Lynn Chadwick was born on 24 November 1914 at Barnes in Surrey. After leaving Merchant Taylors’ School, he went, in the late 1930s, to work as an architectural draughtsman at various design practices. At one of these, he met Rodney Thomas, who was fully abreast of recent developments in contemporary European architecture and design. Chadwick then spent some time as a farm labourer, before volunteering for the Fleet Air Arm in the Second World War. He flew on Atlantic convoy duties and was later commissioned. Demobbed in 1944, he returned to Thomas’s practice, where he became closely involved in designing trade-fair stands. He produced textile, furniture and architectural designs, and his first mobile sculpture constructed from aluminium and balsa wood was shown at a Building Trades Exhibition design prize in a competition judged by Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland in 1947. In 1949 one of his small mobiles was placed in the window of the then influential London art dealers Charles and Peter Gimpel, as part of a mixed exhibition of contemporary sculpture. That led directly to his first solo exhibition at that same gallery a year later. Chadwick was commissioned to make a number of mobiles for a number of clients over the next few years. Unique in that his tendency was to progress from an abstract form which he then invested with life, rather than vice-versa, Chadwick is best-known as a sculptor. Like Paolozzi, he developed a skill in welding together found metal objects, as ‘ready-mades’. In scale, his work seemed always at its best in outdoor locations. He became one of a number of sculptors, including Kenneth Armitage and Reg Butler that came to prominence in the fifties, and were promoted internationally, largely by the British Council in group and solo exhibitions. Chadwick was commissioned to produce three constructions for the 1951 Festival of Britain Exhibition. Quickly realising that the techniques involved in welding iron, steel, brass and copper required completely new skills, Chadwick signed up for a four-week training course at British Oxygen’s Welding School at Cricklewood. Chadwick created his first ‘Beast’ sculptures in 1953: Small Beast in iron and glass may be found in the collection of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Rome. His Idiomorphic Beast in welded iron, again a unique sculpture, may be found in the collection of the City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. Both are spiky, alert forms with geometrical attributes. In 1952 Chadwick was selected by the British Council as one of the eight young British sculptors to be shown at the 28th Venice Biennale which took place in 1956. He won the International Sculpture Prize, beating Giacometti, Cesar and Germaine Richier, only six years after taking up sculpture. His work then toured Vienna, Munich, Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels, before being shown in London. A large-scale commission in 1957 from the Air League of Britain for a sculpture to commemorate Alcock and Brown’s first Transatlantic flight, to be sited at London Airport, ended in a highly embarrassing episode, when the aviation pioneer Lord Brabazon of Tara dubbed Chadwick’s massive two-headed winged figure ‘a diseased haddock’. Chadwick was awarded First Prize at the Concorso Internazionale del Bronzetto held at Padua 1959. He was appointed CBE in 1964, Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1993 and was elected RA in 2001. Chadwick’s success enabled him in 1958 to make his home at Lypiatt Park, the Strawberry Hill-style Gothick house at Stroud, Gloucestershire. There, he established his studio and created a permanent exhibition of his work in the grounds: the rolling Gloucestershire countryside being home to his monumental sculptures. His prints – mainly colour lithographs – are highly valued in their own right and demonstrate great technical skill. A collection of them may be found at the Tate in London. Chadwick married Ann Secord in 1942 and they had a son. The marriage was dissolved, and he married secondly, in 1959, Frances Jamieson; they had two daughters, before she died in 1964. He married thirdly, in 1965, Eva Reiner; they had a son. Chadwick died on 25 April 2003, aged 88. Along with Eduardo Paolozzi and Kenneth Armitage, he had played a major role in establishing British post-war sculpture on the world stage.