IVAN MEŠTROVIĆ | STUDY OF WOMAN BENDING

Mr Oliver Frost, Ogbourne St. George, Marlborough, Wiltshire, before March 1936

Thence by family descent

Dreweatts, Donington Priory, 7 January 2015, lot 508

(Possibly) London, Grafton Galleries, 1917

(Possibly) London, The Fine Art Society, 1924, cat. no. 42, 'Crouching Woman, bronze, lent by Eric Maclagan esq'

The present bronze is mentioned in an autograph letter by Mestrovic, sent from Zagreb to Mr Frost on 8 March 1936:

'Dear Sir, I have received your letter, and it gives me great pleasure to tell you that the little statue of min [sic], of which sent the photograph, was made in London, in 1916, and was a study of woman bending, that I never completed in big size. Yours faithfully, Ivan Mestrovic'

As such, the present work is extremely rare and possibly the only bronze known to have been cast while the artist was living in London. A plaster model is preserved in the Glyptotheque of the Croatian Academy of Sciences in Zagreb. It was exhibited at the Grafton Galleries in 1917 and is likely to date between 1914 and 1916, when Mestrovic modelled a number of crouching female nudes. The present bronze, of which no other versions are known in this material, may be identical with one exhibited at The Fine Art Society in 1924 (see 'Exhibited').