Archer

Archer is a classic work of 20th-century Hungarian sculpture by Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl, who created the pieces making up the Liberty Statue on Gellért Hill in Budapest.
Archer was produced in 1918 under the impression of Antoine Bourdelle’s Hercules the Archer, but Strobl depicted his personage not at the instant of release, but immediately afterwards – the fingers are spread, the arc of the bow is straightening, the bowman’s mouth is open, exhaling strongly or shouting out, his gaze is keenly following the track of the arrow, shot not into the air as in Bourdelle’s work, but at some target closer to the ground. This is not an imitation of the French sculptor, but an artistic response to him, shifting the emphasis from the point of greatest exertion to the moment of expectation – hit or miss?
The sculpture proved popular and in the decades that followed it was reproduced a number of times with minor alterations. Versions of it can be found in the sculptor’s homeland and elsewhere. In the mid-1950s, one of the variants was presented to the Hermitage.
Until the 1990s, this Archer stood in the Great Courtyard of the Winter Palace. At the turn of the 21st century, when the courtyard was reconstructed to create the present main entrance to the museum, the sculpture was temporarily moved to the courtyard of the Old Hermitage, before in 2012 it found its final home in the open air at the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre.