Elisabeth Frink 1930-1993
Study for Standard III, 1965
bronze
height 20 inches
signed on base, edition no. 7/7

Provenance
Private Collection, UK

Literature
Jill Wilder, Elizabeth Frink Sculpture Catalogue Raisonné, Harpvale Books, 1984, cat no.127 illus b/w
Edwin Mullins, The Art of Elizabeth Frink, Lund Humphries, 1972, cat no. 65 illus b/w



This bronze is one of six made by Frink entitled 'Study for Standard', a further five were made as unique casts, before Frink made four large scale versions, each of which stand at around six feet high. The subject of the eagle combines Frink's interest in military imagery at this time, with her ongoing depiction of bird figures as both predator and prey.

The eagles in this series, have an ambiguous quality. They appear to dominate, positioned high up and ready to swoop; yet at the same time they are strangely impotent, seemingly fused to their posts, never to take off. In the larger versions most notably, Frink's treatment of the surface emphasises this merging, as the birds' bodies appear to have been dragged and moulded out of their posts by the artists hands.
Frink described her interest in birds as being expressionist in feeling - in their emphasis on beak, claws and wings - and they were really vehicles for strong feelings of panic, tension, aggression and predatoriness.

Frink's subtly anthropomorphic treatment of the eagle, alludes to the figure of Icarus, or alternatively a nervous diver waiting to plunge. Her reworking of such an overtly military image, can be seen as both ironic and at the same time compassionate, underlining as it does, the loneliness and vulnerablity of the predator.