Lot 96
HAROLD BARLING TOWN, R.C.A.
Additional Images
Provenance:
Private Collection, U.S.A.
Literature:
Iris Nowell, Harold Town, Figure 1 Publishing Inc., Vancouver, 2014, pages 139-143 for a discussion about the Toy Horse series.
Note:
The Toy Horse series began in 1976 and was inspired by a small tin toy horse which Town had received as a gift. According to Nowell, this object “figured beyond all others in his output of drawings.”
While Town is reputed to have produced many hundreds of variations on this theme – with sculptural horses, mechanical horses, static horses, prancing horses, black and white horses and colourful ones – the result seems to have had an enormous impact on the buying public who were in awe of the variations that Town produced on this theme. Nowell notes that for the 1984 Toy Horse exhibition at Laing Galleries, 127 pictures were installed, the praise non-stop and sales robust. She writes: “Collectors who had difficulty deciding between two works bought both.”