Lady Aurelia Young
Oscar Nemon, Part 1: Freud’s Sculptor

Lady Aurelia Young | Oscar Nemon, Part 1: Freud’s Sculptor | 08.11.21

- Aurelia, I’ve been so looking forward to this lecture.

• That’s really kind, Wendy. Well, I’ve been looking forward to giving it.

• Yes, absolutely.

• I’m honoured.

• I’m an amateur sculptor myself, so I do understand sculpting, the mechanisms of sculpting.

• Oh, yes. Like to see some of your works.

• No.

• Show them.

• It’s just for fun. But they’re…

• You do portrait, or do you do…

• No.

• No? All right.

• My daughter does portraits. My daughter’s a fabulous painter, but she’s brilliant in portraiture and sculpture. You know, that’s a special gift, to be able to capture the likeness of people. It’s difficult. So I think I’m going to start because it’s a little bit after 2:30.

• All right.

• Today, we have the great pleasure of having Lady Aurelia Young with us. And I am absolutely thrilled that you are joining us. I know that you’re a participant on Lockdown University, and it’s just such a pleasure to have you here today. So before I hand over to you, I just want to do a little introduction.

Lady Aurelia will be giving us two lectures, part one today and part two next week. She will be going to 1939, so no questions after 1939, please. And before I hand it over to her, just a little brief introduction. Aurelia Young is the daughter of the Jewish sculptor Oscar Nemon. She grew up in her father’s studio in Oxford. In her illustrated talk, she will tell the story of how her father travelled from his home in the Balkans to study in Vienna and Brussels, eventually seeking sanctuary in England in the 1930s. Nemon became the sculptor of royalty, presidents, prime ministers, and many of the leading figures of the last century, including Sigmund Freud. The illustrated talk traces Nemon’s life from his birth in Croatia in 1906 to his very last sitting with Diana, Princess of Wales in 1985. The queen commissioned Nemon to make a bust of Winston Churchill for Windsor Castle. And whilst he was sitting for Nemon, Churchill made a bust of Nemon, his only work of sculpture. Aurelia will explain how Nemon made his sculptures and will include many pictures of his works, showing his development from the angular lines of the 1930s to his more representative later work.

Aurelia has lectured about Oscar Nemon in Israel, America, Paris, Vienna, Brussels, and the UK. And before I hand over to you, I just wanted to say that I was so excited, and I want to share some comments that I’ve read about your lectures. So from Matthew Parris, “The Times” in March, on my brother’s birthday, actually, the 8th of March, “I attended a marvellous lecture by Aurelia Young on her late father, the sculptor Oscar Nemon, a genius who sculpted the crowned heads of Europe, Sigmund Freud, and Winston Churchill.” And in another one from Richard Smith Wright, “Enthralling, spellbinding. Knowing nothing about Oscar Nemon before, I felt afterwards as if he had been a personal friend. Aurelia gave an amusing and fascinating account of a talented and interesting man.”

So to all our participants, we are in for a big treat, and I’m thrilled to be handing over to you. Thank you.

• Thank you, Wendy. So now, where is my presentation? Am I going to do something?

• [Lauren] Yes, you can go down to that share screen button we looked at earlier.

• Oh, share screen. Oh, right, okay, Lauren, thank you.

• [Lauren] Yep.

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

• Share screen. Share. Sorry, folks, and thank you very much, Wendy, for that really kind invitation. So here we go. In July 1931, Sigmund Freud wrote to his friend Max Eitingon, “Someone is making a bust of me, the sculptor Oscar Nemon from Brussels, from his appearance, a Slavic Jew. Federn, who is usually highly inept in discovering unacclaimed geniuses, forced him on me, but this time there is something, or rather quite a lot in it. The head which the gaunt, goatee-bearded artist has fashioned from the dirt is a very good and astonishingly lifelike impression of me.” Oscar Nemon, the young sculptor, was my father, and this is the story of his life and how he came to sculpt Sigmund Freud in Vienna in the 1930s and then went on to sculpt other prominent people of the 20th century, including Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, and President Eisenhower. Oscar’s maternal grandfather, Leopold Adler, owned a paint and shoe polish factory in Osijek in Croatia.

