© The artist's estate
From an unpublished fragment of his autobiography, we learn that the immediate inspiration for this work came to Dobson during his travels in Ceylon in 1924 with the novelist L.
H. Myers. His reputation had already been established by the Mansard Gallery's Group X Exhibition four years earlier, and Ezra Pound was soon introducing Dobson to his friends as the saviour of sculpture in Britain. Roger Fry applauded the clay sketch for Cornucopia in 1925 as something quite out of the ordinary, and in 1927 Clive Bell congratulated its author on a masterpiece without a British rival. It is certainly one of the most important modern carvings produced in this country before the advent of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
Provenance
Mrs Mary Dobson