Oscar Nemon is best known for his series of more than a dozen public statues of Sir Winston Churchill.
22 Facts About Oscar Nemon
2.
Oscar Nemon was the second child, and elder son, of Mavro Neumann, a pharmaceutical manufacturer, and his wife, Eugenia Adler.
3.
Oscar Nemon was an accomplished artist from an early age, and began modelling with clay at a local brickworks.
4.
Oscar Nemon exhibited early works locally in 1923 and 1924, while still at school.
5.
Oscar Nemon was encouraged by Ivan Mestrovic to study in Paris, but he moved to Vienna instead.
6.
Oscar Nemon applied to join the Akademie der bildenden Kunste but failed to secure a place, and spent some time working at his uncle's bronze foundry in Vienna.
7.
Later in his life, Oscar Nemon changed his surname from Neumann.
8.
Oscar Nemon returned to Vienna in 1931, to create a large seated sculpture of Freud, now in Hampstead.
9.
Oscar Nemon staged a one-man exhibition of portrait heads at the Academie, including his Freud and a bust of Paul-Henri Spaak.
10.
Oscar Nemon made portraits of King Albert I, Queen Astrid of the Belgians, Emile Vandervelde and August Vermeylen, and exhibited at the Galerie Monteau in December 1934 and January 1939.
11.
Oscar Nemon abandoned over a decade of work in progress in his studio, including a 20-foot clay model, "Le Pont".
12.
Oscar Nemon married Patricia Villiers-Stuart, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Villiers-Stuart, in 1939 and they lived firstly in Holywell Street in Oxford, and then Sandfield Road in Headington, before settling in Boars Hill.
13.
Oscar Nemon made a bust of Max Beerbohm in 1941 ; Beerbohm taught him English.
14.
Oscar Nemon designed and built a combined house and studio on the site in the 1960s.
15.
Oscar Nemon exhibited some portraits at Regent's Park College in Oxford in 1942, and made portraits of John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery, and Sir Karl Parker of the Ashmolean Museum.
16.
Oscar Nemon made portraits of the members of British Royal Family, including Elizabeth II, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother, and the Earl Mountbatten of Burma, at a studio in St James's Palace.
17.
Oscar Nemon sculpted war leaders such as Dwight D Eisenhower, Earl Alexander of Tunis, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, Lord Freyberg, Lord Portal of Hungerford, Lord Beaverbrook, and other political figures including Harold Macmillan, Harry S Truman and Margaret Thatcher.
18.
Oscar Nemon is best known for his series of more than a dozen public statues of Winston Churchill, including examples in the House of Commons, at Westerham, and in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto.
19.
Oscar Nemon was made an Honorary Doctor of Letters at the University of St Andrews in 1977, and a retrospective was held at the Ashmolean Museum in 1982.
20.
Oscar Nemon died on 13 April 1985 at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
21.
Oscar Nemon's technique depended on modelling from life directly in clay, quickly making many small studies with no preliminary drawings.
22.
Oscar Nemon produced works in clay, plaster, and stone, but most of his finished works were cast bronze, often at the Morris Singer art foundry or occasionally at the Burleighfield art foundry.