Here he is with his wife Johanna in about 1920. The Adlers had eight children, five girls and three boys. Eugenie, their eldest daughter, was my grandmother. When Eugenie was 18, her parents told her that a promising young chemist was coming to lunch and she would sit next to him. After lunch, they would go for a walk, and when they came back he would propose and she would accept. Eugenie did as she was told and became the wife of Moritz Neumann, an industrial chemist from Hungary who worked for his father-in-law at the Adler Paint Factory. My father Oscar was the Neumanns’ second child. Here he is with his mother and older sister Bella in 1906. Oscar also had a younger brother Deze. Here are the three children, the boys in their best sailor suits.

The Neumanns were part of Osijek’s flourishing Jewish community. When Oscar was born in 1906, Osijek was in Slovenia, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Osijek became part of Croatia, then Yugoslavia, and now it’s back in Croatia again. He studied in Vienna, then Brussels, before moving to the UK in the 1930s. Oscar changed his name from the German-sounding Neumann the the more French-sounding Nemon when he was in Brussels in the 1920s, as the Belgians didn’t like the Germans after the German invasion of Belgium during the First World War. Nearly everyone called my father Nemon, including my mother, so I will too. Nemon became interested in sculpture while still at school. Here is one of his very early works, a self-portrait in relief. He got the clay to mould his sculptures from a local brick factory. Everyone seems to agree that he was a quiet, shy boy.

When Nemon was 17, he went to the home of Robert Korski, a rich Jewish landowner in Osijek, where he was asked to make a bust of Nada, Robert Korski’s 11-year-old daughter. 15 years ago, I was shown the bust of Nada in the Jewish Community Centre in Osijek. You can imagine my excitement when I discovered that Nada was then still alive aged 95. I immediately jumped on an aeroplane and flew to her home in Croatia. Nada told me that when she got bored of sitting still for the young sculptor, she threw little pellets of clay into his bushy hair. This is Nemon’s self-portrait, done at about the same time as he made the bust of Nada. Here is a photograph I took of Nada with a photograph of the bust done 84 years earlier. Nada said that when she was sitting for Nemon, it felt as if he was trying to extract her whole psyche. When Nemon was 18, he went to study sculpture in Vienna, where he made friends with the musical community.

This is a relief of the Italian baritone Domenico Borghese, a very sensitive and mature work for a teenage boy. He made this relief of the famous Viennese singer Leo Slezak who Nemon says was the clown of the city. And this is a letter from Slezak asking what has become of the plaque Nemon was making of him. The teenage Nemon was befriended by Max Hevesi, a Hungarian Jewish art dealer in Vienna. Nemon made this relief of Hans, Max Hevesi’s four-year-old son. Max and Hans Hevesi moved to London in the 1930s. Hans was sent to Dulwich College school, and Max bought a Hazlitt art gallery in Mayfair. 20 years later, Hans married an English ballerina called Beryl Morina, who showed me this plaster relief which survived its journey from war-torn Vienna to her home in Winchester.

The intellectual giant in Vienna at that time was Sigmund Freud. One of Freud’s disciples, Dr. Paul Federn, was anxious to commission a sculpture of the famous psychoanalyst, but Freud consistently refused to sit for a sculptor, probably because he was extremely busy and was suffering from cancer of the mouth. Federn told Nemon that if he ever succeeded in persuading Freud to be sculpted, he would be the sculptor. Nemon left Vienna after a year and went to study at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Here is his entry in the year 1925 when Nemon enrolled at the Academie aged 19. When he enrolled, he was told to copy a nude model, and if he succeeded, he would be able to skip three years of study. He says in his memoirs, “This was a great challenge and one which I was determined to succeed.”

However, unfortunately, the other students in the life class were not so diligent, and the model kept moving her position. “One day,” Nemon says, “the whole situation reached crisis point. The model would not cooperate. And if I got her into position, she would wait until I had returned to my work and then drop the pose at once. I had had enough, and taking a lump of clay that was to hand, threw it at her. My aim was good, and she fell off the rostrum onto the floor. The other students came at me in a mob, screaming , ‘Let’s catch the savage from the Balkans.’” A week later, the model made amends by arriving on his doorstep with a cake as a peace offering. And as a result, they became such good friends that his French improved in leaps and bounds.

While studying at the Academie, he was considered such an impressive student that he was awarded the golden medal, which had not been presented for 14 years. He often returned home to Osijek. Here he is sculpting his beloved grandmother Johanna Adler. “I caused something of a stir,” Nemon wrote in his memoirs, “by the bas-relief I made of the Bishop of Dakavo, my first really serious portrait. I modelled him in front of the imposing Cathedral of Dakavo, but he was not pleased by the result. ‘You have made me look like a Turk and a brute,’ he declared, and demanded that I should soften the harsh and the heavy lines of his face, a task I found impossible to achieve.”

