Eduardo Paolozzi attended Edinburgh College of Art, St Martin's School of Art in London, and then studied sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. From 1947 to 1949, he lived in Paris where he met Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Léger, Alberto Giacometti and Tristan Tzara. He returned to London, and from 1949 to 1950 he taught textile design at the Central School of Art and Design whilst also designing collages for interior design patterns such as printed fabrics and wallpapers. From 1955 to 1958 he taught sculpture at St Martin's School of Art, London. In 1956, he obtained a grant from the Copley Foundation. During the 1960s he taught at the Royal College of Art, London, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Hochscule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg. He was Professor of Ceramics at the Fachhochschule, Cologne, from 1977 to 1981, and then Professor of Sculpture at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. He was awarded a CBE in 1968, elected to the Royal Academy in 1979, and knighted in 1986. Paolozzi was active in the Independent Group based in London, a pre-cursor for British Pop, of which he was a founder member in 1952. In 1951 he was commissioned to produce a fountain/well head for the Festival of Britain, and in 1953 Hamburg City Council also commissioned a fountain. Other public commissions included a series of mosaics for the London underground, Piscator in Euston Square, London, and aluminium low relief doors for the Hunterian Gallery in Glasgow, all during the 1980s. 'Vulcan' is the macquette for Eduardo Paolozzi’s monumental statue, ‘Vulcan’ (1999), named after the Roman God of Fire, commissioned by Parabola Estates for Central Square in Newcastle. In 1988 Paolozzi created the forerunner of ‘Vulcan’ with the work ‘The Artist as Hephaestus’ (the Greek original of the Roman God of Fire), embodying a certain kind of alter-ego, a semi-self-portrait (and thereby implying the artist’s own god-like powers of creation). But the origins of Vulcan go back much later than 1988; they can be seen in some of the earliest works of Paolozzi’s career, such as the near-phrenological head, ‘Mr Cruickshank’ of 1950, based upon the dummy used by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to measure radiation of the head). These human heads reappear in the 1980s, with such iconic portrait busts as ‘Count Basie’ and ‘Yukio Mishima’ cast in bronze from a cast of recycled and unusual materials. Vulcan was the Roman god of fire and the blacksmith who forged weapons for the gods and heroes. In Paolozzi's work, Vulcan (or his Greek counterpart, Hephaestus) is often seen as the archetypal sculptor. He is half-man and half-machine - a monument to the modern age.