Collection
Walking Man
Dame Elisabeth Frink, R.A. (1930-1993)
Walking Man
bronze
2.11 m high
1986
Walking Man was the first piece to enter the Jerwood Sculpture collection in 1999. It embodies one of the major themes of Elisabeth Frink's career: her exploration of the male form and the nature of masculinity. Frink's depictions took many guises, as soldiers, shepherds, martyrs, riders, sentinels, athletes, warriors, assassins and biblical figures. There is a generality about the figures, a summing up of the male presence, which is evident in Walking Man, as he journeys with a sense of purposefulness, his destination unknown. The textured surface of Walking Man reveals Frink's working method of applying wet plaster to an armature, which she carved when dry, and from this the bronze was cast.
Frink commented, 'My sculptures of the male figure are both man and mankind. In these two categories are all the sources of all my ideas for the human figure. Man, because I enjoy looking at the male body and this has always given me and probably always will, the impetus and the energy for a purely sensuous approach to sculptural form. I like to watch a man walking and swimming and running and being. I think that my figures of men now say so much more about how a human feels than how he looks anatomically. I can sense in a man's body a combination of strength and vulnerability - not as weakness but as the capacity to survive through stoicism or passive resistance, or to suffer or feel' (see B. Robertson, Elisabeth Frink Sculpture Catalogue Raisonne, Harpvale, Salisbury, 1984, pp. 36-37).