Sculptor Paul Hamann trained at the Hamburg Landeskunstschule, then, briefly in Paris, under Rodin, before serving in the German army during the First World War. Afterwards, he taught in Hamburg, meeting painter Hilde Guttmann (1898–1987), made wood carvings and sculptures, specialising in the female nude, co-founded the Hamburg Secession and was President of the Kunstlerfest. The couple lived in artists’ colonies in Worpswede and Berlin, then, moved in 1933 to Paris, where Hamann’s new painless process for life masks brought him an international celebrity clientele including Bertolt Brecht, Cocteau, Gide, Man Ray and Harold Nicolson – who assisted their passage to England in 1936 (Hilde was Jewish, Paul ‘part-Jewish’). They were founder members of the Free German League of Culture; Hamann co-chaired its Fine Arts section and exhibited in the 1938 New Burlington Galleries Twentieth Century German Art and 1939 Wertheim galleries exhibitions. Between 1940–41 he was interned at Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man (transiting briefly through the Warth Mill camp), alongside Fred Uhlman and Erich Kahn, among others, signing the famous New Statesman letter, sitting to Kurt Schwitters, teaching modelling, sculpting his famous Nude Lady Golfer and a head of pianist Marian Rawicz (in clay), exhibiting in both the first and second Exhibitions of Art and contributing to The Camp magazine. Post-war, he remained a major figure in the émigré network, exhibiting with the AIA (Artists Aid Jewry, 1943; For Liberty, 1943), running an art school with Hilde in St. John’s Wood – attended by former internees including Hugo Dachinger, who sketched the class, and from where a sheaf of his life-drawings has survived - and was a member of the Hampstead Arts Council.