When Nemon was 21, he made this medal of the American aviator Charles Lindbergh who flew to Brussels in 1927, shortly after making the first solo flight across the Atlantic. Sip of water. He rented a studio in Brussels from a fellow sculptor, Pierre de Soete, who you see here in this marvellously powerful representation. Nemon had a natural talent of portraiture. Begin with, had to take what work he could find and sculpted a large number of children in Brussels. At about this time, he changed his name from Neumann to the French-sounding Nemon. An art critic visited Nemon’s studio and was full of praise, saying, “He synthesises in one representation different aspects of the same person. What potential lies ahead for an artist so young who has already achieved such perfect work?”

But then with the depression of the 1920s, his commissions dried up. And as he had no money to pay the rent of his studio, he had to move into a damp, dark cellar. At this point, his natural rapport with the opposite sex came to his rescue. One day, he heard the doorbell of his apartment block ringing incessantly. And so like the prisoners in “Fidelio,” he emerged from his dungeon into the light and found this young woman asking to be let in so she could visit one of her artist friends. Her friend was out, and so she talked to Nemon before she left. Then one night, Nemon says in his memoirs, “At three in the morning, I was awakened by a sharp knocking, then the sound of a woman’s voice. To my amazement, it was the young woman of the courtyard. ‘I wanted to check that you really do live in the cellar,’ she said. ‘When my friend told me of your plight, I couldn’t believe it.’”

She was a rich young Flemish woman called Simone Rickers, who decided to rescue Nemon from his dark cellar. They became close friends, and Simone gave Nemon an entree to Belgium society. In 1930 when Nemon was 24, he made a medal of the French audio pioneer General Ferrie, and also a medal of the great French war hero Marechal Foch. Nemon wrote in his memoirs, “I had now moved into a studio close to the royal palace, and this was the springtime of my life. I was meeting artists and poets of my own generation. My joy reached its zenith when I received a telegram from Dr. Federn in Vienna which said simply, ‘Come at once.’” This was 1921. Nemon was 25. He hurried to Vienna to sculpt Sigmund Freud. But Freud had not in fact agreed to sit for a sculptor, but simply to let Nemon see him.

In Nemon’s memoirs, he says, “I was duly admitted into the famous consulting room of his summer residence outside Vienna. Professor Freud stood up behind his desk as I entered. I moved forward and bowed to him. Our eyes met. He said sharply, ‘Dr. Federn told me you wanted to see me. Well, you’ve seen me.’ I knew nothing of the exchange between Freud and Federn that had precipitated this remark. And being at that time young and filled with the indomitable pride of youth, I felt rather insulted. And on the spur of the moment, I found myself saying, ‘No, sir, I have not seen you.’” Luckily, Freud relented and gave Nemon many sittings. After six months, Nemon had finished three busts, one carved in wood, one cut in stone, and one cast in bronze.

In November 1931, Freud wrote to Paul Federn, “Dear Doctor, a few days ago, you appeared in my home with three busts, asking me to choose one among them to keep as a gift from the Viennese society. The choice was not an easy one. Although the busts were made by the same hand and represent the same person, the artist gave each of them an individual charm and distinction not shown by the others and not easily relinquished. Finally, since however I cannot have three heads like Cerberus, I decided in favour of the one made in wood. With its vivacious and friendly expression, it promises to become a pleasant roommate.” You can see the pleasant roommate just above Freud’s head in this photograph. Freud took the wooden bust to London with him when he left Vienna in 1938, and it can now be seen in Freud’s study at the Freud Museum in London. Freud detailed Nemon’s visits in his diary.

Here is his entry for the 29th of October 1931. Nemon is mentioned just above the bottom line and below a visit from Dr. Sandor Ferenczi, who came the day before on the 28th. Dr. Sandor Ferenczi was one of Freud’s closest disciples. He is seen here with Nemon in his consulting room in Budapest in 1931. And here is the finished portrait, sadly lost. Nemon sculpted other medical doctors in Vienna. This is Dr. Gustav Alexander, an otologist who was shot dead by an angry patient in Vienna in 1932. Luckily, the bust survived and is owned by Dr. Alexander’s great grandson, Dr. Ian Grable, who lives in Chicago. This is a list of exhibits from an exhibition held in Brussels in 1932. I have these wonderful photographs, but I have found it very difficult to put names to the busts, as Nemon failed to write the names of his sitters on the backs of the photographs. I made a lucky discovery recently.

