B y the time you've been a sculptor for 60 years and a member of the Royal Academy for 40, it's not hard to drop a name or two.

"Jacob Epstein worked just around the corner in Kensington from the Royal College of Art sculpture school, where I studied from 1952 to '56," Ralph Brown recalls. "One of my teachers was John Skeaping, and we used to go round and visit him in his studio just off Queens Gate.

"Epstein was always warm and sympathetic, and, what's more, he passed one or two commissions on to me, things he didn't have time for. One was for the Expo 58 world fair in Brussels, another a statue of Gandhi for the Commonwealth Institute. He was a nice and amiable man, but I can't say he influenced my style in particular.

"Neither did Henry Moore, though he did influence my early career. I knew of him from my days at Leeds Grammar School and later at Leeds School of Art, where I studied from 1948 to '51. Like us, he had been a sculptor student in the North of England, and we all thought that if he could do it, so could we."

In fact, the links are closer than Ralph, who turned 80 last year, seems to remember. In 1919, Moore, from just along the road in Castleford, became the first sculpture student at the Leeds college, which set up a studio especially for him.

But it was in London that they first met, when the great man took a fancy to one of Ralph's works: "It was quite a large Mother and Child I'd made in Paris, where I'd gone on a student exchange, and he saw it at a young contemporaries exhibition.

"It was in plaster, but he paid to have it cast in bronze, the first bronze of any size I sold, and that was a great break, as well as making a lot of the other students at the Royal College a bit jealous. He was very supportive, Henry Moore."

The two artists who influenced him most, however, were Germaine Richier and Alberto Giacometti, both of whom he met in Paris. They are names that will mean less than Epstein or Henry Moore to most readers, but Ralph's eyes still shine with admiration when he recalls their early impact on his life and work.

Today, his most imposing works can sell for £60,000 or more in London galleries, and in his later years he has found an important champion in Rungwe Kingdon, who runs the Pangolin art foundry at Chalford, near Stroud, and a sculpture gallery of the same name in London.

Ralph and his wife Caroline, whom he met when she was his student at Bournemouth College of Art in the mid-Fifties, live a couple of minutes' drive from the foundry, in a tucked-away house overlooking the Golden Valley at Chalford.

There's sculpture dotted around the garden, and their friendly alpacas mingle with sheep in the field below. This is that corner of Gloucestershire where the houses scatter haphazardly down the valley side, and Teddy the donkey delivers groceries up the steep, narrow byways on Saturday mornings.

The Browns love France, but they love where they are now at least as much. "I gave up full-time teaching in Britain in 1973, we sold our house in the Cotswolds and went off to the Cévennes mountains in the South of France," he says.

It sounds idyllic. "No, it wasn't. We bought a big old farmhouse, semi-ruined, and slowly started to do it up. I had a studio there, and tried to keep on working. Because we sold a house over here at a reasonable profit, I thought 'I'm rich', but the money soon went. It was fascinating doing it, and we were in an interesting bit of country, but it was way out in the wilds, high in the mountains, and hours away from civilisation. We were told Marseilles was just down the road, and so it was – five hours down the road. We were broke when we came back to Britain two years later."

Ralph is proud of Rungwe Kingdon's description of him as one of the great under-rated sculptors of the century, even though he admits it would be better for his bank balance to be the most over-rated one.

But apart from singing his praises, the people at Pangolin invest heavily in producing his bronzes, as well as having staged an 80th birthday exhibition in London earlier this year. It concentrated on his work in the 1950s and Sixties, and it's been a major job for the Browns and others to get it all together, searching through 60 years of archives and photographs, not to mention long-forgotten corners of his studio and store-room.

"Most of my early work was in broken plaster," says Ralph, "but Rungwe told me not to worry. Pangolin restored it and recast it all in bronze. There were some small studies and scale models I wanted to see on a large scale, and they did that, too. They've been marvellous." The spirit of Ralph's old benefactor Henry Moore has also returned to bless him in his late career, since the foundation that bears the master's name has helped subsidise a superb new book published by John Sansom of Bristol's Redcliffe Press under his Sansom and Company art imprint.

Social, Savage, Sensual: The Sculpture of Ralph Brown, has a foreword by the novelist John le Carré, an avid admirer and collector, and is edited by Gillian Whiteley, an arts writer, researcher and curator who first met the sculptor on the National Sound Archives' artists' lives project a few years ago. Much of Ralph's work is openly sexual and concerned with the female body, both symbolically, as in the gashed carcass being carried by meat porters in a semi-abstract sculpture for Harlow New Town, to the more graphic, highly finished images of his later pieces.

Ms Whiteley is a feminist, and back in the Seventies, when the Women's Movement was in its first flush, he was among artists targeted by them for allegedly exploiting the female body.

"Before Gillian started the book, I asked her how she would handle the sexuality, and she replied 'Head-on'," Ralph recalls. "It's obvious that my work is about women and the female form.

"My sculptures are not from life. The way they look has little to do with the original model. The model gets in the way of what you're trying to make – too intrusive, obscuring your own ideas.

"I do lots of drawings from the model, and from some of them I'm given the idea to make a piece of sculpture. I then make a small or reasonable-sized model in clay, working from a drawing I've made, which will have changed a lot from the original ones."

He works in clay or plaster, and it is from this that the bronzes are cast. A decade or so ago, he went to Pietrasanta, in Italian marble country near Carrara, and produced work that included a version of his earlier two-sided relief The Bride, in which a woman's body is semi-revealed, front and back, behind a veil.

It's a sublime piece of work – but after a lifetime of sculpting in plaster and clay, how on earth did Ralph adapt to working in marble with such consummate skill?

He laughs: "I didn't. Marble is a different material from any other. You take along the original plaster you've made, and an incredibly gifted team of artisans carves the stone, using traditional measuring techniques. A very talented father and son worked on this one.

"This is the way it goes, going back hundreds of years. Even Michelangelo didn't do all the carving himself.

"Pietrasanta is full of little studios. These guys would carve you a big angel with wings and feathers in a week."

His own girls, in clay, plaster, bronze or marble, hardly look the type to qualify for wings and feathers. But they are part of a body of work that is at last bringing Ralph Brown the recognition he deserves.

Social, Savage, Sensual: The Sculpture of Ralph Brown is published by Sansom and Company, price £45.