Henry Moore 1898-1986

Mr & Mrs Rowland Howarth; Thence by descent

Ann Garrould, ed., Henry Moore Complete Drawings 1916-29, vol.1, London, 1996, no. AG 19.1, illustrated p. 19

The monogram of initials enclosed in a circle is similar to that Moore used on pottery he produced between 1917 and 1920

Mr & Mrs Rowland Howarth
Thence by descent

Provenance:

Elizabeth Howarth

Mary Shepherd

Private collection, UK

Ann Garrould, ed., Henry Moore Complete Drawings 1916-29, vol. 1, London, 1996, no. AG 22.23, illustrated p. 53

Elizabeth Howarth
Private Collection UK

Ann Garrould, ed., Henry Moore Complete Drawings 1916-29, vol. 1, London, 1996, no. AG 24.3, illustrated p. 85

c.1924

This drawing is from a group of life studies completed by the artist in the mid 1920s. It was gifted by Moore to his sister Elizabeth (Betty) Howarth.

Irina Moore

Henry Moore, The Complete Drawings, volume 2, page 164, number AG 35.91, HMF1180

Curt Valentin, New York
George Gallowhur, USA
Brigitta Bertoia, USA
Private collection, Los Angeles
William Beadleston Gallery, New York
James Kirkman, London
New Art Centre, London
Lillian Heidenberg Gallery, New York
Private Collection, USA
Osborne Samuel, London

Herbert Read, Moore (Vol.1), 1944, pl152a; 1949, pl.152a
Henry Moore Complete Drawings; Vo lume 2 (1930-39) , edited by Ann Garrould, published by Lund Humphries, no. AG39.20; HMF 1383

This drawing and Fourteen Ideas for Sculpture AG39.19 originally formed part of a large sheet. Moore gave permission for the two sections to be separated in December 1983. Moore signed this drawing when it was separated in 1983.

Around 1937, Moore became fascinated by Fabre de Lagrange’s mathematical models in the Science Museum: beautiful objects, made in 1872 from polished brass, wood and coloured filaments. Their aim was to demonstrate the new discipline of Descriptive Geometry, but for Moore it was the models’ structure and changing viewpoints that proved compelling – ‘the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and see one form within the other’. ₁
The precursors to these models, containing fixed elements, were devised by Gaspard Monge (1746-1818), whose pupil, Théodore Olivier (1793-1853), refined the concept by designing versions able to be distorted and rotated into a variety of configurations. It was these models, made by Lagrange, that changed the course of mathematical teaching. Forming the basis of teaching collections, they dictated the tenor of lectures, their delicate construction even requiring technicians to care for them.₂ Moore evidently studied Lagrange’s models carefully, commenting,
I was fascinated by the mathematical models … made to illustrate the difference of the form that is halfway between a square and a circle. One model had a square at one end with 20 holes along each side … Through these holes rings were threaded and lead [sic] to a circle with the same number of holes at the other end. A plane interposed through the middle shows the form that is halfway between a square and a circle ₃
Over a three-year period, between 1937 and 1939, Moore created around fifty sculptures in which space is modified by taut threads. There is a complex relationship between such works, Moore’s drawings and photography, as Andrew Causey has noted. A photograph, showing a cluster of stringed maquettes arranged on a plinth in Moore’s studio, corresponds exactly with the composition of Landscape with Figures (1938), in which Moore has supplied an imagined background. ₄ The implication is that Moore was exploring ideas beyond sculpture, and it is pertinent, as Causey also observes, that Moore’s drawings were included in the series of Penguin Modern Painters. ₅
In the two sets of drawings presented here, originally part of a single sheet, stringed figures predominate: proliferating and mutating serially across the paper, to suggest bones or stones, worn into strange cavities and curvatures. Fourteen Ideas for Sculpture relates most closely to the complexity of Lagrange’s conoid models, albeit exchanging their angularity for organic, rounded forms. In Eighteen Ideas for Sculpture the focus alters, to address – as Moore’s annotation makes clear – the ‘mother & child’. Moore made biomorphic stringed sculptures with this title, predominantly small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, in 1938-9. Also on this page are more familiar depictions of the subject, a mother standing, child in arms, as well as an abstract enclosing figure, similar to Moore’s internal/external forms. Most intriguing, and fitting into Causey’s category of the uncanny, are the two drawings to the lower left of the sheet, in which a bone-white structure is set closely against a quasi-human form. If the yellow of these figures isolates them, their darkly shaded background contributes to a sense of menace. Such ambiguity was captured by Robert Melville’s term ‘object-presences’: figures ready at any moment to ‘break into overt and destructive action’. ₆

₁ Moore, in Henry Moore and John Hedgecoe, Henry Spencer Moore (Thomas Nelson, 1968), p. 105.
₂ Jane Wess, ‘The history of surface mathematical models’, in Intersections: Henry Moore and Stringed Surfaces (London: The Royal Society, 2012), p. 7-8.
₃ Moore, in Moore and Hedgecoe, Henry Spencer Moore, p. 105.
₄ Andrew Causey, ‘Henry Moore and the Uncanny’, in Henry Moore: Critical Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), p. 82-90.
₅ Geoffrey Grigson, Henry Moore, The Penguin Modern Painters (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Limited, 1943). Plate 20 shows a drawing, Objects – string and wood (1938), illustrating stringed figures in a prison-like setting.
₆ Robert Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings, 1921-1969 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), p. 17.

Curt Valentin, New York
George Gallowhur, USA
Brigitta Bertoia, USA
Private collection, Los Angeles
William Beadleston Gallery, New York
James Kirkman, London
New Art Centre, London
Lillian Heidenberg Gallery, New York
Osborne Samuel, London

Herbert Read, Moore (Vol.1), 1944, pl152a; 1949, pl.152a
Henry Moore Complete Drawings; Volume 2 (1930-39) , edited by Ann Garrould, published by Lund Humphries, no. AG39.19; HMF 1460
Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), illustrated p. 237.

This drawing and Eighteen Ideas for Sculpture AG39.20 originally formed part of a large sheet. Moore gave permission for the two sections to be separated in December 1983.

