Frink’s equestrian sculptures - lying down, rolling or standing - reveal a deeply felt connection with the horse and constitute some of the most recognisable pieces of her oeuvre. Her majestic, full-size Horse and Rider will be familiar to those who have walked London’s Old Bond Street. The intimacy of these pieces stems from Frink’s lifelong association with horses. The theme first entered her work as a twenty-year old in 1950 with Horse and Rider; however, in that bronze there is a notable edge and hint of violence in contrast to the serene presence of the current example.
Dating from 1970, this bronze belongs to a series of reimagined horse and riders which Frink was prompted to revisit after her move to the south of France in 1967. There she discovered the horses of the Camargue which brought a new strand of understanding to her interpretation of the subject. The sense of a timeless connection begins to creep into her sculptures and drawings of man and horse. The warrior element lessens, and the human grows. Commentators recognised this tendency almost immediately, with Terence Mullaly seeing in 1969 a sense of the prehistoric, the timeless, in her latest sculptures (Terence Mullaly, ‘Sculpture with the Power of the Prehistoric’, Daily Telegraph, 8 December 1968, p.9), and indeed Frink recognised this 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.’
Bringing together the very different but exceptionally complicated physical structures of both man and horse in a way that retains the distinct elements of each yet combines them in poise, balance and harmony has been a challenge to which the greatest artists, both sculptors and painters, from antiquity onwards have accepted. By presenting both horse and rider bare – devoid of specific associations – the work has an elemental and potent presence, and represents a significant contribution to this long standing motif of Western art.