Adams
Lot 60
DAVID WYNNE OBE (1926 – 2014) Awakening Lovers (1996) Carrera marble on a limestone platform base 152cm high, 137cm long, 97cm wide (including platform base)Provenance: The Mall Galleries, London; Private Collection, Co. WicklowBorn into a naval family in Lyndhurst in the New Forest, David Wynne was educated at Stowe school in Buckinghamshire. He joined the Royal Navy as the second world war was in its closing stages and soon after began his degree in Zoology at Cambridge. His tutors, realising that he was not a man for lecture halls, urged him to concentrate on art. Encouraged by sculptors Jacob Epstein and Georg Ehrlich, Wynne, who eschewed a formal art education, began to develop his skills, primarily as a sculptor of animals, and in particular dolphins.He held his first one-man show at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1955, and a second in 1959. In 1961 he was commissioned by London county council (LCC) through the Arts Council, to produce a piece for Crystal Palace park. His monumental Guy the Gorilla, in black fossil marble, was an enormous popular success and his career was made. In Wynne’s career, artistic reputation and social connections worked together harmoniously. Portraits of theatrical and musical knights, from Thomas Beecham to John Gielgud, were joined by a sculpture of equestrian nobility, the Derby-winning racehorse Shergar. Wynne’s contribution to popular culture is said to have included the introduction of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to the Beatles, themselves the subjects in 1964 of a striking composition of bronze busts that seem to float above one above another. However it is for his later animal sculptures including Girl With a Dolphin (1973) at Tower Bridge and Boy With a Dolphin (1974), on the Chelsea side of Albert Bridge, that he is best known. Dr Pamela Tudor-Craig, the esteemed art historian, in her introduction to Wynne’s 1997 exhibition at The Mall Galleries described him as a ‘…. master equally in marble or metal. David Wynne creates in both mediums, so in a sense he has two artistic personalities. In bronze he can convey the pounce of a leopard, the quiver of a horse, the fast volley of a tennis player, or the fingerprint of music. All that is swift and fleeting, scarce seen by casual eyes, he catches in molten metal. His bronze heads evoke the breathing essence of the sitters, from the very old to the newborn. Who else could capture the first hints of personality? He is quite simply the best portrait sculptor of his generation. In marble, on the other hand, he discovers the quiet plenitudes at the heart of mystery. In bronze he exults in the dance of life; in marble he reveals his own still depths; for this quicksilver man is a philosopher in stone. In a century when art has been used to express fragmentation, destruction and despair, David Wynne has stood for wholeness, sanity, compassion, and a celebration of all things lovely. Witness his most recent piece, ‘Awakening Lovers’. Does it not come from the country of the human heart?’King Charles has called him “A remarkable man with a remarkable God-given talent for extraordinary sensitive sculptures”. David Wynne’s work has frequently run against the current of contemporary fashion, but it has never failed to appeal to those who have an eye for the beautiful.
