The famous physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) fled Germany in 1933, and was staying in a refugee camp in Britain when Epstein made this portrait bust. However, Einstein left to take up a professorship at Princeton before it was completed. Epstein later described Einstein’s ‘wild hair floating in the wind’ and wrote that ‘his glance contained a mixture of the humane, the humorous, and the profound. This was a combination that delighted me. He resembled the ageing Rembrandt’.

Jacob Epstein was born in New York in 1880 and died in London in 1959.