As you will see, bust number 18 on the list is H. Simont. With the help of the internet, I found a law firm in Brussels called Simont Braun, one of whose partners is called Lucien Simont, who looked remarkably like one of the unknown busts. I got in touch with Lucien Simont, who told me that indeed the bust was of his father, who’d been a young lawyer aged 30 in 1930, and the bust was a gift from a grateful client. Henri Simont became a distinguished judge, and the bust can now be seen in the Palace of Justice in Brussels. I had been wondering who Guy G. could be on the list at number 16. I didn’t know what the G stood for until I read a letter Nemon wrote to his sister Bella, saying that he had sculpted the son of his landlady, Madame Gottschalk. So this could be Guy Gottschalk?

I then discovered that the bust was indeed Guy Gottschalk, the son of Max Gottschalk. When I visited the Jewish Museum in Brussels, I was told that Max Gottschalk was regarded as a great hero in Belgium for saving the lives of many Jews in the 1940s. The Gottschalk family moved to the US, where Guy became a doctor. This is my father’s entry for Guy in his address book. I’d love to find the bust of little Guy if it still exists, but have had no luck so far. Guy’s brother, Robert Gottschalk, became a New York attorney and a lover of Barbara Rockefeller. Nemon’s first royal commission was to sculpt King Albert I of Belgium. Busts of King Albert turned out to be a controversial work. The Belgian Queen Elisabeth protested that Nemon had sculpted her beloved husband with his mouth open.

Here are Nemon’s busts of King Albert I with his son King Leopold III, but with his mouth firmly shut. Nemon also sculpted King Leopold’s tragic wife Queen Astrid, who died in a car crash when she was only 29. Nemon’s… I’ll just have a drink of water. Nemon’s friend Simone married an Englishman called David Dear and made a studio for Nemon at her new home in London. In this article, Simone is standing next to Nemon’s bust of King Albert I. Simone gave the bust of the king to the Belgian embassy in London, where it now proudly stands at the top of the embassy’s grand staircase. This double life-size bust of King George VI was cast in London in 1937. I doubt if Nemon had sittings with the king, and the bust has now disappeared. In 1936, Nemon was once again in Vienna for more sittings with Freud in preparation for a statue which was going to be erected in Vienna to celebrate Freud’s 80th birthday.

Whilst in Vienna, Nemon stayed… No, right, so whilst in Vienna, Nemon wrote to his friend Simone. “I saw Freud for the fourth time today, and we spoke at length. What a great man. No one has ever moved me like him or convinced me of his greatness by his knowledge and penetration of mankind. This will mark my life, and I feel enriched by knowing that such a man walks the earth and deserves to have his bust cast in gold.” The funds for the statue were to be raised by public subscription, but that was not to be, I presume because of rising antisemitism in Austria in the 1930s.

As you see, Nemon’s stayed at the Hotel de France in Vienna. A couple of years ago, a couple of years later, sorry, not ago, in 1938, Murray Burnett, the author of the film “Casablanca,” stayed at the same hotel, and in an interview he said, “We arrived in Vienna at night, and this frightened woman met us and said, ‘You know there is only one hotel that you can go to in Vienna, the Hotel de France. That’s the only hotel that accepts Jews.’”

Freud immigrated to England in 1938. Nemon visited him in London with their mutual friend Princess Marie Bonaparte, who helped Freud escape to England from Vienna. Nemon sculpted Princess Marie in her garden in Paris. They became good friends, and Nemon made this statuette of the princess. She told him that she preferred to be outside when sitting for Nemon. The weather was so hot. Nemon said it reminded him of the princess who liked to pose in the nude because the studio was too hot. Princess Marie laughed and said, “That was my aunt, Princess Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s younger sister.”

This is the well-known sculpture of Princess Pauline Bonaparte by the Italian sculptor Canova. I took this photograph at the British embassy in Paris, which used to be the home of Pauline Bonaparte. Like Freud, the princess was a lover of chow dogs, and she asked Nemon to sculpt her dogs, Tatoun and Topsy. Here is Tatoun looking at her static self. And her is Topsy. The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford owns this work. And here is Marie Bonaparte sitting on a large edition of Nemon’s sculpture of Topsy. This is at her home in Paris. Nemon met a young Englishwoman called Jessie Stoner, seen here with the film star Leslie Howard. I’ll tell you more about Leslie Howard in my next talk. In this press cutting, Jessie Stoner describes how she picked up a piece of clay in Nemon’s studio and made a model of some kind, whereupon Nemon remarked that she was very talented.

