ABOUT CHARLIE
Taught by animals
Charlie models from life wherever he can - in the field, at the zoo, in the animal's own paddock. Where he can't, long observation stands in.
C
harlie Smith was born in 1990 and grew up on a stud farm in Dorset, surrounded by horses that he rode long before he ever tried to sculpt
them. Riding teaches you an animal's temperament from the inside, and that understanding, rather than any formal training, is what he built everything on. He was fourteen when a life-size horse's head he'd made sold at his school's graduation exhibition, and although he didn't know it at the time, he'd found the thing he would spend his life doing.
For years afterwards he sculpted commissions from life, driving around the country to model dogs and horses wherever they happened to be, working in clay while the animal moved and fidgeted and occasionally tried to eat the maquette. By the end of it he had spent thousands of hours working with a living animal in front of him - an education no school offers, and the reason he works the way he does. No two animals stand, move or look at you the same way, and catching the individual is the whole point.
The work he makes now grows out of those years, though his subjects have become larger, wilder and considerably less obedient. He goes to the animals he wants to sculpt - a leopard on an outcrop in Kenya, the wild bison herd at Berleburg in Germany, a barn owl hunting the hedgerows near the studio - and works in the tradition of the animalier sculptors he most admires, Rembrandt Bugatti above all: from life, in clay, cast in bronze by lost wax. What he adds is his own. He has no interest in exact likeness, which a camera manages perfectly well, so he leaves his surfaces open and marked by the making - passages of rough and smooth that catch the light differently as you move, so the eye finds a place to start and follows it around the sculpture. A deep patina, applied by hand, settles into those surfaces rather than covering them, and gives each piece much of its character.
The sculptures are made in small editions, usually of twelve, each chased, patinated and signed, and they stand in private collections on five continents - among them commissioned pieces ranging from champion racehorses to Bo, a life-size Portuguese water dog made for President Barack Obama and his family. Charlie works between studios in London and Dorset, and both are open to collectors by appointment.
"You can't sculpt a wild animal the way you sculpt one that will wait for you. It has to be immediate, spontaneous - and once I'd worked that way, I was hooked."
CHARLIE SMITH
THE TRADITION
Working from life
Sculpting animals from life is one of the oldest disciplines there is, and Charlie works it the old way - clay, an armature, and the animal in front of him. When the animal can't come to the studio, the studio goes to the animal - and out there, the animals decide the schedule.
From concept to bronze
In the field
Hours of watching - and wherever possible, a study modelled on the spot
In the studio
Sculptures are scaled up or continued on in Charlie's London studio
In the foundry
Lost wax, then patinated. Each sculpture is numbered and hand signed.
He travels with a box of wire armatures and sets up a makeshift modelling stand wherever the animals are - in Kenya, often near a watering hole, working in plasticine on whatever arrives. Several studies run at once: when the giraffe move off and a rhino comes down to drink, the giraffe goes back in the box and the rhino takes the stand. It is sculpting at the animal's pace, in minutes rather than sittings, and it is the reason the finished work feels watched rather than assembled.
The studies come home to the studio in London or Dorset, where they are worked into - then transported, very carefully, to the foundry, and cast in bronze by lost wax. Each cast is chased and patinated by hand, signed and numbered before it leaves.
Selected record
1990
2004
2008
2021
2022
2025
Born in Dorset; raised on the family stud farm
Takes up ceramics at school
First sale - a life size horse's head
Commissioned sculpture for President Barack Obama
First solo show - Wider Horizons, London
Second solo show - From Life, London
Collections
In private collections in the UK, France, Germany, the UAE, Bahrain, Kenya, South Africa, the United States and Canada.
Commissioned work stands in homes and on land from Martha's Vineyard to Normandy - among them Bo, a life-size Portuguese water dog made for President Barack Obama and his family, and one Salers bull, modelled in his own field.