(b St-Jean-de-Braye, nr. Orléans, 4 Oct. 1891; d Neuville-St-Vaast, nr. Arras, 5 June 1915). French sculptor and draughtsman, active in England for most of his short career and usually considered part of the history of British rather than French art. In 1910 he took up sculpture in Paris without formal training, and in the same year he met Sophie Brzeska, a Polish woman twenty years his senior, with whom he lived from that time, both of them adopting the hyphenated name. In 1911 they moved to London, which Gaudier had visited briefly in 1906 and 1908, and lived for a while in extreme poverty. He became a friend of Wyndham Lewis and other leading literary and artistic figures, and his work was shown in avant-garde exhibitions, such as the Vorticist exhibition of 1915.