Jessie Stoner then decided she would like to learn to sculpt, and Nemon became her teacher and, um, close friend. I can just hear my father’s caressing voice telling Jessie how talented she was. They visited Yugoslavia together, where Nemon taught her to sculpt. Here they are taking a break between lessons. Whilst in Croatia, Nemon had a very serious mastoid infection, which was operated on by his friend from Osijek, Podvinecz. Nemon is standing on the right with a bandage around his head. Dr. Podvinecz was married to a Croatian soprano, Maria Podvinecz, who is on the left in this photograph. Here’s this video of them in the Podvinecz garden in Zagreb. There’s Maria Podvinecz. And here is Jessie Stoner getting a hand up from Dr. Podvinecz. Happy scene.

This is Dr. Podvinecz with his eldest son, sculpted by Nemon in Zagreb in 1938. On their way back to England, Nemon and Jessie visited the 1937 World Fair in Paris. This is a photograph Jessie Stoner took at the World Fair. They filmed each other on the Pont des Arts. Nemon sculpted back in England the Austrian child analyst in London in 1939. There he is working on the bust at her home in Maida Vale. In the film you’re about to see, Nemon is talking to Melanie Klein in her garden in London. I think the film must have been made for Nemon, as Melanie Klein has been asked to pose in different positions. [Silent clip plays]

I’d love to know what language they’re talking in. I don’t know if anybody can lipread, see if it’s German or English or French. Probably German, I should imagine. Apparently Melanie Klein disliked the bust Nemon made of her and she destroyed it. When told about this vandalism 40 years later, Nemon told Melanie Klein’s biographer Phyllis Grosskurth that “My impression was that Melanie had a noticeable tendency to pomposity and was easily capable of self-righteous behaviour. Maybe these qualities were manifest in my work and caused her some discomfort.” Just before the war broke out, Nemon went back to Yugoslavia. Here he is with his mother and younger brother Deze. He never saw them again.

They and his 80-year-old grandmother were captured and murdered by Nazi sympathisers. 90% of the Jewish community of Osijek were killed in the Holocaust. Nemon is saying goodbye to his beloved grandmother Johanna Adler, little knowing that he will never see her again. Nemon is kneeling by the grave of his material grandfather Leopold Adler in the Jewish cemetery in Osijek. The gravestone now has the added names of the members of the Adler family who perished in the Holocaust, Nemon’s mother, brother, grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Nemon was deeply affected by the death of his family, and 20 years after the war ended, he went back to Osijek for the unveiling of his Holocaust memorial. He called this sculpture “Humanity,” and it represented to him his hope for the future. A mother is looking lovingly into the eyes of her baby, passing on humanity with the love she has for her child.

Back in England in the late 1930s, Nemon was taught English by Florence Kahn, an American Jewish German actress who had been sent to learn French in Paris when she was a young woman. Florence was in her 60s when she taught Nemon English, but Nemon and Florence had such a jolly time talking to each other in French that her husband, the author and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, decided to take over the lessons. Nemon was not too pleased with this development. Nemon describes Max Beerbohm as “almost a stage version of a retired colonel. I was not keen to learn English as a form of drill on a parade ground.” Max Beerbohm made this caricature of Nemon. Nemon had a studio in London and often went to the Allies Club in Park Lane for lunch.

However, the smart Polish count objected to the scruffy sculptor with clay under his fingernails and tried to get him barred. The club’s president Sylvia Henley, Clementine Churchill’s cousin, overruled them, arguing that as a refugee from the Nazis, he was exactly the sort of person the club should welcome. We leave the war for awhile and look at the early life of Nemon’s future wife, my mother Patricia. Patricia was the only child of Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Villiers-Stuart and his wife Constance, prosperous Norfolk landowners. Here is Patricia aged five with her father and mother and grandmother in 1915. When Patricia was eight years old in 1918, she and her mother were painted by the artist Wilfrid de Glehn. And here is my mother in the year she was a debutante before she went to Buckingham Palace to be presented to King George VI. One of Sigmund Freud’s disciples, the London-based analyst Dr. Ernest Jones, introduced Nemon to Patricia.

