James Butler, who has died aged 90, was one of Britain’s foremost figurative sculptors. His lively and popular representations of national and local heroes, from Richard III in Leicester to the footballer Billy Wright in Wolverhampton, grace many a British square, street and stadium precinct.
Butler came to prominence in 1972, when he was elected a full Royal Academician, and received the first of several significant international commissions, a twice life-sized sculpture of the Kenyan president, Jomo Kenyatta, to be placed in the centre of Nairobi. Four decades later, in 2015, he produced a similarly large-scale bronze of the Queen, which celebrated the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, and was installed at Runnymede, in Surrey.
In the intervening years, Butler used his talents to create a wide range of sculptural works in a variety of materials and techniques. These included a number of military memorials, and the 50-pence piece produced in 2004 to commemorate Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile. He developed a more personal vein of expression by sculpting children and ballet dancers, often based on his young daughters.
Butler was born in New Cross, south-east London, the second of three children of a stevedore, Walter, and his wife, Rosina. He spent most of his childhood in West Malling, Kent, in a house built by his father, which, following Walter’s death in 1942, his mother turned into a cafe.
Having enjoyed drawing from an early age, James received encouragement from his art master at Maidstone grammar school, and at the age of 16 went to Maidstone School of Arts and Crafts to study painting. However, the foundation course exposed him to many artistic practices, and he soon became obsessed with sculpture, which he studied under Sydney Birnie Stewart, known as “Jock”.
When Stewart moved to St Martin’s School of Art, in London, Butler was persuaded to join him, and he continued his studies under both Stewart and Walter Marsden, the head of sculpture. During his last term there, Butler met the stone carver Gerald Giudici, who gave the students a demonstration in the use of a pointing machine to copy plaster into stone. Giudici invited Butler to work as an apprentice carver under him and his brother, Raimondo.
Once he had completed both his national diploma and two years of national service – and had married Daisy Gutteridge, in 1955 – he returned to work for Giudici as a full-time carver. He was involved in carving many of the architectural sculptures of William McMillan, Charles Wheeler and James Woodford, including the latter’s Queen’s Beasts, which stand outside the Palm House at Kew Gardens (1958).
While working for Giudici, Butler took evening classes under Bernard Sindall at the City and Guilds of London Art School. Sindall directed him to the work of the Italian sculptors in the modelling tradition – notably Giacomo Manzù, Marino Marini and Medardo Rosso – and they would prove influential in his development. The award of the Beckwith scholarship allowed him to stay at the British School at Rome for about a month, and while there he looked closely at the work of these Italian modellers and the ancient art that had inspired them.
In 1956, Butler took up a scholarship at the Royal College of Art, but soon found that he lacked the freedom that he had had at the City and Guilds. So, in 1960, he returned there as a teacher, while also establishing himself as a sculptor in his own right. His success was marked, in 1964, by his election as an associate of the Royal Academy, at the age of 32.
For a while, Butler lived alongside other artists, first at the Abbey art centre, Barnet, and then at the Digswell art trust, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire. However, following his divorce, and a brief second marriage to Janet Lowe, in 1966 he married Elizabeth Nassim (who now writes novels as Liza Cody), and settled in the village of Greenfield, Bedfordshire, where he lived and worked in a Victorian former schoolhouse.
At this stage in his career, he took on any job that he was asked to do, as was confirmed by the slogan printed on his T-shirt: “We never say no”. So, he created stage sculptures for productions of the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, and also waxworks for Madame Tussauds.
But once he was elected to the Royal Academy, Butler received increasingly distinguished sculptural commissions. These included Monument to Freedom Fighters, which stands outside Freedom House, Lusaka, Zambia. In 1975, he gave up teaching in order to concentrate full time on sculpture, and, now divorced for the third time, in the same year married Angie Berry, who would become a journalist, author and travel company co-founder. From 1982, they lived at Valley Farm, Radway, Warwickshire, the outbuildings of which allowed for both a large studio space and a gallery of completed work.
In 1981, Butler was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. His Cippico Fountain, for Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, was awarded the society’s Otto Beit medal (1982); and his sculpture of Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis, for the Wellington Barracks, London, received the society’s silver medal in 1985. His memorial to the Green Howards was placed at Crépon, near the site of the Normandy landings, in 1996; and the memorial to the Fleet Air Arm was installed in Victoria Embankment Gardens, London in 2000. Working as successfully on a small scale, he designed a new Royal Seal of the Realm (2001), based on sittings by the Queen, which was the first of several projects he undertook for the Royal Mint.
He was appointed MBE in 2009, and in 2020 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He became a Senior Royal Academician in 2006, but, in his later years, he came to believe that “the Royal Academy no longer really looks after figurative sculptors”. In 2015, my gallery, in St James’s, London, began to represent him.
His last major works included the Rainbow Division Memorial, placed at the site of the Battle of Croix Rouge Farm, in Picardy, France (2011), and even at the age of 90 he still had the strength, concentration and imagination to work on a large scale.
Butler is survived by Angie and their four daughters, Rosie, Saskia, Candida and Aurelia, by a son, Tom, from his marriage to Janet, and by a daughter, Kate, from his marriage to Elizabeth.
• James Walter Butler, sculptor, born 25 July 1931; died 26 March 2022
