Lynn Chadwick
Won Venice at thirty-nine with welded beasts and cloaked figures with geometry for heads.
Lynn Chadwick was born in London in 1914, trained as an architectural draughtsman, and flew as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm during the war. He came to sculpture through mobiles in the early 1950s and then to the welded and cast work that made his name: standing figures in cloaks, beasts, and pairs, built as an armature of welded iron rods filled with a compound he called Stolit and later cast in bronze. Heads are reduced to a pyramid for the male and a rectangle for the female. He took the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1956, ahead of Giacometti, and worked at Lypiatt Park in Gloucestershire until his death in 2003.
Nearly everything of consequence is a bronze in a numbered edition, usually of six or nine plus artist's proofs, and the edition number and cast date are the first things to establish along with whether the cast was made in his lifetime. He used distinctive patinas, including a polished linished finish on some later works, and repatination is an intervention that a photograph will not always reveal. Works are normally stamped with a number and often dated. The estate maintains the records.
If you own a work by Lynn Chadwick
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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