Elisabeth Frink Sculpture "Birdman"

Elisabeth Frink's Birdman finally captured by gallery

Plaster figure commemorating real-life aviator fills gap in Leeds gallery's sculpture collection

It has one of the most impressive collections of British sculpture but not, surprisingly, a work by a woman who deserves to be in the top rank of the nation's sculptors: Elisabeth Frink. Today, the Leeds Art Gallery will announce that it has finally plugged the gap by acquiring an important Frink work from the late 1950s, Birdman.

The work, valued at £250,000, has been gifted to the Leeds sculpture collection in a deal through the Art Fund charity.

Frink is known for her battered and distorted-looking human and animal figures, and curator Sophie Raikes believes her most interesting work is from the late 50s and early 60s, "when she was developing a new style and combining figurative and animal forms in truly original ways".

The sculptor, who died in 1993, is thought to have been inspired to create the 1.9 metre-high half-man, half-bird figure in plaster after reading in Paris Match about a real-life birdman, Léo Valentin, who tried to fly, Icarus-like, with wings. Another influence was her memory of an air force boyfriend who was badly injured when his parachute failed to inflate.

The sculpture was gifted to the Art Fund by the Frink estate and her gallery, the Beaux Arts, with the proviso that it went on display and not into storage.

Lin Jammet, Frink's son and manager of her estate, said: "It's a really important piece because it gives you a sense of the speed and spontaneity with which my mother worked, showing how she'd model quickly in plaster and then carve the form back."

The sculpture, with its embryonic wings, is also, said Jammet, "the epitome of the way she saw man, as capable of great heroism - like her soldier father whom she worshipped - but also hugely vulnerable".