Sculptor Jacob Epstein was born into a Polish-Jewish family in New York City, USA in 1880 and raised in Manhattan’s multicultural Lower East Side. He moved to London in 1905 and received his first British commission for the facade of the British Medical Association Building on the Strand in 1907 - the first of many highly controversial public commissions - although his work as a portrait sculptor was always in demand. Today, he is widely recognised as a pioneering modernist, direct carver, modeller, portraitist and collector.