The grouping of a number of figures together into a single sculpture had been a theme that Armitage had explored throughout the 1950s, from the early breakthrough works such as Family Going for a Walk and People in the Wind, and allowed him to explore the idea of figures being simultaneously individual yet part of a bigger entity, that entity frequently being the image first registered by a viewer.

These groupings became increasingly abstracted as the decade progressed, and the artist's confidence in his manipulation of the basic forms grew, allowing him to explore the emotional responses that could be elicited from the viewer. A work such as The Seasons exhibits an exuberance in both forms and surface that immediately transmits its message to the whole image. Less literal than the earlier sculpture groups, The Seasons offers us a moment of excitement, the three figures caught in a moment of elation, arms aloft and outstretched, their long legs suggesting a leap of exhilaration, perhaps reminiscent of the response of a sporting crowd. The artist also, and possibly for the first time, included painted colour in the sculpture, perhaps harking back to his early training as a painter. The present cast includes ochre, black and blue, which suggests that the colours used may have varied between casts, the initial cast, possibly the one that subsequently belonged to Armitage's important American collector David Bright, being painted in black and white.

'Joining figures together I found in time that I wanted to merge them so completely they formed a new organic unit – a simple mass of whatever shape I liked containing only that number of heads, limbs or other details I felt necessary'(The artist, quoted in Norbert Lynton, Kenneth Armitage, Methuen, London 1962, unpaginated).