Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired by the family of the present owner, circa 1980, thence by descent
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Waddington Galleries, Elisabeth Frink, 1965 (another cast)
London, Battersea Park, Sculpture in Battersea Park, May-September 1966 (another cast)
London, Waddington Galleries I, II, III, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture and Prints and drawings from Chaucer, 11 October-4 November 1972 (another cast)
London, Royal Academy, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture and Drawings 1952-1984, 8 February-25 March 1985, cat.no.33 (another cast)
London, Beaux Arts, Frink: Sculpture, Drawings and Prints, 1998 (another cast)

Literature
Bryan Robertson, Elisabeth Frink Sculpture Catalogue Raisonné, Harpvale Books, Salisbury, 1984, p.162-3, cat.no.118 (ill.b&w, another cast)
Sarah Kent (ed.), Elisabeth Frink, Sculpture and Drawings 1952-1984, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1985, p.13, cat.no.33 (another cast)
Catalogue of the Ingram Collection, The Lightbox, 2009, p.40 (col.ill., another cast)
Annette Ratuszniak (ed.), Elisabeth Frink Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture 1947-93, Lund Humphries in association with the Frink Estate and Beaux Arts, London, 2013, p.95, cat.no.FCR142 (col.ill., another cast)

Frink comments; 'In the mid sixties I made a series of soldier's heads which were rather brutal. They had pigtails. I like the idea of the head being terminated in some kind of ribbon at the back. The pigtail in my sculptures was rather like a cardinal's ribbon. I was married to a man, Edward Pool, whose head was rather like this – no pigtail, but bearded, a fine head – and I incorporated his beard into the shape of a head so each sculpture, indirectly based on this man, had a rather massive jaw.' (Elisabeth Frink quoted in Jill Wilder (ed.), Elisabeth Frink Sculpture; Catalogue Raisonné, Harpvale, London, 1984, p.37).

Edward (or Ted) Pool was Frink's second husband whose severe war wounds acted as a constant reminder of the violence of her times. Anti-militant, Frink engaged her sculpture to combat ideas of celebrating war and violence. The soldier is not presented as a functioning military machine but a disfigured, stupefied and helpless being. Conceived in her most active year, Soldier's Head II is an early example of Frink's use of the form of the head as a 'vehicle for emotion' and would receive early praise with Edward Mullins declaring; 'These blunt representations of the hireling thug are in my view her most interesting yet' (Edward Mullins, 'Grown-Up Prodigies', The Sunday Telegraph, 5 December, 1965, p.12).

Themes first explored in the Soldier's Head works were then developed in the equally combative and iconic Goggle Heads and then resolved in the restful Tribute Heads a decade later.

Another cast from this edition resides in the Ingram Collection.