1965
Bronze
h38.1cm x w22.9cm x d38.1cm
Edition 4 of 6

Provenance:
Private Collection
Christie’s London, 25th May 1994, lot 82

Exhibited:
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Dame Elisabeth Frink, R.A.: sculpture and drawings 1952 – 1984, 8 February – 24 March 1985, p.13 (another example exhibited and illustrated)
Washington D.C., The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture and Drawings 1950-1990, 1990, p. 64 (another example exhibited)

Literature:
Elisabeth Frink, Sarah Kent and Hilton Kramer eds., ‘Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture & Watercolor 1964-1979,’ The Massachusetts Review, vol. 21, no.1, 1980, n.p. (another example illustrated)
Stephen Gardiner, Frink: The Official Biography of Elisabeth Frink, London, 1998, pp. 48, 122, 131, 133-1344, 150, 153, 156-7, 205 (another example illustrated, p. 202)
Annette Ratuszniak ed., Elisabeth Frink Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture 1947-93, London, 2013, p. 95 (another example illustrated)

Description:

This is the last in a series of five heads of soldiers dating from 1964-65. It is one of Frink’s earliest portrayals of a man’s head – a subject she returned to repeatedly. Her father was in the army and early boyfriends were in the military. She acknowledged that these menacing, heads were ‘rather brutal’, but that they were also partly based on her husband – the heavy jaw is derived from his beard: ‘I incorporated his beard into the slope of the head so each sculpture, indirectly based on this man’s head, had a rather massive jaw.’