ELISABETH FRINK

David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, New South Wales; purchased from the above in 1986  

Elisabeth Frink Sculpture, David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney, 10 October - 8 November 1986, cat. 4 

With the rider, the male nude and the monumental head, the horse is one of a handful of themes which recur throughout Frink's oeuvre, from small, naturalistic figurines such as the present work to the monumental War Horse, 1991 at Chatsworth House.

Horses begin to muster in the artist's work at the end of the 1960s, when she left England to live in the Camargue, in the south of France. Inspired by the region's famous, semi-wild white horses, and influenced by the grand simplicity of Chinese brush drawings and Tang Dynasty ceramics, Frink made numerous prints and drawings of the animals throughout her time there. She remembered that 'we had a horse of our own in France. It used to be out grazing all night and in the heat of the day we brought it into the stable to lie down, where I could observe it carefully. I think there is something very beautiful about a horse lying down.' ¹

On her return to England in 1973 she continued to develop the theme, though now the models were the thoroughbreds owned by her husband Alex, a keen racing man.

The present work is one of a number of small bronzes which ultimately derive from the life-size Horse lying down of 1974. This hunched, heavy-headed creature, with its flattened ears and dripping bronze coat is beautifully observed, wonderfully alive. As Edward Lucie-Smith has commented: 'Her horses show a keen enjoyment of their own physicality; they are not just the servants of man, but creatures existing in their own right.' ²

1. The artist, quoted in Elisabeth Frink, Maltzahn Gallery, London, 1974
2. Lucie-Smith, E., Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture since 1984 and Drawings, Art Books International, London, 1994, p. 43