The Visitation (1926)

This life-size bronze figure was intended to be one of a pair which would have depicted the biblical event, called The Visitation, when the Virgin Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth when they are both pregnant with Jesus Christ and John the Baptist, respectively. It was modelled in Jacob Epstein's studio hut in Epping Forest and exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, London in the summer of 1926 and called simply 'A Study' to avoid too critical a reception, as the artist later said. The model was a music student and secretary to the playwright John Drinkwater (1882-1937). Epstein said that she 'expresses a humility so profound as to shame the beholder who comes to my sculpture expecting rhetoric or splendour of gesture'. Several later casts exist including at the Baltimore Museum of Art, USA and at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia.

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