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.
