[5] The damage to the initial statuette had fortuitously freed his imagination from a more literal representation of Isabel at home with a book, and enabled him to envisage a soaring, semiabstract work that explicitly conveys a universal meaning.

Lachaise created the larger-than-life plaster model of Floating Figure at his country home in Georgetown, Maine, in three weeks’ time.

[6] The full-scale plaster model of Floating Figure was exhibited as Woman in Lachaise’s important show at the Brummer Gallery, New York, in early 1928, when it was described as “a seated woman who by the power of her gestures seems suspended in space,”[7] and envisioned in a garden setting.

[8] Lachaise had the full-scale model cast in bronze in December 1934/January 1935, in time for inclusion, as Floating Woman, in his retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in early 1935; the show also included a bronze cast of the refashioned statuette (now owned by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California).

An edition of seven casts was produced between 1963 and 2005 for the Lachaise Foundation by the Modern Art Foundry in Queens, New York.