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拍品專文
The present work was created while Dame Elisabeth Frink resided in the Southern French countryside near Corbès. She began exploring the theme of 'Horse and Rider' in 1969, and horses were to occupy much of the artist's ouevre. Frink had intentionally dissociated herself from the London art scene, and her sculpture of this time was the reflection of a happier and more relaxed state of mind for the artist.
Frink’s six year stay in France, from 1967 to 1973, was significant for reinvigorating her fascination for horses. ‘And this is mainly because I bought a horse, to teach my son to ride, and also to ride again, myself, down there. And also I got to know the Camargue horses, which are wonderfully wild, primitive animals. And I was fascinated by, how they moved and looked. So all the next series of sculptures of horses and things, are all based on that. The horse in its primitive sense’ (E. Frink quoted in conversation with S. Kent, National Life Stories: Artist’s Lives, 1992).
Horses had been a central part of Frink’s youth both personally – learning to ride at the age of four – and artistically. She recounts twice visiting the Doge’s Palace in St. Mark’s Square during a childhood stay in Venice with her mother, which houses an array of Renaissance horse sculptures. The remarkable Horses of St. Mark, found in St. Mark’s Basilica, similarly captured her budding imagination.
The current lot is also notable as a maquette for the celebrated Horse and Rider sculpture of the same name located on the corner of New Bond Street and Burlington Gardens. As Frink said herself, ‘A symbol of a man on a horse, a man riding free and a horse free … intended to be completely ageless. He could come from the past or go into the future. I like to feel that work to’s and fro’s from past to present’ (Elisabeth Frink, quoted in B. Connell, ‘Capturing the Human Spirit in Big, Bronze Men’, The Times, 5 September 1977, p. 5).
Frink’s six year stay in France, from 1967 to 1973, was significant for reinvigorating her fascination for horses. ‘And this is mainly because I bought a horse, to teach my son to ride, and also to ride again, myself, down there. And also I got to know the Camargue horses, which are wonderfully wild, primitive animals. And I was fascinated by, how they moved and looked. So all the next series of sculptures of horses and things, are all based on that. The horse in its primitive sense’ (E. Frink quoted in conversation with S. Kent, National Life Stories: Artist’s Lives, 1992).
Horses had been a central part of Frink’s youth both personally – learning to ride at the age of four – and artistically. She recounts twice visiting the Doge’s Palace in St. Mark’s Square during a childhood stay in Venice with her mother, which houses an array of Renaissance horse sculptures. The remarkable Horses of St. Mark, found in St. Mark’s Basilica, similarly captured her budding imagination.
The current lot is also notable as a maquette for the celebrated Horse and Rider sculpture of the same name located on the corner of New Bond Street and Burlington Gardens. As Frink said herself, ‘A symbol of a man on a horse, a man riding free and a horse free … intended to be completely ageless. He could come from the past or go into the future. I like to feel that work to’s and fro’s from past to present’ (Elisabeth Frink, quoted in B. Connell, ‘Capturing the Human Spirit in Big, Bronze Men’, The Times, 5 September 1977, p. 5).