Around 1937, Moore became fascinated by Fabre de Lagrange’s mathematical models in the Science Museum: beautiful objects, made in 1872 from polished brass, wood and coloured filaments. Their aim was to demonstrate the new discipline of Descriptive Geometry, but for Moore it was the models’ structure and changing viewpoints that proved compelling – ‘the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and see one form within the other’. ₁

The precursors to these models, containing fixed elements, were devised by Gaspard Monge (1746–1818), whose pupil, Théodore Olivier (1793–1853), refined the concept by designing versions able to be distorted and rotated into a variety of configurations. It was these models, made by Lagrange, that changed the course of mathematical teaching. Forming the basis of teaching collections, they dictated the tenor of lectures, their delicate construction even requiring technicians to care for them.₂  Moore evidently studied Lagrange’s models carefully, commenting,

I was fascinated by the mathematical models … made to illustrate the difference of the form that is halfway between a square and a circle. One model had a square at one end with 20 holes along each side … Through these holes rings were threaded and lead [sic] to a circle with the same number of holes at the other end. A plane interposed through the middle shows the form that is halfway between a square and a circle ₃

Over a three-year period, between 1937 and 1939, Moore created around fifty sculptures in which space is modified by taut threads. There is a complex relationship between such works, Moore’s drawings and photography, as Andrew Causey has noted. A photograph, showing a cluster of stringed maquettes arranged on a plinth in Moore’s studio, corresponds exactly with the composition of Landscape with Figures (1938), in which Moore has supplied an imagined background. ₄ The implication is that Moore was exploring ideas beyond sculpture, and it is pertinent, as Causey also observes, that Moore’s drawings were included in the series of Penguin Modern Painters. ₅

In the two sets of drawings presented here, originally part of a single sheet, stringed figures predominate: proliferating and mutating serially across the paper, to suggest bones or stones, worn into strange cavities and curvatures. Fourteen Ideas for Sculpture relates most closely to the complexity of Lagrange’s conoid models, albeit exchanging their angularity for organic, rounded forms. In Eighteen Ideas for Sculpture the focus alters, to address – as Moore’s annotation makes clear – the ‘mother & child’. Moore made biomorphic stringed sculptures with this title, predominantly small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, in 1938–9. Also on this page are more familiar depictions of the subject, a mother standing, child in arms, as well as an abstract enclosing figure, similar to Moore’s internal/external forms. Most intriguing, and fitting into Causey’s category of the uncanny, are the two drawings to the lower left of the sheet, in which a bone-white structure is set closely against a quasi-human form. If the yellow of these figures isolates them, their darkly shaded background contributes to a sense of menace. Such ambiguity was captured by Robert Melville’s term ‘object-presences’: figures ready at any moment to ‘break into overt and destructive action’. ₆

₁ Moore, in Henry Moore and John Hedgecoe, Henry Spencer Moore (Thomas Nelson, 1968), p. 105.
₂ Jane Wess, ‘The history of surface mathematical models’, in Intersections: Henry Moore and Stringed Surfaces (London: The Royal Society, 2012), p. 7–8.
₃ Moore, in Moore and Hedgecoe, Henry Spencer Moore, p. 105.
₄ Andrew Causey, ‘Henry Moore and the Uncanny’, in Henry Moore: Critical Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), p. 82–90.
₅ Geoffrey Grigson, Henry Moore, The Penguin Modern Painters (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Limited, 1943). Plate 20 shows a drawing, Objects – string and wood (1938), illustrating stringed figures in a prison-like setting.
₆ Robert Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings, 1921–1969 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), p. 17.

Piccadilly Gallery, London

Marlborough Fine Art, London

M.R. Feheley, Toronto

Christie’s, London 1979

Private Collection

Sotheby’s London, 1996

Berkeley Square Gallery, London

Private Collection, UK

The Artist

Ms Lillian Browse, 1942

Private Collection, UK, purchased form the above

(Reference: HMF 1814a)

Moore was two months too old, in September 1939, to be drafted into military service at the outbreak of war. Yet while reluctant to serve actively a second time, he realised the potential impossibility – given his abhorrence to Nazism and Fascism – of maintaining ‘the state of mind to go on quiet working’ without some involvement.¹ In discussion with Kenneth Clark, the chair of the War Advisory Committee, as well as Sir Jasper Ridley (1887-1951), then Trustee of the National Gallery, it was suggested that Moore might make drawings of the shelters in the London Underground. Ridley had been an active collector of modern British art since before the First World War, with an interest in artists such as Matthew Smith, John and Paul Nash, Mark Gertler and John Skeaping. Through his work for the Contemporary Arts Society, and as Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Tate, Ridley would play a significant role in shaping Britain’s cultural landscape during and after the war.

It was his close connection with Moore’s Underground drawings that encouraged Ridley to acquire Draped Figures in a Shelter (1941) shortly after it was made. In it, the figures are arranged not in a row, as in many of the drawings, but somewhat haphazardly, receding towards an undefined endpoint. The palette is dark, yet there in explicit context to the scene. We might compare it with the well-known photograph of Moore, taken at Holborn Underground during the filming of Out of Chaos (1944), where he leans against a wall, notebook in hand, while the figures recline or curl up on the platform and staircase. The photograph is illuminated by a single lightbulb, softening the sleepers’ outlines while emphasising unexpected details, such as a knee or upturned face. In the drawing, Moore universalises his figures by simply draping them, thereby suggesting an experience that is universal, gathering old and newborn alike.

¹ Henry Moore, letter to Herbert Read and Ludo Read (9 October 1939), quoted in Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Aldershot, Lund Humphries, 2002, p.60

Buchholz Gallery (Curt Valentin), New York (by 1955).
Erna Futter, New York; Estate sale, Christie’s, New York, 15 May 1986, lot 181.
Acquired at the above sale by the late owner
Osborne Samuel, London

Henry Moore Sculpture and Drawings , with an introduction by Herbert Read, published by Lund Humphries, first published 1944, illustrated p. xxxii

A. Garrould, ed., Henry Moore, Complete Drawings 1940-49 , London, 2001, vol. 3, p. 156, no. AG 42.148 (illustrated p.156).

