Born into a Jewish family in Latvia in 1906, the sculptor Dora Gordine grew up and began practising as a modernist sculptor in Tallinn, Estonia. By 1938, she was being hailed as ‘possibly the finest woman sculptor in the world’. Having lived in Berlin, Paris, Malaya and Singapore, she settled in Kingston after her second marriage in 1936 to the Hon Richard Hare. Together, they built Dorich House, now run as an artist-studio museum by Kingston University
The model for the nude, kneeling figure was Mrs Elizabeth Choy Su-Mei (1910-2006). Awarded an OBE in 1946 for her work with Allied Prisoners of War in Singapore, Su-Mei remained in London for three years. Keen to learn art, she recalled, ‘I decided the best way was to work as a model… I felt honoured to pose for a well-known sculptress, Dora Gordine. She did two statuettes of me and started on a third, but I had to go away and she could not finish that one.’
