Sir Jacob Epstein

Irving Penn is best-known for his fashion photography at Vogue but also his powerful portraiture, modernist compositions and photographic travel essays. His portrait of sculptor Jacob Epstein was shot in London in 1950. Three months earlier, in Paris, inspired by Eugene Atget's photographs of workers, Penn had posed Parisian celebrities, including the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, in their working clothes accompanied by the tools of their trade. Later in London he also photographed London traders including chimney sweeps, newspaper sellers, and a coalman, dusted with soot. Epstein's influence upon Penn can be seen in the latter’s photograph of the Steel Mill Firefighter, reminiscent of Epstein’s 1913 radical, robot-like sculpture, Rock Drill.