On the face of it, they were an unlikely match. She was an English debutante and heiress to an estate in Norfolk, whilst he was a penniless refugee who spoke very little English. Patricia fell in love with the charismatic and intelligent sculptor. This liaison outraged Patricia’s parents, who tried every method they could to stop the relationship. Colonel Villiers-Stuart asked his solicitor to ask the Home Office to deport Nemon from the country. They wrote to the Home Office, “We have been approached by our client, Colonel Patrick Villiers-Stuart, in the following circumstances. Captain Villiers-Stuart has one daughter who will ultimately inherit the family property which is of considerable value. She is a young lady of artist temperament who has contracted an acquaintance with one Oscar Neumann, a Yugoslavian Jewish artist.”

When the Home Office failed to deport Nemon, Patricia’s parents tried again, as they had discovered that Nemon was planning to go to Yugoslavia to arrange for his mother and brother to escape to America. Her parents asked the Home Office to refuse Nemon entry back to the UK when he returned. When this didn’t work, they decided to take desperate measures, and in December 1939, just after the war had started, they suggested that Nemon was a spy for the SS. This did the trick. The Home Office then ordered Nemon to leave the country by January 1940.

And so on that sombre note, I will come to the end of today’s talk. If you would like to know what happened next, I’ll be here again next Wednesday to tell you how Nemon came to sculpt Winston Churchill and why Churchill decided to sculpt Nemon, seen here on the cover of the book “Finding Nemon,” which I wrote with the author Julian Hale.

So that’s all, folks, for today. Ended. Now, do I do something? All right.

• Thank you, Aurelia. That’s fascinating.

• Thank you.

• So she’s your mum.

• Patricia Villiers-Stuart was my mother.

• Okay, to be continued.

• Right, yes.

• Next week, the saga continues. What a wonderful sculptor.

• Right, thank you.

• Fabulous, wonderful presentation. Are you happy to take questions?

• Yes, certainly. How do I get them?

• [Lauren] At the bottom of your screen, right by the screen share button, there should be a Q&A button.

Q&A and Comments

• Yes, okay, here we are. Jennifer Malvin, “Thank you so much for this outstanding…” Oh, that’s kind, Jennifer. Valerie Cooper, “What a woman she was.” Well, which is the lovely woman? Well, Valerie Cooper, “His likenesses are incredible.” Romaine, “As a student of Melanie Klein, appreciate the film on her, thanks.” Oh, well, that’s good. I’m glad about that. I think that possibly the film was taken by Jessie Stoner because of films they took when they were in Yugoslavia together. And I’m sure my father didn’t have a cine camera. But in fact the Melanie Klein… What are they called? The Melanie Klein Society actually has the film, and it’s on their website.

Gail Dendy. Oh, nice, thank you, Gail Dendy, for your kind remarks. And, Jennifer, thank you very much. Susan Weinberg, kind remarks. Well, everybody, Valerie Cooper, everybody’s making very kind remarks. Nobody wants actually to ask me any questions. Oh, here we are, Les Leda,

Q: “Did Nemon every add wire spectacles to his busts, or where they always integral?” A: Yeah, I’m glad to say they were always integral. He was brilliant at doing spectacles. Probably you’ll see more in my next talk. Yes, no, he never added wire spectacles, I’m very pleased to say, but I’m sure people who do, they’re still very nice.

Q: “What is the size of mother and child?” A: It’s about nine feet tall. He really wanted mother and child, the “Humanity,” to be outside the Knesset, and he really wanted it to be enormous, as big as the Christ in… Where is it? Where’s the Christ? Rio de Janeiro.

• [Wendy] In Rio.

• Yes, in Rio. He always wanted his sculptures to be bigger, but of course no one could afford to make anything very big, so it… Yes, you can see… The mother and child is out, or “Humanity” is outside my father’s studio, which you’ll hear about next month, just outside Oxford. So you would get a chance to see it if you like if you hang around next week.

Q: “Was he able to finance so many travels as a beginning artist?” A: He was never able to finance absolutely anything. We were always very poor. I don’t know, I think kind Simone probably gave him money. I don’t know how he survived, with old friends. Because the trouble about being a sculptor, that it’s so expensive to have works cast in bronze, no one ever wanted to pay for anything to be cast in bronze. And at that time, you know, in the ‘30s and '40s and '50s, there wasn’t much money around, so nobody could ever much afford to pay him. So I don’t know how actually he financed anything, really.

