Acquired directly from the Artist by the previous owner, February 1956
Exhibition History:
Kassel, Document 1, Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts: internationale Ausstellung im Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, 1955 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue);
British Council, details untraced (illustrated as Study for Girl with Vest in the exhibition catalogue, no. 4);
New York, New School Art Center, Sculpture from the Albert A List Family Collection, 1965 (illustrated as Girl with Vest, 1953 in the exhibition catalogue, no. 16);
Woking, The Lightbox, 2D:3D – Discover the Art of Sculpture: Sculpture & Sculptors’ Drawings from The Ingram Collection, 1 February – 1 March 2008;
London, Sotheby’s, Sculpture and Sculptors’ Drawings from The Ingram Collection, 10 – 21 January 2011;
Woking, The Lightbox, The Ingram Collection: Diamond Jubilee Exhibition, 6 March – 15 April 2012;
Somerset, Hestercombe Gallery, A Personal Passion, 25 April – 5 July 2015;
Woking, The Lightbox, Bodies! The Ingram Collection, 21 November 2015 – 31 January 2016;
London, Royal College of General Practitioners, Health and the Body, 3 March – 29 May 2016;
Hastings, Jerwood Gallery, Century: 100 Modern British Artists, 23 October 2016 – 8 January 2017;
Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, Reflection: British Art in an Age of Change, 17 August 2019 – 5 January 2020
Literature:
Margaret Garlake, Sculpture of Reg Butler, Henry Moore Foundation, 2006 (another edition illustrated no. 123, p. 137, RB103)
Reg Butler was a conscientious objector in the Second World War, and worked as a blacksmith from 1941 until the end of the war. He took up sculpting in 1944 and, despite not having any formal training, by 1953 he had won first prize in an international competition for a monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner. However, Butler’s enduring subject was really the female form. In the early 1950s he moved away from welding in iron, and the delicate, elongated figure of Study for a Girl in a Vest is perfectly realised in the thin-shell bronze casting technique which he developed himself.
