Elisabeth Frink: Eagle (lectern)
Title: Eagle (lectern)
Artist: Elizabeth Frink (1930–1993)
Location: Coventry Cathedral (C of E)
Date: 1962
Elisabeth Frink’s bronze lectern for Basil Spence’s Coventry Cathedral was her first major commission. She was known at the time for her sculptures and drawings of birds – one made while she was a student was exhibited in 1952 and bought immediately by the Tate Gallery – and the lectern was to take the traditional form of an eagle. Unlike these early works, where the figures seemed aggressive but also vulnerable, and often had militaristic overtones, Frink’s lectern eagle is confident, in control of its powers – Spence thought it looked ‘as if it has just settled there after a long flight’. Its outspread wings, whose blocky, textured feathers Frink created by setting kindling into the plaster, echo the flock of wooden thorn-like shapes in the canopy of the choir stalls (built to designs by Spence’s partner Antony Blee) behind. It expresses both the architectural forms of the Cathedral, and, in its forward gaze, the mood of the post-war Church of England.
Elisabeth Frink was born in 1930 in Suffolk, and was brought up Roman Catholic. She studied at Guildford School of Art and Chelsea School of Art in the 1940s and 50s, at a point when British sculpture had begun to attract international attention. Her work was exhibited alongside other sculptors of her generation, but her style, as it developed in the 1950s and 60s, was her own, as were her distinctive interests: animals, particularly birds and horses, and men, possessing unsettling strength and an otherworldly physicality. She received a number of ecclesiastical commissions, including her last work, a monumental figure of the Risen Christ for Liverpool Cathedral, which was installed only a week before her death in 1993.
Further Information
Medium: Bronze
Permanent display
See Elisabeth Frink’s Eagle lectern on the Ecclesiart map here.
Other artworks in churches by Elisabeth Frink: Risen Christ (1964), Our Lady of the Wayside, Solihull; Crucifixion (1964), St Bernadette’s RC Church, Belfast; crucifix (1966), Douai Abbey; crucifix (1967), Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral; Walking Madonna (1981), Salisbury Cathedral; crucifix (c. 1983), St Mary’s with St George’s German Lutheran Church, London; Risen Christ (1993), Liverpool Cathedral.
Other contemporary and modern artworks in Coventry Cathedral: High Altar Cross, Geoffrey Clarke; Christ in Glory tapestry (1962), Graham Sutherland; baptistery window (2003), John Piper; Reconciliation (1977), Josefina de Vasconcellos; west screen (1962), John Hutton; Tablets of the Word (1960), Ralph Beyer; St Michael and the Devil (1958), and Ecce Homo (1934-1935), Jacob Epstein.