Henri Gaudier was born on 4 October 1891 at St Jean-de-Braye, near Orléans, France. He settled in London in 1911 with Sophie Brzeska, whose surname he added to his own so that his subsequent work was produced under the composite name Gaudier-Brzeska. In London he established friendships with both writers and artists, notably with Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry, Horace Brodzky, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Jacob Epstein. In 1913 he exhibited with the Allied Artists' Association and gave up his job as a clerk with a shipping broker in order to devote himself to his art full-time. Although briefly affiliated in 1913 with roger Fry's Omega Workshops, he soon allied himself with the Rebel Art Centre and the Vorticists, contributing to both issues of their magazine Blast. He left England in September 1914 to fight for France and on 5 June 1915 was killed during an infantry charge at Neuville-Saint-Vaast.