Artwork Data

Title

Beschermengel

Artist

Frits van den Eeden

Year

1966

Material

Brons

Artwork Location

Address

Bronovolaan, Den Haag

City district

Haagse Hout

GPS data

52.102371664556, 4.3169388534424 View on map

Artwork Description

Text

Head bent far forward, balancing on one foot: this is how the bronze figure on the narrow concrete pedestal towers above you in the parking lot behind Bronovo Hospital. Thanks to his wide-stretched, sturdy wings, he manages to keep his balance. So close to the hospital, this sculpture evokes all sorts of associations with sickness and death and how this can throw a person off balance. Fortunately, this Guardian Angel keeps you upright. Because that is what Frits van Eeden called this sculpture.

Van Eeden was both a painter and sculptor. His colorful paintings feature easily recognizable cows, horses, sailboats, flowers and people. His bronze sculptures also teem with animals and people. In all of his sculptures and representations, this artist manages to maintain a good balance between abstraction and figuration. As a result, the subject can always be traced.

Van Eeden was educated at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. He was a member of the Hague artist association Pulchri Studio and taught for many years at the Brevard Art Center in Melborn, Florida. At the end of his life, he returned to The Hague.

Van Eeden more often modeled human figures with wings. Besides this guardian angel for Bronovo and various Angel figures, he also made Icarus (1989). A small bronze sculpture of the mythological son of Daedalus, who flew with wings made of wax too close to the sun and crashed down.

"I want to get the greatest possible expression with as little material as possible," Van Eeden revealed in an interview in De Posthoorn (July 14, 1966). That statement certainly seems applicable to the Guardian Angel placed at the new Bronovo Hospital building in Benoordenhout in 1966.

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