Barry Flanagan (1941–2009) was born in North Wales. He studied at the Birmingham College of Art and Crafts from 1957 to 1958, continuing at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, England, graduating in 1966. Flanagan taught at St. Martin’s School from 1967 to 1971. Flanagan began his series of hare sculptures in the late 1970s, and in 1982 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. His work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Fundación “la Caixa” in Madrid in 1993, which toured to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in de Nantes. In 1995, his sculptures were installed along Park Avenue in New York City and Grant Park in Chicago. He had a solo exhibition at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, in 2000, and in 2006 he was given a retrospective exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. His work is included in major museum collections around the world, including the Hirshhorn Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Tate Gallery in London; the Walker Art Center in Minnesota; the National Galleries of Scotland; and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.