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Lot Essay
Elisabeth Frink was brought up with horses and taught to ride at an early age. Her love for and experience of horses is distilled into her sculptures, they are not specific hunters or race horses, but reflect the ancient spirit of the horse and its evolution in relation to man.
In discussing her animal sculptures Frink comments, 'I always try to explain that I haven't done a great many animals - that I'm not in fact an animal sculptor. If you love animals you have to have some sort of sympathy with the way they are or exist, and how we treat them. If I'm sculpturing animals I don't want to oversentimentalise them because one can be very sentimental about that part of our life. I'd find it a very sad life without animals: we need them, that's the awful thing ... This is another reason why I'm not a true animal sculptor. The animals I make are far more what I feel about them than what they are in real life. I'm imprecise about the muscles and the blood vessels, which is what a lot of academic sculptors care about. I'm much more interested in the spirit of the animal. I get into the inside of the animal, and the outside takes care of itself' (E. Lucie-Smith and E. Frink, Frink a Portrait, London, 1994, pp. 121-123).
In discussing her animal sculptures Frink comments, 'I always try to explain that I haven't done a great many animals - that I'm not in fact an animal sculptor. If you love animals you have to have some sort of sympathy with the way they are or exist, and how we treat them. If I'm sculpturing animals I don't want to oversentimentalise them because one can be very sentimental about that part of our life. I'd find it a very sad life without animals: we need them, that's the awful thing ... This is another reason why I'm not a true animal sculptor. The animals I make are far more what I feel about them than what they are in real life. I'm imprecise about the muscles and the blood vessels, which is what a lot of academic sculptors care about. I'm much more interested in the spirit of the animal. I get into the inside of the animal, and the outside takes care of itself' (E. Lucie-Smith and E. Frink, Frink a Portrait, London, 1994, pp. 121-123).