It seems fitting that the

charismatic Oxford sculptor Michael Black should have gone to meet his maker, aged 90, on St Valentine’s Day, he being such an ardent apostle of love, in a fashion fiercely carnal.

Evidence of this came for me in an obvious way during an evening spent some 40 years ago in Osney’s riverside local pub, The Waterman’s Arms (now The Punter).

Drinks flowed, in strode, having rowed (in gleaming vintage skiff), the strapping figure of Mr Black.

He joined a company composed of myself and largely student friends, plus a visiting pal from London with a lively female companion, titled and – as was patently obvious – feeling entitled to all attentions that a man could provide.

Michael, instantly charmed by this available aristocrat, promptly proceeded to deliver what was required, somewhere about the premises – his and her absence barely noticed by the rest of us.

Here was ‘artistic’ behaviour requiring those inverted commas and reminiscent of what was expected, and usually delivered, by the likes of, say, Augustus John and Lucian Freud.

As an artist of stature, Michael always felt able – and why not? – to behave in a way significantly different from the run of men.

I encountered him first in 1973 in the immediate aftermath of the fame arising from his two-year project to replace the 13 ‘Emperors’ Heads’, so called, standing guard outside the Sheldonian Theatre.

These have become as iconic an image of Oxford as Sir Thomas Jackson’s ‘Bridge of Sighs’ at Hertford College – each of them beamed around the world in TV’s Inspector Morse and its successors – and Bill Heine’s shark.

An engaging eccentricity characterised his manner as he moved among the slightly rackety individuals resident in the streets around Plantation Road, whose Gardener’s Arms pub was the focus of their nocturnal activity.

His behaviour could, however, sometimes veer towards the intolerable, as, for instance, when a table-cloth-tugging conjuring trick performed at a pal’s house in St Bernard’s Road deposited six people’s dinner on the carpet.

Back at The Waterman’s Arms some years later – in an illustration of eccentricity never really explained – he turned up with a fully grown sheep that proceeded to graze the river bank.

Our dog Holly was happy to mingle with the animal until – the collie part of her make-up at last triggered – she let out a non-stop wail of outrage; a sound I had never heard before, nor have heard since.

Dear Holly! As we buried her in a garden in West Street, Osney, early in the new millennium, we saw Michael ascend the stairs in the next-door property to bid farewell to our friend Chris Moss, terminally ill with cancer.

As founder and boss of the Wychwood Brewery, Chris had supplied the beer enjoyed by all as delivered through the udder of an ox of Michael’s creation during ‘alternative’ May Morning celebrations he instituted at Aristotle Lane recreation ground.

An annual feature for some years – with Morris men, music and a Magdalen College tower in miniature – the event was his response to the racket and vulgarity, as he saw it, of what was simultaneously going on in town. There is to be a revival of the high jinks, in his memory, this year.

The ox had its origins in a project of Michael’s to equip the city with a life-size bronze sculpture of the beast commemorated in its name, sited (as I reported in April 1981) at the corner of Morrell Avenue and Headington Hill. This was never proceeded with, perhaps owing to its £30,000 estimated cost.

There were various events involved in the development of this project, some of which took place in the lovely gardens at Wadham College, among whose fellows Michael moved with convivial ease.

On one occasion there, he led me to the grassed area behind the chapel where stands John Doubleday’s curious sculpture of Sir Maurice Bowra in which the college’s legendary Warden (1938-1970) segues into a chair.

“It was suggested that I might do something for the college,” said Michael, “but Bowra said it would be over his dead body.”

The sculptor’s next commission was the Warden’s death mask, cast from the corpse in 1971, and now in the National Portrait Gallery.