Have you heard of the family Stein?
There’s Gert and there’s Ep and there’s Ein
Gert’s poetry’s bunk
Ep’s statues are junk
And no one can understand Ein
Pop into the V&A’s sculpture gallery and you can get close to two of the ‘Steins’ from this humorous limerick of the 1930s, as you can come face to face with Jacob Epstein’s bust of the scientist Albert Einstein.
When Hitler came to power in January 1933 the Nazis attacked the ‘Jewish physics’ of Einstein and, with his life in danger, the physicist fled to the UK en route to taking up a professorship at Princeton.
Einstein was staying in a cabin at Roughton Heath, near Cromer as a guest of the MP Oliver Locker-Lampson protected by an armed guard as there was a bounty on the the scientist’s head and it was feared he could be the victim of an assassination attempt. Epstein visited him on the heath and modelled his head in clay while the two talked (it is believed that this is when Epstein – a fellow jew – persuaded Einstein to speak publicly against the Nazis). The V&A bronze is one of many that were cast from that model.
Epstein said that his subject ‘resembled the aging Rembrandt’, and although unfinished (Einstein left to go to the US shortly after the sitting, and Epstein is said to have regreted being unable to complete the work), the bust magnificently captures the informal, approachable and humorous character of its subject, qualities that exist in Rembrandt’s self-portraits.
