As a youth, the French sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska studied business at Bristol and Cardiff in 1908-09. In 1911 he returned to England where he became a pioneer of Modernism. After volunteering for the French army on the outbreak of the First World War, he was killed in action. This portrait of a Miss Borne was modelled in clay, probably in 1912. An edition of twelve bronzes was made posthumously.