Footnotes

Provenance
With Waddington & Tooth Galleries, London, where acquired by the previous owner
Their sale; Christie's, London, 12 November 2009, lot 22, where acquired by the present owner

Exhibited
London, Waddington & Tooth Galleries, Elisabeth Frink; Recent Sculpture, November-December 1976 (another cast)

Literature
Jill Willder (ed.), Elisabeth Frink Sculpture, Catalogue Raisonné, Harpvale Books, Salisbury, 1984, p.186, cat.no.232 (ill.b&w, another cast)
Annette Ratuszniak (ed.), Elisabeth Frink, Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture 1947-93, Lund Humphries, London, 2013, p.135, cat.no.FCR261 (ill.b&w, another cast)

A cast from this edition is in the collection of the Sheffield City Art Gallery.

Elisabeth Frink's animal bronzes – by the sculptor's own admission – are more concerned with representing her emotional response to, and spiritual identification with, the subject in question than with literal physical form. In view of this particularly subjective approach, Frink denied being an animal sculptor in the true sense of the notion, stating her principal interest to lie 'in the spirit of the animal' (Edward Lucie-Smith & Elisabeth Frink, Frink: A Portrait, London, Bloomsbury, 1994, p.123). Her horse bronzes are especially representative of a particular sensitivity to the subject, Frink's father having been a keen horseman during her childhood in rural Suffolk.

Horse in the Rain forms part of a series of variations on the same theme completed between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. Frink's interest in representing the horse in bronze on a similarly small scale seems to have originated during three years spent with her husband in France between 1967 and 1970, when she first tackled the subject of Horse and Rider. Having abandoned any representation of the human figure for her Horse in the Rain series, however, Frink encourages a more direct contemplation of the essence of the animal in question. Here, the creature's restful pose goes hand-in-hand with a subtle and graceful sense of movement that is enhanced by reflections of light springing from the object's irregular and dynamic bronze surface.