Jacob Epstein was an American-born sculptor and painter who worked chiefly in England, where he pioneered modern sculpture, often producing controversial works that challenged taboos concerning what public artworks appropriately depict.

Epstein's parents were Polish refugees living in New York's Lower East Side. He studied art there as a teenager, sketching the city, and joined The Art Students League of New York in 1900. Then he worked in a bronze foundry by day, studying drawing and sculptural modelling at night. Moving to Europe in 1902, he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts, where Auguste Rodin taught him. He settled in London in 1905, and a few years later became a British Citizen. Epstein lived in a long-term relationship with Kathleen Garman, whom he married sometime after their daughter's birth in 1926. Their daughter, also named Kathleen, married painter Lucian Freud in 1948 and is mother of two of his daughters. He was knighted in 1954.

In London, Epstein involved himself with a bohemian and artistic crowd. Revolting against ornate, pretty art, he made bold, often harsh and massive forms of bronze or stone. His sculpture is distinguished by its vigorous rough-hewn realism. Brilliantly avant-garde in concept and style, his works often shocked the general public. He often used expressively distorted figures, drawing more on non-Western art than the classical ideal. People in Liverpool are said to have named his nude male sculpture over the door of the John Lewis department store "Swinging Dick." Such factors may have focused disproportionate attention on certain aspects of Epstein's long and productive career, throughout which he aroused hostility, especially challenging taboos surrounding the depiction of sexuality. Works condemned in his time as obscene and disgraceful today communicate thought and understanding.