Uli Nimptsch was born at Charlottenburg in Berlin on 22 May 1897. He was the younger son and second of four children of Siegfried Nimptsch, a broker on the Berlin Stock Exchange. Uli studied at the Applied Art School, Berlin (1915-17) and at the Berlin Academy (1919-26) under Professors Gerstel and Lederer. He was awarded a Rome Prize in 1928. In 1925 he married Ruth Berthe. Nimptsch was based in Rome throughout the 1930s, although he is known to have also visited Paris. He returned to Germany in 1937 and lived in Bavaria, but left his homeland for the sake of his wife, who was Jewish. He went to Paris and Rome, before settling in London in 1939, where he arrived with no knowledge of the English language. The life model – usually young – was his preferred subject, and despite having worked in Rome, he preferred a naturalistic style. An acknowledged masterpiece from the 1930s is his Marietta (1936-8), a full-length standing nude with her hands over her head, a cast of which was acquired by the City Art Gallery of Leeds in 1944. Interned as an enemy alien, Nimptsch lived on the Isle of Man with his friend Oscar Kokoschka upon the outbreak of the Second World War. His wartime sculptures created in London were different, being small-scale high reliefs in bronze or lead, of narratives from the Bible or classical mythology. He returned to life studies and was not apparently influenced by British sculpture. He had one-man exhibitions at the Redfern Gallery (1942), Leeds (1944), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (1957), Stone Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne (1965) and finally at the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy (1973). Nimptsch became a British subject after the war. For the 1951 Festival of Britain, the Arts Council commissioned work for London’s South Bank from Robert Adams, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Frank Dobson, Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, Karin Jonzen, F E McWilliam, Bernard Meadows, Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi and Nimptsch. In 1951 Girl Sitting on a Stone Plinth was acquired by the Arts Council’s collection. His Olympia (1956) took three years to sculpt and was a reclining nude lying full length, supported on an arm and a leg. It was acquired by the Tate Gallery under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest in the year it was finished. Portrait busts were commissioned of Paul Oppé (1949, British Museum Print Room), Sir Mortimer Wheeler (1969, British Academy), and Viscount Brendan Bracken (Bracken House). His nude male group The Good Samaritan (1961) was commissioned by Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham, and Neighbourly Encounter, (1961) by London County Council for the Silwood Housing Estate. On 28 March 1955 Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill rose to speak one last time in the House of Commons to move the approval for a statue of the late Member for Caernarvon Boroughs to be erected within the precincts of the parliamentary estate. It was an old debt on Churchill’s part, as ‘the Welsh Wizard’ had been both mentor and patron to him and had saved his career in 1916 by bringing him into his government, in the face of fierce opposition from the Conservatives. The commission was originally awarded to Jacob Epstein, but after his death, was passed by the Ministry of Works to Nimptsch. The statue of David Lloyd George (1963) stands opposite Oscar Nemon’s Winston Churchill in the Members’ Lobby of the House of Commons. Nimptsch’s bronze statue Christ Ascendant for St Wilfrid’s Church, Bognor Regis was dedicated in 1964. Nimptsch exhibited at the Royal Academy almost annually from 1957, was elected ARA in 1958, and RA in 1967. After the war, he had persevered with the subject he most admired, in work that was consistent over 40 years of his working life. His best nude studies ‘possess an admirable sense of the conflict between liveliness and restraint, and few other sculptors in Britain took on this subject with such seriousness or such a sense of decorum’. Nimptsch was Master of the RA Sculpture School in the period 1966-69. He died on 2 January 1977. He bequeathed ten of his sculptures to the RA, together with the portrait of himself by Oskar Kokoschka. His Nude Seated on a Bench Holding her Right Foot  may be found in the British Government Art Collection. His pupil Haidee Becker’s 1976 pastel portrait of Nimptsch may be found in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London.