As its title implies this working, energetic sheet is a graphic rehearsal or blueprint for possible sculptures and contains both reclining, seated and figures with internal forms, themes which were to dominate Moore’ s career. Elements hark back to the surrealist tendencies from the late 1930’ s but also formal sculptural resolutions have evolved on the sheet and are familiar in works from the 1940’ s onwards. The energetic application of layers of mixed media echoes the bony, taut surfaces of the sculptures. The memorable drawing ’ Crowd looking at a tied-up object (1942) recalls Yves Tanguy’ s ocean-bed surrealism. Ideas for Sculpture , though a set of un-related studies rather than an independent or cohesive narrative, contains a similarly elusive feeling of mystery and atmospheric flux.

Fischer Fine Art
Mary Keen
Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1961
Lord Cottesloe, London
Private Collection, South Africa
Private Collection, USA
Osborne Samuel, 2013
Private Collection, UK

Henry Moore Complete Drawings; Volume 3 (1940-49) , edited by Ann Garrould, published by Lund Humphries, no. AG 42.125; HMF 2026, recto & verso illustrated page 149

Private Collection, Chicago (acquired before 1950 & thence by descent)
Private Collection, USA

Ann Garrould (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Drawings, vol.3, 1940-49, Aldershot, 2001, no.AG43.107; HMF 2156, ills.p.196

Stanford, Iris & B Gerald Cantor Centre for Visual Arts, Stanford University, on loan, March 2000

This drawing is reminiscent of a work from the same period Reclining Figures: Ideas for Stone Sculpture, 1944, in which each figure appears in an individual pod in a subterranean setting, recalling the mysterious fascination that caves in hillsides and cliffs held for the artist. Moore’s interest in underground landscapes had previously been expressed in his ‘Shelter Drawings’ series of 1941, depicting figures taking refuge in the London Underground during the Blitz, and in his coal mining drawings of the same year.

The Artist
By whom gifted to Duncan Guthrie, 1952
Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

On 23 July 1943, the Reverend Walter Hussey, Sir Kenneth Clark and Sir Jasper Ridley (1887–1951) visited Moore’s studio to see five maquettes for a Madonna and Child commissioned by Hussey for his parish church of St Matthew’s, Northampton. Hussey had approached Moore after seeing his Shelter Drawings in an exhibition at the National Gallery in autumn 1942. As a result, between April and June 1943, Moore compiled his ‘Mother and Child Sketchbook’, from which he modelled twelve different maquettes in clay. The example chosen by Hussey, from the five maquettes Moore presented, was enlarged and carved from Hornton stone, to be installed in early 1944.

Ridley, through his close involvement with the work’s genesis and execution, decided to commission a Madonna and Child from a different maquette, partly as a war memorial for his parish church in Claydon, Suffolk, but also to commemorate his own son, Jasper Ridley (1913–43), who had died in the war. This sketch, in pencil, ink, wax resist and wash, closely reflects the design of the Madonna and Child (1948–9) for Claydon, except in one detail: Moore, who apparently felt that the carving lacked sufficient majesty, added a crown, which he built up over several days using ground stone and fixative.

Asked in 1952 to provide a design to be reproduced on Christmas stamps, as part of a publicity campaign for the newly founded National Fund for Poliomyelitis Research (now Action Medical Research), Moore gave this drawing to the charity’s founder, Duncan Guthrie. The image of a mother and child would hold particular significance for Guthrie, whose young daughter, Janet, was diagnosed with polio in 1949.

Private Collection, UK, 1954
James Kirkman, London
Piccadilly Gallery, London

Osborne Samuel, London

Ann Garrould (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Drawings, vol.3, 1940-49, Aldershot, 2001, no.AG44.20; HMF 2241a, p.214-215

From the Rescue Sketchbook, page 21. The early part of this sketchbook contains various studies for textile designs and family groups which may date to 1943. The latter part to preliminary sketches for The Rescue, a melodrama by Edward Sackville-West published in 1945 including reproductions of Moore’s drawings.

Christie’s London, 1999
Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich
Private Collection, UK

Ann Garrould (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Drawings, vol.3, 1940-49, Aldershot, 2001, no.AG44.75; HMF 2259a, p.228-229

The six reclining figures in this wartime drawing are beautifully drawn ideas for sculpture typical of the artist’s working method. The six figures are isolated in space and float on ledges. These ideas were developed in a drawing from the same period Reclining Figures: Ideas for Stone Sculpture, 1944, in which each figure appears in an individual pod in a subterranean setting. Moore’s interest in underground landscapes had previously been expressed in his ‘Shelter Drawings’ series of 1941, depicting figures taking refuge in the London Underground during the Blitz, and in his coal mining drawings of the same year.

Gifted by the artist to his nephew as a wedding present (Albert Spencer Speight)
Thence by descent

Private collection UK

Recorded in the Henry Moore Foundation Archives as HMF2440a

The Henry Moore Foundation has suggested a date of 1948 for the drawing and that it originally was part of the 1947-49 sketchbook.

“My drawings are done mainly as a help towards making sculpture – as a means of generating ideas for sculpture, tapping oneself for the initial idea: as a way of sorting out ideas and developing them.

Also sculpture compared with drawings is a slow means of expression, and I find drawing a useful outlet for ideas which there is not time enough to realise as a sculpture. And I use drawing as a method of study and observation of natural forms (drawing from life, drawings of bones, shells etc.)”

Notes on sculpture, (1937) reprinted in ‘Henry Moore Complete Sculpture, vol 1, published by Lund Humphries, 1988, p.xxxv

The Leicester Galleries, London, where purchased by Sir Eric Maclagan, May 1951
Thence by family descent
Osborne Samuel, London

The Leicester Galleries, London, New Bronzes and Drawings by Henry Moore , 1951, cat.no.41

In 1927, Moore made a series of studies of his mother in which he captured the cast and tilt of her head improvisatorially in ink on newspaper. Fourteen years later, often from memory, he undertook to record the conditions in London’ s underground shelters. These drawings are quite different in character. By apparently transforming the figures to effigies, frozen in collective indignity, Moore appeared to shy away from subjective expression, creating instead ‘ a cast characters … who are drawn from reality but are also generic people who suffer and endure’ .₁

Three Female Figures stems from the shelter drawings, in technique and approach, but also provides insight into other areas of Moore’ s working practice. It is, in effect, a tableau depicting an elderly woman, hunch-shouldered, feet planted heavily, ministered by two younger women. The postures are statuesque, the gestures petrified acts of humanity, but Moore’ s realisation is graphic as well as sculptural. Using a technique he described as ‘ sectional drawing’ , Moore divides the surface of the figures into jigsaw grids to create a sense of volume. Equally, he uses wax crayon and wash to create spontaneous effects of light, offsetting and animating the composition.

