In 1956 Wright was invited to participate in the touring British Council exhibition, Young British Sculptors, alongside Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Robert Clatworthy, Elizabeth Frink, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi, Leslie Thornton and William Turnbull. The present work is a very early and rare example of a wood carving by Wright whose later chosen materials were bronze, lead and aluminium. It is the only known pear-wood sculpture Wright completed, and is composed from wood he was given by a wheelwright from Ampleforth in Yorkshire. The wood from which it was carved and its natural textures and imperfections directly inspired a motif that would become a key feature of his figurative works – the ‘secret middle’, something he referred to as an ‘inner warmth’. This ‘secret middle’ is not only evident in Watching Figure, but also in works such as The Argument (1955), for which he was presented with the Ricardo Xavier da Silveira Acquisition Prize for his sculpture in 1957.

The present sculpture was exhibited at the City Art Gallery in Wakefield in 1953. There have been major retrospectives of Wright’s work held in Newcastle in 1974 and at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 1981. Examples of his work are also in the collections of The Hepworth Wakefield and TATE.