Working drawing for 'Icarus', by 1925

Maurice Lambert RA (1901 - 1964)

RA Collection: Art

This is a working drawing in pencil for 'Icarus' (1925; Private collection), a bronze sculpture also known as 'Bird Boy'. The finished sculpture shows a boy within the head and wings of a bird, his face looking out of the bird's open beak. However, in this diagram the artist drew the boy about to take flight with a structure supporting him from behind presumably to indicate how this part of the sculpture would be cast. Dimensions are also inscribed next to the figure and the support.

According to Vanessa Nicolson, 'Icarus offers a highly imaginative interpretation of the Greek myth. Historically, painters have tended to choose the dramatic moment of the boy's fall after flying too close to the sun, while sculptors traditionally represented the legend by showing his father Daedalus in the process of making or attaching the wings before he tries to fly. This was the moment Lambert's teacher Derwent Wood had chosen to represent, thirty years earlier, and for which he had been awarded the gold medal and travelling scholarship from the Royal Academy Schools. Lambert's interpretation shows the boy with the wings already attached, apparently growing out of his shoulders but also held in place by his hands. Icarus' face peers out from under a huge beak with an expectant and concentrated expression, while his arms and feet are posed in anticipation of take-off. The line of the arms and the tiptoeing feet balanced on the rock imbue the work with movement, giving it a dynamism that is lacking in traditional representations of the subject. Most of all, its greatest originality lies in the metamorphosis of boy and bird conveyed through the neck of the bird merging seamlessly into the boy's body. Viewed from above one sees only the figure of a large bird, with no sign of the boy trapped inside. In terms of the story this is entirely fanciful: Icarus never turns into a bird. The work symbolises the boy's identification of himself as a bird: the reason he flew too close to the sun' (see references).

On the verso are the artist's calculations written over a sketch of a yacht, possibly connected with Lambert's marble sculpture 'Yacht' (c. 1932) but, as he was a keen sailor, it may relate to his leisure pursuits rather than his art work.

Further reading:

Vanessa Nicolson and Klio K. Panourgias, The Sculpture of Maurice Lambert, Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham, 2002, pp. 23-24