Three Female Figures , in fact, relates to Moore’ s early experiments in printmaking. In 1949 Moore had begun a collaboration with the Ganymed Press, newly founded in London using equipment from its former namesake in Berlin. Ganymed’ s speciality at this period was ‘ collograph’ , so-called by the press’ s manager, Bernhard Baer, to distinguish from conventional collotypes, which were reproductive rather than autographic. Essentially, the artist would draw in separation on plastic sheets (Kodatrace) to create images transferred photographically to a light-sensitised glass plate. Among Moore’ s first prints using this technique was a scarcely modified version of Three Female Figures ( c. 1950), for which only a few proofs are known to exist. ₂

1. Andrew Causey, The Drawings of Henry Moore (Lund Humphries, 2010), p. 13.

2. Three Female Figures , CGM 16, collograph, 50.5 x 38.1 cm, printed in black, blue-grey and yellow. See Frances Carey and Anthony Griffiths, Avant-Garde British Printmaking 1914-1960 (British Museum Publications, 1990), p. 150-52; David Mitchinson, Henry Moore Prints and Portfolios , (Patrick Cramer, 2010), p. 28, 32 (illustrated in colour). The existence of the drawing was not known at the time of Mitchinson’ s study.

Fischer Fine Art, London

A,Garrould, Henry Moore, Complete Drawings 1940-1949, Vol.3, Much Hadham, 2001, p. 276, no. AG 47-49.79; HMF 2468

D. Mitchinson, Henry Moore: Prints and Portfolios, Geneva 2010

Verso: ‘Study for Family Group’

Coloured crayon, wax crayon, watercolour wash

The sketch on verso is used in the 1949 collograph CGM 5

A group of a dozen or more maquettes owes its origin to an unrealised commission for Impington Village College, in Cambridgeshire. When the educationalist Henry Morris approached Moore, in the 1930s, it was with an inspirational vision to create a centre for the surrounding villages, designed by the architect Walter Gropius, to integrate art, music, lectures, plays and films into everyday life. Moore instantly lighted upon the subject of the family, as most appropriate. Although funds proved insufficient to fulfil the project at the time, the idea took root. In 1944, Morris again contacted Moore, who began to make sketches, then maquettes of family groups. Some were intended to be enlarged as bronze sculptures, but most were envisaged as stone carvings, Moore’s preferred medium for Impington. After nine months’ work, however, the project foundered, partly through lack of money, and partly due to the Education Authority’s lack of enthusiasm for Moore’s maquettes. Some years later, the ideas were developed as two significant commissions: Family Group (1948-9), in bronze for Barclay School in Stevenage, and Family Group (1954-5), in stone for Harlow New Town.1 

Contemplating the Impington commission, Moore filled two sketchbooks with family groups. The compositions varied between one- and two-children families, with the children (of different ages) seated or standing. Some are more abstract than others, some figures contain holes, others have vestigial or split heads. The female figure is often swathed in a shawl or dress, and sometimes a blanket is draped, tenderly, over both figures’ knees. Moore regarded these sketches not only as generating ideas for sculpture but as a means of clarifying the subject in his mind: with a battery of possibilities before him, he could choose which to refine and take forward. In conversation with David Sylvester, Moore later identified the family group as his last significant subject to be developed through this process of drawing. 2 

 1 See Moore, in Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), p. 89, 273-5. 

 2 Henry Moore in ‘Henry Moore Talking to David Sylvester’ (7 June 1963), BBC Third Programme. See also Alice Correia, ‘Maquette for Family Group 1945 by Henry Moore OM, CH’, Tate Research Publications (2014)

Henry Moore, The Complete Drawings, volume 4, , number AG69-77.16, HMF3197

From Sketchbook 3, Page 34A

The artist’s daughter

Henry Moore, The Complete Drawings, volume 4, page 207, number HMF3227; AG69-77.58

Rear end paper from the Red Notebook, containing drawings made between 1969-1977, some of which are studies of the artist’s daughter Mary.

Henry Moore, The Complete Drawings, volume 4, page 270, number AG72-74.37, HMF 73/74 (77)

From The Red Notebook, p.68 verso

Henry Moore, The Complete Drawings, volume 4 , number  AG72-74.45; HMF73/74.84

From Sketchbook 4, Page 44

Henry Moore, The Complete Drawings, volume 4, number AG 73-79.30; HMF74/6.30

Verso: Seated Mother and Child. Charcoal, chinagraph. Signed in biro. From Sketchbook 2, p. 30.

Henry Moore, The Complete Drawings, volume 4, number HMF75.77; AG75.8

From Sketchbook 1, Page 8

Deluxe edition contains 2 original prints signed and numbered by the artist, the first etchings CGM `Composition for a Poem by Herbert Read’, 1946 (34.9 x 27.6 cm) and the last lithograph illustrated here, CGM 719, `Two Seated Women on Beach’ from 1984 (31.4 x 46.4 cm)

Private Collection, UK

Henry Moore and the Challenge of Architecture , published by the Henry Moore Foundation, 2005, catalogue no.3, page 6

Henry Moore Foundation, Henry Moore and the Challenge of Artchitecture, Perry Green Much Hadham, 2005

c.1921

One of only 3 recorded impressions.

Dancing Figures is a rare and early linocut from 1921, which came to light among other previously unseen works in the exhibition Henry Moore and The Challenge of Architecture, organised by the Henry Moore Foundation in 2005.

This linocut was created as an idea for an architectural frieze and conveys a sense of movement and dynamism among the stylized figures, giving a clear insight into Moore’s creative process at a time when he started his earliest explorations of architectural concepts.

William Weston purchased print from a member of staff at WS Cowell Ltd, where the trial proofs had been printed.

