Jacques Lipchitz was a celebrated Lithuanian-born French sculptor best known for his Cubist works depicting figures, portraits, and still lifes made of bronze or stone. Born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz on August 22, 1891 in Druskinikai, Lithuania to a Litvak (Lithuanian Jewish) family. To please his parents, Lipchitz studied engineering as a young man. But around 1909, he decided to pursue art instead and moved to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Académie Julian in Paris.

Lipichitz was a part of the artistic milieu in the famed Montmarte neighborhood of Paris, which included Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Juan Gris. He became especially influenced with work by Pablo Picasso, who had pioneered a style of art called Cubism. Cubism was an art movement in which images were fractured and broken into simultaneous fragmented shards of perspective. It was strongly geometric and not based on traditional representational art like portraits or landscapes.