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Bob says…

Theodore Garman, Jacob Epstein’s son, is well represented in the Archive. He comes across as a precosious child who from the off wanted nothing more but to make art.  From the evidence we have his relationship with his dad appears rather distant.  His death, while constrained in the back of a van being taken to a mental instition at the age of 30, is horrific.  It’s clear if you consider the paintings in the collection, that all his work is a dialogue with his dad.  Even the marks he makes have a similar characteristic to his fathers.  I am not sure Theo would have thought his father a distant figure even though books Jacob Epsein gives Theo are signed ‘From Epstein’ rather than from ‘From ‘Dad’.

I am about the third of the way through the Stephen Gardiner’s Biog of Epstein.  Epstein’s relationship with his father was truely distant.. His father, a self made property magnet, actively tried to prevent Epstien from being an artist.  Epstein’s move to Europe can be seen as his means of escape. 

What also is evident from our first rifling’s is the Anti-semitism that pervaded the art world in the early 20th Century.