Bernard William Meadows was born at Norwich, Norfolk on 19 February 1915. He was the product of a modest middle-class background and was educated at the City of Norwich School. In 1931, his father persuaded Bernard to prepare for the future, by training as an accountant. It soon became apparent that Meadows was useless at figures and he persuaded his parents to permit him to attend the Norwich School of Art, where he studied under Walter Watling. The training there was wholly conventional and a friend who knew the sculptor Henry Moore arranged for Meadows and a couple of fellow students to visit his studio. Moore rewarded Meadows’ interest by writing to him, inviting him to come and help in the holidays. Meadows worked as Moore’s assistant in his workshop outside Canterbury in the period 1936-40. As he told Moore’s biographer, Roger Berthoud, these were idyllic days: they commenced at five am by throwing buckets of cold water over each other as a wake-up call, continuing with work in the studio, then going out to shoot rabbits or poach pheasants, to swim in the sea off Deal or Reculver and to finish the day with a visit to the cinema. Meadows studied under Gilbert Spencer at the Royal College of Art from 1938 to 1940. However, his first application to the RCA was turned down, because of his association with Moore. In 1936, at the age of 21, Meadows took part in the London International Surrealist Exhibition first surrealist exhibition in London: the war meant he would not exhibit again until the first Battersea Park open air exhibition during the Festival of Britain in 1951. Meadows commenced the Second World War as a registered Conscientious Objector, but when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he joined the Royal Air Force. He spent most of his war in the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, where he became fascinated by the native gigantic crabs, whose forms he would later introduce to his sculpture. He found in crabs and later, birds, a means of expressing extreme violence, without resorting to the human figure. His birds fall to earth, shattered, or metamorphose from bird form into a gun barrel, not a sportsman’s gun, but the sort that in an earlier war had drenched the banks of the Somme in blood. Meadows’ appropriation of animal forms was his way of finding his own voice as a sculptor and escaping the overwhelming influence of Moore. Meadows returned to the RCA to complete his studies in the period 1946-48. Meadows’ main work is in bronze and, like Moore, he produced drawings before sculpture. He first came to international attention at the 1952 Venice Biennale, when his work was exhibited in the British Pavilion alongside that of Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. In his catalogue introduction, Herbert Read coined the phrase ‘the geometry of fear’ for Meadows’ work was typical of 1950s British sculpture, which was characterised by forms of aggressive or wounded animals used to reflect the mood of post-war anxiety. It was only in the later part of his career, in the works of the late 1970s and early 1980s, that Meadows’ mood changed, and a more sensuous element emerged. His first one-man show was at Gimpel Fils in 1957. He then exhibited from New York City to Tokyo and produced a stream of public and private art in Britain and beyond. In the period 1948-60 he taught at Chelsea, but felt that he was hamstrung by a department he described as little more than a life-modelling class and which had no casting facilities. Meadows’ work developed in new directions in response to his teaching career and he would later confess to a two-way influence between himself and prized students like Elisabeth Frink and Robert Clatworthy. In 1960 Meadows was appointed professor of sculpture at the RCA, a post he would hold until 1980. There, he introduced a foundry, where he could cast his own and students’ work. His Public Sculpture was an assemblage of stone blocks and balls of dripping and dimpled metal. It was commissioned in 1968 for the Eastern Daily Press’s Prospect House in his native Norwich and may be seen there still. When Moore became old and, in the early 1980s, ill, Meadows returned to help him; after which, he became first, acting director and then consultant to the Henry Moore Foundation. Meadows died on 12 January 2005. A body of his work may be seen on display in the Tate Gallery at Millbank.