Frank Dobson (1886-1963)

The Portland stone sculpture Concertina Man (1920), for which this work is a study, appears to have been inspired by Ossip Zadkine's Le Joueur d'Accordéon (1918) in subject and to a certain extent in style, although Dobson's version of Cubism is less severe and mechanistic than that of Zadkine. The figure of the Concertina Man incorporates the same raised shoulder as Le Joueur d'Accordéon, but in Dobson's piece the head is angled deeply into the shoulder, resulting in the more rounded and compact shape of the overall form. Dobson twists the torso into the contrapposto position which he employed frequently in his future work, balancing the forward thrust of the shoulder and arm with the weight of the opposite leg.

(see N. Jason and L. Thompson-Pharoah, The Sculpture of Frank Dobson, London, 1994, p. 6)