I n the 1970s, Chadwick used figurative sculpture to return to the theme of human couples, a theme which he first explored in the 1950s at the genesis of his artistic career. In the 1970s, his sculptures became more anthropomorphic and charged with a new sense of versatility and authority. “Having established his formal language, as it were, he needed to refine and enrich it” (Dennis Farr, Lynn Chadwick, London, 2003, p. 76).

The draped figures of this period – with detailed contours and delicately angled planes – present a stark contrast to his contorted insect figures of the 1950s and his block-like shapes of the 1960s, and yet there is an impressive consistency to Chadwick’s work: his hallmark focus remains just as sharp on what he termed "attitude," that is the carefully calculated poses, angles and distances between his figures which he saw as essential to their character.

In Pair of Sitting Figures III there is a palpable sense of conversation and shared attention which is characteristic of several Chadwick double-figure compositions. There is also a new tenderness in his work of this period, for example in the delicate modeling of the female figure’s torso and both figure’s necks.

The relation between Chadwick’s male and female figures is often expressed in terms of balance: “In the mobiles you have the arm, and you balance two things on it like scales—you have a weight at one end and an object at the other end. If you have a heavy weight close to the fulcrum then you can have a light thing at the other end. So you can [similarly] balance the visual weight of two objects. And so it was interesting to balance male with female. To me, I was balancing them, I suppose, psychologically, or whatever it was” (Lynn Chadwick quoted in ibid., p. 98).