Robert Clatworthy

Robert Clatworthy (1928 – 2015) was a British sculptor best known for his stylised forms and highly challenging abstracted sculpture, especially his menacing bronzes of bulls and cats whose textured surfaces expressed his rapid handling of the quick-drying plaster from which they were cast. This is what gave Clatworthy’s work its energetic resemblance. Clatworthy grew up in the West Country and attended art school at West of England College of Art in Bristol. After a period in national service, Clatworthy went to Chelsea School of Art, London, where he was taught by Bernard Meadows. He also began an enduring friendship with Elisabeth Frink, whose work he continued to praise even when she later eclipsed him. In the early 50s Clatworthy had an important break, being taken on as an assistant by Henry Moore who persuaded him to join the Slade school of art. Decades later at the height of his commercial success, Clatworthy believed in following his own rhythms rather than the demands of the art market, and eventually fell out with his fashionable dealers over their requests for constant production.