Bomberg urged his students to seek out and attend exhibitions in London as often as they could. As a pupil of Bomberg’s, Metzger was granted free entry to the Leicester Galleries where he saw ‘a lot of Epstein’. In fact, it was Epstein’s support, by way of a letter of recommendation, that led to an extension of Metzger’s Haendler Trust grant for another year. His full-time study was therefore funded up until the end of 1950.
Russian-Polish Jewish émigré Jacob Epstein was raised in Manhattan’s multicultural Lower East Side and settled in London in 1905. A champion of direct carving, his controversial public commissions, including the British Medical Association building façade (1907−08) in London and Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Paris (1911), challenged prevailing notions of sexuality and beauty and favoured the non-European model. Lydia, a jazz singer and/or dancer, was working as a waitress at Epstein’s favourite Chinese restaurant in London’s Wardour Street when they met; this is the second of three busts of her created between 1929 and 1934.