The present Study for Rock Drill relates to Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill, conceived in the years immediately preceding the First World War and first exhibited in 1915. One of a small number of drawings connected with the sculpture, it belongs to the period in which Epstein was working out the form of what would become one of his best-known works.

By 1913 Epstein had been living in Britain for almost a decade. Born in New York’s Lower East Side in 1880, he moved to London in 1905 and soon established himself as a sculptor prepared to depart from the conventions of Edwardian public sculpture. His study of archaic and non-Western sculpture had a lasting effect on his treatment of the figure, while his work in the years before the war developed alongside Cubism in Paris and the beginnings of Vorticism in London.

It was during this period that Epstein began work on Rock Drill. In its original form, the sculpture consisted of a plaster figure mounted on a commercial pneumatic rock drill. The use of an actual machine was without precedent in Epstein’s work. Seated astride the drill, the figure was reduced to hard, simplified forms, with a helmet-like head and sharply articulated limbs. The machine was not represented in sculpture but incorporated into the work itself, making the distinction between figure and drill difficult to separate.

The present drawing shows Epstein developing the figure at an early stage. Pencil establishes its principal outlines, while passages of watercolour define the larger areas of the body. The narrow sheet accommodates the upright figure closely, and much of the drawing is concentrated on the arrangement of the torso and limbs. The head is simplified and without individual features; the body is treated in much the same way, through a series of angular shapes rather than conventional anatomical modelling.

The drawing is closely related to other studies for Rock Drill dating from around 1913. Together, these sheets show Epstein repeatedly returning to the pose and adjusting the relation of the figure to the machine. In the present work, the relative freedom of the pencil lines and watercolour gives a particularly clear sense of this process. It is a working drawing rather than a finished presentation study, made while the final form of the sculpture was still being determined.

The original version of Rock Drill survived for only a short period. Epstein later removed the pneumatic drill and cut down the plaster figure, retaining the head, torso and upper arms. The reduced figure was subsequently cast in metal as Torso in Metal from “The Rock Drill”. The alteration changed the work considerably. Without the drill and lower part of the body, the figure no longer had the physical completeness of the 1915 sculpture and instead appeared as a fragment.

The dismantling of Rock Drill has often been considered in relation to the First World War. Epstein’s original sculpture belonged to a period in which machinery had become an important subject for a number of European artists. The experience of mechanised warfare inevitably changed the context in which such imagery was understood. Epstein later recalled Rock Drill as an image associated with violence and the destructive possibilities of the machine.

The surviving preparatory drawings are therefore important records of the sculpture in its original conception. Unlike the later Torso, they belong to the period when Epstein was still considering the complete figure in relation to the drill. The present sheet documents that process at close hand and preserves an early stage in the development of a work that Epstein himself would soon substantially alter.