The Listener

The Listener was made in the Atelier under Linus Rosen as a study in attention, eight years before the first Penfield and nearly forty before the Owl’s attention mechanism, which descends from it. It is a bronze bust of a woman of about fifty, on a turning plinth, with two small horns hidden in her hair.

When two people in a room are speaking, she turns, over several seconds, toward the louder. When the room is quiet, she returns to face the door. Visitors to the House in the 1970s complained that she made them self-conscious at dinner, and in 1974 she was moved from the dining room to the library, where nobody speaks loudly and she rarely moves.

Records in the heritage catalog are compiled from the Register of Provenance and the makers’ own notebooks. Where the two disagree, the Register is preferred and the disagreement noted. Return to the collection