Dorich House Museum

This work was completed while Gordine was living and working in Paris in the 1920s; it was exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries in Paris in 1929. Dahomy was a kingdom of West Africa, now part of Benin, but the model was a young woman from Senegal. Her name is unknown.

Gordine’s large female figure Javanese Dancer was completed while she was living and working in Paris in the 1920s. Javanese Dancer was one of three Gordine works photographed by the visual artist Man Ray, who lived nearby. It pre-dates Gordine’s visit to Java by around three years and together with other work of the late 1920s […]

The model for this piece was a young woman named Esther who worked for the War Victims Relief Organisation in Paris in the 1920s, when Gordine was living there. It was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in 1928 as Female Torso.

The actress Edith Evans posed for a portrait head in 1937 and enjoyed her experience of working with Gordine so much that she also agreed to pose for this nude. Both pieces were shown at the Leicester Galleries in November 1938.

The pose is close to that of a seventh-century CE stone carving of a river goddess at Ellora, a Buddhist and Hindu temple complex in lndia, and is discussed at length in Gordine’s article ‘The Beauty of Indian Sculpture’ (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, January 1941). There are also similarities to two dancing girls, […]

The title of this work derives from ‘The Tale of the Pomegranate Flower and Laugh-of-the-Moon’ from The Thousand and One Nights, known also as The Arabian Nights. 

This small standing female nude is informed by Gordine’s knowledge and experience of Indian, Khmer and Javanese sculpture, which she lectured on in the early 1940s at the Royal Asiatic Society and elsewhere, saying that ‘pure sculpture, unlike painting, reached a degree of perfection in Asia which is hardly ever achieved in Europe, except for […]

The model for this work was Joan Williamson, daughter of the banker and economist Sir Andrew McFadyean. She also modelled for Mischief and Sea Rose.