Gérald Cramer (ed.) Alistair Grant & David Mitchinson, Henry Moore. The Graphic Work, 1931-72, vol. I, London, 1973, no.8, illustrated.

This exceptionally rare trial proof was Moore’s earliest experiment in lithography. When he agreed to make a print for Brenda Rawnsley’s ‘School Print’ project, the printers sent the artist two plates to draw on. A very small number of trial proofs of the two resulting images (CGM 6 and 8) were printed by Cowells and no edition was made. The subjects in this print are typical of Moore’s work at the time, exploring the seated figure, the family group and the mother and child theme. The texts adjacent to the images (in reverse) are Moore’s notes on the technical aspects of this new medium.

Private Collection, UK

Gérald Cramer (ed.) Alistair Grant & David Mitchinson, Henry Moore. The Graphic Work, 1931-72, vol. I, London, 1973, no.14, illustrated.

Based on a drawing Standing Figures 1948.

From the album `Meditations on the Effigy’

Signed and numbered from the edition of X, one of ten artist’s proofs aside from the edition of 50

From the album `Meditations on the Effigy’

Signed and numbered from the edition of X, one of ten artist’s proofs aside from the edition of 50

A Printer’s proof aside from the edition of 100

Book edition A and slipcase contained in a linen covered box, consisting of 150 copies numbered C/CL, containing 4 lose lithographs, CGM 246 Garsdale; CGM 248 Cavern; CGM 250 Lullaby Sleeping Head and CGM 259 Split Stone.

From the Auden Poems Portfolio. 

From the Auden Poems Portfolio.

Printer’s proof aside from the edition of 80

From the `Reclining Figures’ Portfolio, a set of 6 lithographs. 

A printer’s proof aside from the edition of 200. 

Henry Moore: Catalogue of Graphic Work Volume III 1976-1979, published by Gerald Cramer, CGM/422

From the ‘Reclining Figure’ Portfolio (Deluxe Edition)

Berkeley Square Gallery, London

Private collection, UK (since 1997)

Bernard Denvir, ‘Art Collectors and their Collections: 2. W.A.Evill’,The Studio, vol. 137 no.671, February 1949, illustrated p.46;

John Hedgecoe and Henry Moore, Henry Moore, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., London, 1968, pp.36 & 48, illustrated (clay);

David Sylvester (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture 1921-1948, Volume 1, Lund Humphries, London, 1988, LH15, p.3, illustrated p.21 (clay);

David Mitchinson et al., Celebrating Moore: Works from the Collection of the Henry Moore Foundation, Lund Humphries/HMF, London 1998, p.81 (clay);

Peter Osborne (intro.), Henry Moore 1898-1986, A Centenary Exhibition, Berkeley Square Gallery, London, 1998, illustrated in the catalogue (unpaginated)

Contemporary Art Society, London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Catalogue of Part of a Collection of Oil Paintings, Water Colours, Drawings and Sculpture Belonging to W. A. Evill, Esq., December 1947 – February 1948, cat. no.93; another cast

The Tate Gallery, Contemporary Art Society, The Private Collector, 23rd March – 23rd April 1950, cat. no.328;

London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April – May 1961, (part I- section 3) cat. no.23;

Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid Evill Memorial Exhibition, June – August 1965, cat. no.116 (as Head of a Young Girl);

London, Tate Gallery, Henry Moore, 17th July – 22nd September 1968, cat. no.3

Terracotta was made in 1923 and held in the collection at the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham

Bronzes also held in the Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Mr & Mrs Rowland Howarth
Thence by descent

David Sylvester (ed.) and Herbert Read, ‘Henry Moore Complete Sculpture 1921-48 vol.I,’ London 1990, no.35, illustrated p.7

David Mitchinson with intro. by Peter Osborne, ‘Henry Moore,’ published by Osborne Samuel, 2015, p.21

Unseen for decades this is Moore’s first cast sculpture, depicting his sister Elizabeth Howarth’s new born daughter Mary. It has remained in the Howarth
family ever since.

The Leicester Galleries, London
Malcolm MacTaggart, Esq., Welwyn (purchased from the above 1931)
Sotheby’s, London 01/07/1987. Lot 307
Private collection USA
Private collection UK

Herbert Read, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawing, Lund Humphries, 1944, No. 87 (pl.54)
Terence Mullaly, ‘Collectors Pieces’ in the Daily Telegraph, Oct 13th 1961 illustr.
Ionel Jianou ‘Henry Moore’ Paris 1968, p.67, no.75, catalogued
D. Sylvester (ed.)
Henry Moore, edited by Christopher Stephens, published by Tate Publishing, 2010, no 25, illustrated, p.112

Leicester Galleries, London, 1931 ‘Exhibition of Sculpture & Drawings by Henry Moore, 1931. No.4
Marlborough Fine Art, Henry Moore: Stone & Wood Carvings (loan exhibition in aid of the RAF Benevolent Fund), 1961, no.31, illustrated.
Henry Moore, Tate Britain, 24 February – 8 August, 2010, no 25, illustrated, p.112

Intriguingly one of the drawings which prefigure the small number of ironstone heads is annotated by Moore with the words ‘Profile Pebble’. The significance of this is difficult to ascertain, although Moore does refer specifically to pebbles that, “show nature’s way of working stone.” This small group of delicately carved slender profile heads in lustrous ironstone significantly stand apart from his work of the early 1930s. Various drawings from the time contain clues to the conceptualization, the sharply drawn profile in silhouette. Exhibited together at the pivotal Leicester Galleries 1931 exhibition, one was acquired by the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg for their permanent collection, Moore’s very first sale to a museum.

Shuzaburo Yasuda, Tokyo (acquired from artist, c.1936).

Private Collection USA c.1990

Berkeley Square Gallery, London

Private Collection UK, 2006 (purchased from the above)

A. Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture, London, 1988, vol. 6, p.24, no. 105a (illustrated).

