Overall height: 64cm (25.2in)
Patinated bronze. Standing figure modelled as a First World War kilted Gordon Highlander in field service order, comprising Tam O’Shanter with Gordon's badge, Scottish 1902 pattern tunic with 1908 pattern web equipment, .303 rifle, knee socks, ankle puttees and boots; the base modelled as rough ground littered with an abandoned pickelhaube. Signed ‘AG Walker’ to the base with chamfered angles. Height of bronze: 60cm (23.6in).
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The present bronze is a period reduction of the memorial to the killed and missing of the 6th (Banffshire and Donside) Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders of the two World Wars. It stands in a memorial garden in Keith, Moray, Scotland.
Arthur George Walker RA (1861-1939) is perhaps best known for the statue of Florence Nightingale flanking John Bell’s Crimean War Memorial in Waterloo Place, London. Walker studied at the Royal Academy Schools and in Paris and became a regular exhibitor of more than 80 works in all at the Royal Academy from 1884, the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and the Royal Scottish Academy. His early sculptural work included mythological figures, but his later work was mainly portrait busts and memorials. He was also an accomplished mosaicist and completed mosaics and sculptural commissions including for the Marchioness of Lothian at Blickling Hall, Norfolk, and for Lady Tollemache at Helmingham. Work by Walker includes another monument to Florence Nightingale in St Paul’s, the memorial to the pioneering surgeon Dame Louisa Aldrich-Blake in Tavistock Square, the memorial to the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst in Victoria Tower Gardens by the Houses of Parliament, a figure of Christ on a war memorial in Limehouse Churchyard, and the figures of William Morris and Payne for the façade of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Walker later designed further First World War memorials Wolverhampton, Ironbridge, Huston, Bury St Edmunds, Shrewsbury School, Limehouse, Dartford, Chesham, Derby and Sevenoaks among others.