By the time he exhibited this melancholy fragment in 1916, Epstein had suffered the death of his 23-year-old friend Gaudier-Brzeska, killed by German forces in France.
In repose, its heavy, squared-off mass seems to have been sculpted by Epstein or Gaudier-Brzeska, while the clean curve of nose and brow offers the pagan profile not of a movie actor but of a Greek wrestler, bashed in life and purified in marble.