Unique

Carved in 1931, this unique alabaster bust is a wonderful example of Moore’s early primitivist work. In 1924, Moore became intrigued by the Mexican masks housed at the British Museum and the theme of the face as a metonym for the soul and personal identity would become a pervasive theme in his work. Head showcases both his passion for natural forms and his ethos of direct carving; with its refined and delicate contour, this elegant bust recalls the simplicity of non-Western masks, while also referencing the organic qualities of new Modern Western sculpture, Surrealists like Alberto Giacometti and the impossibly smooth surfaces of Constantin Brancusi. For Moore, the human head was an important origin of artistic inspiration, and he claimed the head as “the most expressive part of a human being” (Henry Moore in David Mitchinson, ed., Henry Moore Sculpture with comments by the artist, London, 1981, p. 45).

In creating Head, Moore also chose to include one of his trademark structural innovations: the hole. “A piece of stone can have a hole through it and not be weakened–if the hole is of studied size, shape and direction…The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation. The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional” (Henry Moore, “Notes on Sculpture,” in Henry Moore; Sculpture and Drawings, New York, 1949, p. xli). Moore integrated the hole in many of his most iconic sculptures, including his famed Reclining Figures, in order to articulate shape and depth. The use of a hole at the nape of the figure’s neck alludes to three-dimensionality without disrupting the placid smoothness and solidity of the alabaster. Moore wrote:

The year 1931 was very important for me because I became more conscious of forcing forms in depth. It is easy to carve both sides of a sculpture, but I had a real desire to make a three-dimensional form by thinking of it also from within, and not only as a solid object like a tree trunk. The division between the breasts and the hands, even going right through to the other side of this girl figure, was the beginning of the ‘hole’ period for me. I had used holes before, in 1928, making an eye that goes right through the head of the sculpture, but not for a three-dimensional form reason (quoted in J. Hedgecoe, Henry Moore, New York, 1968, p. 63).

With a small hole, Moore converts his reductive, virtually abstract Head, into a symbol not only the simplicity of human expression, but most basic realism of the human form. With its organic curvatures and slim incised lines, especially the curvy line that traverses the center of the face and neck, Head is designed to be subtle, enigmatic, almost totemic.

Moore’s devotion to direct carving, the method he employed in creating this work, was founded on the belief that the sculptor, using his own hands, should allow the inherent nature of his material to shape the character of the subject he created. In Head, Moore emphasizes the smoothness of the alabaster in the shape he conceived, one that mimics a pebble shaped by natural forces. A great admirer of organic selection and formation, Moore manifested his devotion to nature in this sculpture.

In the early 1930s, Shuzaburo Yasuda, the first owner of this work, studied sculpture at the Tokyo National College of Art. In 1936 he traveled to the United Kingdom where he visited Henry Moore’s studio in Hempstead, forging a friendship that would last through the war.

Acquired by Philippe Dotremont, Brussels, circa 1950, subsequent to the exhibition in Bern, 1950 but before the publication of the Tate Galley exhibition catalogue in 1951.

Carlo Ponti & Sophia Loren

Private European Collection

Berkeley Square Gallery, London

Private Collection, UK

Sculpture & drawings by Henry Moore, exh. cat. Tate Gallery, London, arranged by the Arts Council of Great Britain on the occasion of The Festival of Britain, 1951, fig.22

Herbert Read, Henry Moore, Munich, 1967, ill.pl.88

Robert Melville (ed) Henry Moore Carvings, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1967, illustrated.

Robert Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture & drawings 1921-1969, New York, 1970, no.91 illustrated.

Elda Fezzi, Henry Moore, 1977, ill.p.11

Charles Harrison (ed), Unit 1, Portsmouth, May 1978, ill.p.37

Franco Russoli & David Mitchinson, Henry Moore, Escultura, Barcelona, 1981, no.84, ill. p.59

Alex Robertson et al (ed) Surrealism in Britain in the Thirties, Leeds, 1986, ill.pp.210-211.

Susan Compton, Henry Moore, London, 1988, ill.p.64

David Sylvester (ed) & Herbert Read, Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture, 1921-48, vol.1, London, 1990, no.138, ill.p.84

Cercle d’Art (ed), Moore 1898-1986, Paris, 1996, ill. pl.28

Henry Moore, Sculpture of the 20th Century, exh. cat. Dallas Museum of Art, 2001, illustrated in photographs pp.67, 213

Henry Moore, edited by Christopher Stephens, published by Tate Publishing, 2010, no 49, illustrated, p.132

London, Mayor Gallery. Unit 1, April 1934, no 30 as Composition (Corsehill stone)

London, New Burlington Galleries, International Surrealist Exhibition, 1936

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Henry Moore, 1946

Bern, Kunsthalle Bern, Henry Moore, 1950, no.23 (illustrated in the catalogue)

London, Marlborough Fine Arts, Henry Moore: Stone & Wood Carvings, 1961, no.16

London, Marlborough Fine Arts, Art in Britain 1930-1940 centred around Axis Circle Unit One, March-April 1965, no 83 (illustrated in the catalogue)

London, The Tate Gallery, Henry Moore, July-September 1968, no.29 (illustrated in the catalogue)

Florence, Forte Belvedere, Moore e Firenze, 1972, no.19

London, Royal Academy, Henry Moore, September-December 1988, no 19 (illustrated in the catalogue)

London, Tate Modern, Surrealism: Desire Unbound, 2001-2002, no.39 with tour to Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Saint-Paul de Vence, Foundation Maeght, Henry Moore – Retrospective, 2002, no.39

Henry Moore, Tate Gallery, London, February-August 2010, no 49

Edgar B. Young & Jane White Young, New York (acquired from the artist on November 26, 1965)
Private Collection, USA (acquired from the above in 2002)
Osborne Samuel, London

David Sylvester, ed., Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture, vol. 1 , London, no. 231, illustration of the terracotta version p. 146
David Mitchinson et al., Celebrating Moore, Works from the Collection of The Henry Moore Foundation , London, 1998, no.143, illustration of another cast p.209
John Hedgecoe, Monumental Vision: The Sculpture of Henry Moore , London, 1998, no.234, illustration of the terracotta version, p.211
Dorothy Kosinski, Henry Moore: Sculpting the 20th Century (New Haven & London: Dallas Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 2001), cat. 50, illustrated in terracotta, p. 174.

