Bernard Meadows began and practically ended his career as an assistant to his close friend and mentor Henry Moore. It is a fine point as to whether this dedication to another man's cause affected his own accomplishment in the years between.  The peak of his fame came after the British Pavilion at the 1952 Venice Biennale introduced him to the world, together with Lynn Chadwick, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler and Eduardo Paolozzi as that decade's new generation: the sculptors who would succeed Moore and Hepworth.  He was born in Norwich, the son of middle-class parents with, as they used to say of people with no books, low intellectual horizons. In 1931, the middle of the depression, his father persuaded Bernard to prepare for a secure future by training as an accountant.  Meadows failed hopelessly at this project and persuaded his parents to allow him to go to Norwich School of Art. His training in painting was totally conventional - the horse painter Alfred Munnings was held up as the exemplary figure - until a friend of Meadows who knew Henry Moore arranged for Bernard and a couple of fellow students to visit the sculptor's studio. Moore followed up the visit by writing to Meadows inviting him to come and help him in his holidays.  In 1960, after a dozen years teaching at Chelsea School of Art, he was to become for 20 years an influential and inspirational professor of sculpture at the RCA, whose high-quality pupils included Elisabeth Frink, now much more famous than Meadows and much his inferior.  He found in crabs and, later, birds, a way of escaping the influence of Moore; he was able to express extreme violence without resorting to the human figure, though later, by a study of imperial Roman busts, Holbein's portraits of Henry VIII, and Michelangelo's head of Brutus, he was able to work his way through to powerful semi-abstract versions of armed and dangerous human figures, condottieri, soldiers, tyrants.

Frightened Bird red
Lithograph
1962
34 X 29
£550

Frightened Bird yellow
Lithograph
1962
37 x 25
£450