Q: “Did your father sculpt in stone?” A: No, I don’t think. He didn’t work in… Well, he had things cast in stone, but he didn’t work in stone. He didn’t carve in stone. The only carving he ever did was the Freud in wood, which is just such a beautiful work.

Victoria, Victoria, “On the UCL website, there’s a quotation from Nemon’s diary where he claims that Ernst Chain stole some penicillin to treat your mother, making her the first patient to penicillin.” Well, she wasn’t obviously the first patient because we know who the first patient was, a poor policeman, wasn’t he? “Can you tell me when this was? I thought Mr. Alexander was…” Yeah, well, the first patient was a policeman certainly. You have to wait to discover because I’m not allowed to tell you what happened next and how. It’s quite true that Chain did say he’d stolen that penicillin to treat my mother, and she was given penicillin early, but that’s all in the next talk, that drama.

Jennifer again, Malvin, “Thank goodness your father’s time was unbelievable so many ways, so many times. He could have been caught up in the terrible events in Nazi influence become…” Well, he was very lucky that he wasn’t, that the UK didn’t stop him coming back when he tried to get a passage for his mother and brother to America. I think that was so awful. I blame my grandparents if, you know, why they had to stay. I don’t know if he managed to do that, but if he had got them to America, they wouldn’t have perished. Right, thank you, Carol, Jason for your kind remarks. Now let’s see.

This is what John Borough, John, anyhow, you know who you are, John, “One of our metal technicians worked for Nemon and has very fond memories of his visit to the Morris Singer Foundry and his generosity towards the technicians.” Yes, he was very, very generous, much to my mother’s despair, 'cause we never had any money, and Nemon was very generous with his money.

Q: “Was your late mum Jewish?” A: No, she was definitely not Jewish, and that was the problem with her parents because she was not Jewish.

“Thank you so much. Signed copy of the book was given to me as a gift, which I treasure.” Oh, well, that’s kind, Barbara, thank you.

Q: “Did your mother convert, or did your father convert?” A: No, nobody converted. We were all unconverted. My father was… He wanted his children to be English or British because he didn’t want his children to be strangers, as he never really… From the age of 17, he’d been Jewish and a stranger in so many different countries, and he wanted his children to feel that they belonged in one country. And so my mother was English, and we were English, and we weren’t, as it were, taught to be Jewish. He didn’t, no. We knew our father was Jewish, but we weren’t taught to be, as it were, the religion.

Q: “Did your father draw people first?” A: Yes, he did. I’ll show you next time.

Q: “Did your father ever sculpt you?” A: Yes, he did. You’ll see that. You can’t see it in the background of my… No, I guess. Beverly,

“Did your grandparents disown your mother?”

• I’m going to jump in, Aurelia. Not to be answered this time. Wait until next week.

• Right, yes, good, okay. And that’s the end.

• I’m going to help you out. So I just want to say thank you for the most wonderful presentation. Really, what a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful sculptor. Did he know Chana Orloff? Is the name familiar to you?

• No, it’s not familiar.

• Chana Orloff.

• But I don’t know if he did. But have to look in his address book. I don’t think so. Who…

• She was an Israeli… I don’t know if she, yeah, she was an Israeli sculptor. I’m a big fan of her. I love her work.

Q: Who of the artists did he hang around with? A: Well, he didn’t really hang… Once he was in England or in UK, he didn’t really because he hadn’t grown up with any artists, do you see? Generally you hang around with the ones you’ve been at art school with, but he didn’t.

• Right.

• So he didn’t hang around with any artists, really. Musicians, friends, Jewish friends, Croatian friends, but not with artists because he was already 36 when he got…

• Right.

• So.

• And the musicians. Anybody that was famous at the time?

• Well, he had a great friend Albi Rosenthal who was a musician in Oxford, but not, I don’t think… No, I think he was just so busy sculpting people and travelling. He was in America… Well, I’ll tell you later how he was in America.

• Very good. All right, so we’ve got part two to look forward to, so thank you very, very much for a wonderful presentation. We look forward to seeing you next week.

• Thank you. Right, bye.

• Thank you, Lauren, and thank you to all who were attending today, all our participants.

• Yes, thank you.

• Thanks, bye!

• Thank you, bye! Bye!