Casts held at the San Diego Museum of Art & the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, USAThe terracotta original is held by the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham, UK

A group of a dozen or more maquettes owes its origin to an unrealised commission for Impington Village College, in Cambridgeshire. When the educationalist Henry Morris approached Moore, in the 1930s, it was with an inspirational vision to create a centre for the surrounding villages, designed by the architect Walter Gropius, to integrate art, music, lectures, plays and films into everyday life. Moore instantly lighted upon the subject of the family, as most appropriate. Although funds proved insufficient to fulfil the project at the time, the idea took root.

In 1944, Morris again contacted Moore, who began to make sketches, then maquettes of family groups. Some were intended to be enlarged as bronze sculptures, but most were envisaged as stone carvings, Moore’s preferred medium for Impington. After nine months’ work, however, the project foundered, partly through lack of money, and partly due to the Education Authority’s lack of enthusiasm for Moore’s maquettes. Some years later, the ideas were developed as two significant commissions: Family Group (1948-9), in bronze for Barclay School in Stevenage, and Family Group (1954-5), in stone for Harlow New Town. ₁

Contemplating the Impington commission, Moore filled two sketchbooks with family groups. The compositions varied between one- and two-children families, with the children (of different ages) seated or standing. Some are more abstract than others, some figures contain holes, others have vestigial or split heads. The female figure is often swathed in a shawl or dress, and sometimes a blanket is draped, tenderly, over both figures’ knees. Moore regarded these sketches not only as generating ideas for sculpture but as a means of clarifying the subject in his mind: with a battery of possibilities before him, he could choose which to refine and take forward. In conversation with David Sylvester, Moore later identified the family group as his last significant subject to be developed through this process of drawing. ₂

The maquette for Family Group (1944) shows three seated figures. To the left, a woman holds a child, to the right, a man places one hand protectively on the woman’s shoulder, while his other hand holds a book. The message is clear: that a close family unit is inseparable from the values of education. Significantly, Morris had intended to bring all aspects of learning together at Impington, with parents and children using the same building, and ‘village’ and ‘college’ functioning, effectively, as families.₃ Morris’s thinking can be set against the backdrop of the Welfare State, with its focus on upholding and supporting the family as a vital anchor for society.

Having made a similar group of maquettes for the Northampton Madonna and Child, in 1943, Moore realised their potential, once editioned in bronze, for use as promotion or a source of income.₄ Family Group was editioned in 1956, from the original terracotta maquette, by Charles Gaskin of the Art Bronze Foundry in Chelsea. Bernard Meadows, who was Moore’s assistant at the time, recalled that some casts were roughly finished, and required considerable refinement before returning to the foundry for patination. The flipside to this, paradoxically, is that their final state can be considered to have been closely supervised and worked on by the artist.

Kenneth Clark remained critical of Moore’s family groups, considering them to lack the force, or menace, of other subjects. The phrase Clark used was ‘dutiful deadness’, which he diagnosed as stemming from Moore’s own personal happiness, as represented by the family – a wife and child.₅ Notwithstanding, Family Group (1944) is a beautifully conceived and realised maquette, possessing the quiet strength of its monumental counterparts. Moore’s commissions for Stevenage and Harlow, meanwhile, would become well-loved examples of public art.

₁ See Moore, in Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), p. 89, 273-5.
₂ Henry Moore in ‘Henry Moore Talking to David Sylvester’ (7 June 1963), BBC Third Programme. See also Alice Correia, ‘Maquette for Family Group 1945 by Henry Moore OM, CH’, Tate Research Publications (2014).
₃ Andrew Causey, The Drawings of Henry Moore (Lund Humphries, 2010), p. 133.
₄ David Sylvester, ‘The Evolution of Henry Moore’s Sculpture: II’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 90, No. 544 (July 1948), p. 190.
₅ Kenneth Clark, Henry Moore Drawings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), p. 155.

The Artist

Mary Moore 

Waddington Galleries, London

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above in 1996)

Herbert Read (intro.), Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings, Lund Humphries, New York, 1949, cat. no.106b, illustrated
Will Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, Thames and Hudson, London, 1960, cat. no.123, illustrated (dated 1946)
John Hedgecoe (ed.), Henry Spencer Moore, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1968, cat. no.9, illustrated p.177
Ionel Jianou, Henry Moore, Tudor Publishing, New York, 1968, illustrated pl.14 (dated 1946)
Robert Melville, Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings, 1921-1969, H. N. Abrams, London, 1970, p.353, cat. no.356, illustrated
David Mitchinson (ed.), Henry Moore Sculpture, with Comments by the Artist, MacMillan, London, 1981, p.310, cat. no.175, illustrated p.94 
David Sylvester (ed.), Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture 1921-48, Vol. I, Lund Humphries, London, 5th edition, 1988, cat. no.259, illustrated p.151
Connaissance des Arts, ‘Moore,’ June 1992, p.10, illustrated
David Mitchinson (ed.), Celebrating Moore, Lund Humphries, Los Angeles, 1998, cat. no.155, illustrated p.221 (dated 1948-49)

