LONDONER Lynn Chadwick came into sculpture via architecture, a field he worked in as a draughtsman, and it was the influence of his employer Rodney Thomas that proved crucial.

Thomas was a dreamer and a visionary thinker —  “a modest man who didn’t think modestly” — who’d been dissuaded by his uncle from becoming a painter. He was the ideal person to encourage Chadwick’s aspiration.

Chadwick’s lack of formal artistic training was a blessing in disguise, as it was his architectural drawing that “taught me how to compose things,” he once recalled. “I actually wanted to produce a sort of touchable object, a tangible object... I wanted to do it to have some reality in front of me.”