmity towards Rodin, who in 1911 refused to defend Epstein’s controversial tomb of Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise cemetery, Epstein acknowledged that ‘[w]ith Rodin, […] a new era in sculpture began’. As its title suggests, Second Portrait of Euphemia Lamb followed an earlier bust of her (fig. 1), one example of which is owned by the Tate collection. Epstein had also used her as the nude model for a full-length fountain figure (1908–10), which was commissioned by Lady Ottoline Morrell for her garden at Garsington Manor. In his memoir, Epstein wrote: ‘I look upon this period as still formative.’ Unlike his later portrait busts, in which characterisation was exaggerated and the modelling of clay a bravura demonstration, Second Portrait of Euphemia Lamb is characterised with assiduous naturalism. As he wrote, it belonged to 'a series of studies from the model, which were as exact as I could make them. I worked with great care, and followed the forms of the model by quarter-inches, I should say, not letting up on any detail of construction of plane; but always keeping the final composition in view.' Such refinement of modelling allowed more of the sitter’s personal qualities—of facial expression, posture, bone structure—to register. Most noticeably, Lamb’s mouth is curiously shaped around the open lips. She is also depicted in this way not only in Epstein’s first bust, but also a pencil portrait by Augustus John. In 1920, Bernard van Dieren’s Epstein monograph reproduced a photograph of the plaster cast for Second Portrait of Euphemia Lamb (fig. 2). Silber’s catalogue raisonné notes that the plaster was acquired in 1971 by the Museum of the City of New York. The other bust was also illustrated; both were titled ‘Euphemia Lamb’ and neither was dated. In 1942, a monograph by Richard Black again included both portrait busts of Euphemia. ‘It is interesting to compare the various versions of this subject’, he wrote. ‘The entire character of the sitter has been altered by the treatment of the surface and the rearranging of the hair forms.’ Both works were dated to 1911. This version was titled Euphemia Lamb (Full bust) and the earlier version was wrongly titled Euphemia Lamb (Second Version). In 1963, a monograph by Richard Buckle repeated Black’s error and identified this work as the first bust. He wrote that ‘[it] could only be a modern portrait of a modern woman.’ By contrast, the other ‘might almost be a work of the Florentine Quattrocento.’ Like Black, Buckle also dated both works to 1911. There are four known bronze casts of Second Portrait of Euphemia Lamb. It was never editioned. The green patina of this specific cast is singular: other examples appear much darker in colour, being either black or brown. Another cast was owned by the artist Muirhead Bone, which was the first to be publicly exhibited at the National Portrait Society in 1914 with Bone listed as the lender in the catalogue. * Annie Euphemia Forrest first came to attention when she eloped from Manchester to London with Henry Lamb in July 1905. She was known as Nina but was renamed Euphemia by Lamb, ‘since she reminded him so much of Mantegna’s saint’—a painting of 1454 owned by the Museo nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. The possessive trend for renaming models was apparently started by Lamb’s friend and mentor Augustus John, whom he met in late 1905 or early 1906. John had renamed his lover Dorothy McNeill variously as ‘Dorelia’ or ‘Ardor’, and would in turn nickname Euphemia ‘Lobelia’. She and Lamb married in May 1906, shortly after they realised that she was pregnant with their child. She suffered a still-birth and they drifted apart thereafter. From the time of her arrival in London until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Euphemia Lamb was ubiquitous at the Café Royal—the famous haunt of artists and writers in Regent’s Street described by Augustus John: 'Survivors of the period will remember the famous old saloon of the old Café Royal with its gilded caryatids and painted ceiling, its red plush benches and marble tables, its conversational hum mixed with the clatter of dominoes. […] Well-differentiated groups disposed themselves according to habit. There were the sporting, journalistic, literary, political and artistic sets, interspersed, of course, with a floating hotch-potch of nondescript elements.' It was here that Euphemia met many of those artists who would romance and portray her. These included James Dickson Innes, Ambrose McEvoy and indeed Epstein. As the biographer Michael Holroyd wrote, ‘Her adventures were to lead her, in one guise or another, into many memoirs’. She apparently bred infatuation, especially in those who portrayed her; such was Innes’s dedication to her that he reportedly ‘buried a silver casket containing certain correspondence’ (presumably love letters) beneath the cairn on the summit of Arenig Fawr in Snowdonia. Writing of Innes, John described her in his autobiography as ‘his Euphemia’. She was physically attractive to the male artists she encountered. John admired her ‘pale oval face and heavy honey-coloured hair’, while C.R.W. Nevinson thought her ‘a lovely ash blonde’. Euphemia was also a dreamer, sometimes perceived as a fibber, such that Virginia Stephen (later Woolf), writing in 1906, was unpleasantly astonished by her: ‘[Miss Forrest] sits vaguely in the drawing room for hours, and forgets whether she had tea or dinner last’. Some years later in 1914, Woolf gave a more detailed account: 'As to Nina Lamb, I think she is by this time a professional mistress. She has lived with various people. […] I believe she’s rather nice and pretty—but without any morals. She began life in Manchester—her mother being apparently in the same line of life. She had a little money of her own, and she used to wander about London and Manchester (where a club was formed to protect her virtue) until she became H. Lamb’s mistress, and then his wife. They separated soon after that, and when we were in Paris a year or two afterwards she was a well known character. 'However, I don’t think she’s wanting, and she certainly was amazingly pretty. I think she moved from person to person—I could write pages of her adventures, because she used to appear at intervals with amazing stories of her doings, which were partly invented, but I think she was very attractive to a good many people.'