Finding Nemon

I greatly admire the art of Mr Oscar Nemon, whose prowess in the ancient classical realm of sculpture has won such remarkable appreciation in our country. - Winston Churchill

His talent was classical sculpture, but his gifts lay in capturing the personality of his sitters. It was for both these reasons and a singular determination that Oscar Nemon, an artist born of humble Jewish stock in a small city in modern-day Croatia, found himself before the great and good of twentieth-century society in order to sculpt them. Among his sitters were the Queen, Sigmund Freud, President Truman, Margaret Thatcher and, most famously, Winston Churchill.

Daughter of Nemon, Aurelia Young, and author Julian Hale together reveal the fascinating stories behind these artistic and personal encounters: how the Queen came to know him as the 'missing Oscar'; how Nemon became the subject of Churchill's only attempt at sculpture. In searching for Nemon, she finds a paradoxical figure; to his sitters he was an outsider, foreign, Jewish, without family, while in the art world he was seen as part of the establishment. Finding Nemon, the first biography of Oscar Nemon to appear in English, finally brings the sculptor out from the shadow of his work.