Footnotes

Provenance
With Terry Dintenfass, New York, 6 March 1992
Private Collection, U.S.A.

Exhibited
London, Waddington Galleries, Elisabeth Frink: Recent Sculpture, Works on Paper, 1981 (another cast)
Winchester, Great Courtyard, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture in Winchester, 17 July-13 September 1981 (another cast)
Dorchester, Dorset County Museum, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture and Drawings, 17 July-18 September 1982 (another cast)
Wakefield, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Elisabeth Frink: Open Air Retrospective, 1983 (another cast)

Literature
Sarah Kent, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture in Winchester, exh.cat., Great Courtyard, Winchester, 1981
Jill Willder, Elisabeth Frink, Sculpture, Catalogue Raisonné, Salisbury, 1984, pp.192-3, cat.no.253 (ill.b&w, another cast)
Annette Ratuszniak, Elisabeth Frink; Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture 1947-93, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2013, p.145, cat.no.FCR288 (ill.b&w, another cast)

Man's best friend, the domesticated dog, first appeared on its own in Frink's oeuvre as early as 1957, a bronze sculpture simply titled Dog, cast in a small edition of just three. Much less kindly in appearance than the present lot, it was cast from her life size sculpture, Blind Beggar and Dog, conceived the same year, for which there is also a maquette. In this work the animal is used in a protective roll, leading its helpless master forward in search of money. The dog's legs have been attenuated so that the animal takes on the appearance of something distinctly wild, like a jackal perhaps. Another Dog then appears in 1958, even less representative than her first with its spindly legs almost buckling under the weight of its hefty body and thickly set head and neck. A hiatus of over two decades then occurs with this subject until it resurfaces in 1980 with the present lot. Her dogs from this period take on the appearance of a specific breed, despite Frink denying these claims. At Woolland, her Dorset home, Vizslas (a handsome Hungrarian, gun-dog) had been introduced by her third husband Alex Csáky, a keen shooter, and it is impossible not to relate Dog to this breed, which is golden-red in colour with its characteristic stubby, erect tail, droopy ears and pointed snout.

"She had first-hand experience of domesticated animals, such as hounds and horses, and was fascinated by how close the interdependent relationship, nurtured over millenia, had diminished the prey-predator relationship for mutual benefit." (Calvin Winner, 2018)