Titled "Dinner for Two" by Jack Dowd, signed on the wine bottle. Born in New York in 1938, Sarasota-based artist Jack Dowd creates paintings and sculptures of artists, celebrities, and everyday people with a very human-like feel to them, and his sculpture of the Butler is made from gypsum cement and was created in YEAR. Definitely a figure with whimsy to it. Jack was inspired by his father and began sketching and drawing at an early age. He started sculpting in the ’70s, when he lived in Plainfield, Vermont. He began with a chainsaw and blocks of wood, then started working in clay because it was more flexible: he used wire mesh to build a form, then molded the clay around it and made a model, turned that into a rubber mold, and cast bronze or gypsum figures from the mold, and his sculptures combine avant-garde and folk art together. The artist has a private studio called Moon River in Sarasota and has had many solo exhibitions sponsored by museums and art centers across the country, including the Florida State Museum of Fine Art, Jacksonville’s Museum of Modern Art, and the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, which drew 40,000 visitors and was the best attended opening in the museum’s history. The Butler is cradling wine bottles in his left arm, and the figure is attached to a base which is 10 in. high, 18 in. deep, and 22 1/2 in. wide, and the whole sculpture stands 70 in. tall. “Jack Dowd” is emblazoned on both sides of the base.