Study for Third Watcher

Richard Calvocoressi comments, 'While working on the 'Prisoner' sculpture in 1951-2 Butler drew several studies of heads looking up, a motif which was eventually incorporated in the 'watchers'. The idea for this tense alert pose may have derived from Butler's habit of 'staring up into the sky' watching test flights of de Havilland Delta-wing jets over Hatfield. 'I think it is reasonable', he said later, 'to imagine that one is liable to project into the sculpture feelings that are going on in one's own body' ... In Butler's raised heads of the early 1950s, there are echoes of Francis Bacon particularly the screaming grotesque in the right-hand panel of Bacon's 'Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion' [see fig. 2, lot 26] referred to above ... In the 'Watchers' of 1954 and 1955 ... Butler adopts a formula to which he returns in the painted bronzes. Meanwhile, his imagery was becoming more subjective and private, with an incipient sadism that also recalls Bacon' (see Exhibition catalogue, Reg Butler, London, Tate Gallery, 1983, pp. 24, 26).