The sculptor Charles Jagger was defined by the Great War. He served from the very beginning in the Artist’s Rifles, giving up his Prix de Rome scholarship to join, and he was sent out to Gallipoli as part of the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. He was wounded badly twice and ended the war with a Military Cross. It was the British War Memorial Committee that made his career thereafter, for which he made arguably his greatest sculptures, culminating with his great work the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner.

This is from a small group of drawings from the very beginning of his career, before the War, that stayed in the family. Charles was the son of a colliery manager near Sheffield and he, his older sister Edith and his younger brother David all wished to become artists (his brother David Jagger became a celebrated society portrait painter), but the family was not rich and Charles had to hide his artistic ambitions from his father. He was apprenticed at first to Mappin and Webb as a metal engraver when he was 14, and had begun to teach at Sheffield Technical School of Art when in 1907 he was awarded a scholarship by West Riding County Council to the Royal College of Art - which was the first his father knew of his secret training. Charles later attributed his particular skill in low relief to his early experience as a metal engraver. After the Royal College in 1911 he became studio assistant to his sculpture tutor there, Professor Lantéri.

This group of early drawings are interesting in several respects, and generally different from the kind of drawing encouraged by the Slade School at that time. As John Glave Smith put it in his essay for the Imperial War Museum’s 1985 exhibition catalogue (p 53):

The divergence between the surviving student drawings made by Jagger at the Royal College of Art and the Slade’s teaching method is substantial. His drawings are based on a rigorous and methodical approach which still owes something to the shading system despised at the Slade. They appear to have been worked at systematically with varying hardnesses of pencil in strict sequence. … This tonal modelling is, however, an underpinning of the composition rather than a consistent mode of representation … They are in Michelangelo's terms ‘presentation drawings’ … The Slade reacted against the academic system of highly finished drawing based on the tonal ‘copying’ of light and shade. It was maintained that this system did not lead to intelligent understanding of the form itself. Slade students were required to make many provisional, tentative drawings. The true content of drawing, it was argued, lay in the artist’s apprehension of three-dimensional form. Symbolic and narrative aspects were no part of this, and neither was the artist’s capacity to produce neat, clean ‘copy.’

The critic Ian McAllister, wrote about Jagger’s drawings in the Studio Magazine in 1914:  'That of Francis, an old toolmaker [who made modelling tools for the Royal College of Art], was hastily done in a few minutes, just on the spur of the moment, when the model happened to be reading a paper in a college hall.’ It was drawn in 1911.