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Henry Moore, 17th December – 16th March 1947, with tour to Chicago and San Francisco
New York, Architectural League of New York, Modern Sculpture for Architecture, 11th December – 2nd January 1948 
New York, Museum of Modern Art, New Acquisitions, 13th January – 21st March 1948;
Venice, British Pavilion, XXIV Venice Biennale, 29th May – 30th October 1948, with tour to Milan;
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts from the Museum Collection, 24th August – 27th December 1948;
New Jersey, Princeton University Art Museum, Contemporary Sculptures and Painters, 5th January – 16th January 1949;
Paris, Musée National D’Art Moderne, Henry Moore Sculpture and Drawings 1923-1948, 19th November – 31st December 1949, with tour to Brussels, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Berne and Athens;
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Painting, Sculpture and Graphic Arts from the Museum Collection, 14th February – 20th November 1950;
London, Tate, Sculpture and Drawings by Henry Moore, 2nd May – 29th July 1951;
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Good Design, 21st November – 28th January 1951;
British West Indies, Contemporary British Artists, 1st January – 1st February 1952, with tour to Malta and France;
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Recent Acquisitions, 13th February – 22nd April 1952;
Macon, Musée Municipal, Artistes Anglais Contemporains, 10th May – 12th July 1952;
Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Sculpture of the Twentieth Century, 10th October – 7th December 1952, with tour to Chicago and New York;
Sofia, Sofia City Art Gallery, Henry Moore: An Exhibition of Photographs, Reproductions, With Some Original Bronzes, 7th – 19th April 1959, with tour to Beirut, Budapest, Kuala Lumpur, Peshawar, Oslo, Drammen, Moss, Ardenal, Asker, Trondheim, Notodden, Eskilstuna, Linkoping, Odense, Kolding, Esbjerg and Aarhus;
New York, Museum of Modern Art, Paintings Sculpture and Graphic Arts from the Museum Collection, 26th November – 8th September 1963;
New York, Museum of Modern Art, From the Museum Collections: Family Portraits, 27th May – 7th February 1965;
London, Tate, Henry Moore, July – September 1968, cat. no.68, illustrated p.173 (another cast);
Florence, Forte di Belvedere, Henry Moore, 20th May – 30th September 1972, cat. no.61, illustrated p.140;
Amman, Jordan National Gallery, 40 Years of British Sculpture, 22nd May – 7th June 1981, with tour to Harare, Belgrade, Skopje, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Novi Sad, Sarajevo, Athens, Cairo, Gaborone, Heraklion, Manila, London – Ontario, Red Deer, Lethbridge, Tallin, Riga, Vilnius and Kyiv;
Sofia, 125 Rakovsky, 1300th Anniversary of the Founding of the Bulgarian State, 1981, (details untraced);
Mexico City, Museo De Arte Moderno, Henry Moore: Esculturas, Dubjos, Grabados. Orbras 1921-1982, 1982, with tour to Caracas;
Berlin, Nationalgalerie Der Staatlichen Museen, Henry Moore: Shelter and Coal Mining Drawings 1939-1942, 4th April – 3rd June 1984, with tour to Leipzig, Halle and Dresden;
Hong Kong, Hong Kong Museum of Art, The Art of Henry Moore, Sculptures, Drawings and Graphics 1921-1984, 1st February – 12th March 1986, with tour to Tokyo and Fukuoka;
New Delhi, National Gallery of Modern Art, Henry Moore: Sculptures Drawings and Graphics 1922 to 1984, 1st October – 15th November 1987;
St Petersburg, The Russian Museum, A Changing World of Sculpture from the British Council Collection, 18th October – 21st November 1994, with tour to Moscow, Prague, Casablanca and Essen;
Vienna, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Henry Moore: Eine Retrospektive Zum 100 Geburtstag, 1998, (details untraced);

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Riklis Collection, New York
Weintraub Gallery, New York
Private Collection, New York
Berkeley Square Gallery, London

Private Collection, UK

Alan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture, 1921-48, vol. 1, London, 1957, no. 261, illustration of another cast
Franco Russoli and David Mitchinson, Henry Moore Sculpture, London, 1981, no. 182, p.96, illustration of another cast
80th Birthday

Columbus, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio
San Francisco, California, USA, Henry Moore: The Reclining Figure, 1984, No. 26, (another cast)
Austin, Texas, USA
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
Portland, Oregon, USA
Waddington Galleries, London, 1992, No.14, (another cast)

In modelling Reclining Figure Henry Moore has encapsulated many of the most important motifs of his definitive aesthetic style. The curvaceous form of the sculpture recalls the blanketed sleeping figures Moore captured beneath the city of London in the Underground during the war and the sensuous lines of the model belie the complex arrangement of internal and external shapes. The key elements of his post-war abstraction can be discerned in the present work, particularily the use of striated surfaces and an extreme plasticity of form. The subject of the reclining figure is synonymous with Moore and was the most important motif of his œuvre, as he explained, ‘The reclining figure gives the most freedom… A reclining figure can recline on any surface. It is free and stable at the same time. It fits in with my belief that sculpture should be permanent, should last for eternity. Also it has repose’ (quoted in A. Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Berkeley, 2002, p. 218).

The present work was conceived in 1946, a momentous year for Moore, foremost the birth of his daughter Mary who was the first owner of Reclining Figure; also his first great American retrospective was presented in New York, Chicago and San Francisco. It was also during the mid-1940s that he made crucial technical developments; he began to thoroughly explore the distinct qualities of bronze. The freedom gained from that malleable material meant that his sculptures assumed more spatially dynamic forms exemplified by the voided drum of the torso in the present work. Herbert Read suggests that ‘the ideas could now be rendered without physical compromise into a ductile material’ (H. Read, Henry Moore, London, 1965, p. 169).

Collection of the artist. Collection of Ann H. Zwinger.
By descent, Ann H. Zwinger Trust.

Orebro, Sweden, 1952

Dimensions include the artist’s base Height 2cm; 3/4 in

The recent, spectacular exhibition of Moore’s Helmet Heads at the Wallace Collection in 2019 demonstrates their enduring fascination. Moore had visited the Wallace Collection in the 1920s and made drawings of armour, recording details that found their way into his sculptures – most intensely during the 1930s to 1950s, but sporadically throughout the course of his life.

Early intimations of Moore’s Helmet series appear in his drawings in the mid-1930s. Helmets morph into heads, skulls contain blanched structures, branching within them. From these seedling ideas developed Moore’s first metal sculpture. The Helmet (1939–40), originally in lead, is a slender vertical structure. Two holes, piercing its top, appear as eyes. Most importantly, however, it encloses a separately cast inner form suggesting a figure, planted on two stubby legs. The upright form of this figure, in combination with the womb-like enclosure of the outer shell, suggests a mother and child.

Moore, in fact, cited multiple sources for the series that unfolded from this startling composition. In addition to the Wallace Collection, he recalled that his early interest in armour had been informed by the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he wandered at lunchtimes as a student. ₁ He also linked The Helmet’s origin to Wyndham Lewis ‘talking about the shell of a lobster covering the soft flesh inside’. The carapace protects a vulnerable interior, just as a mother shields her child:

The helmet … became a recording of things inside other things. The mystery of semiobscurity where one can only half distinguish something. In the helmet you do not quite know what is inside. ₂

It is an intriguing line of thought, and one that Andrew Causey probed by juxtaposing Moore’s The Helmet with Epstein’s Rock Drill, which likewise shelters an embryo inside its mechanistic ribcage. ₃

Moore’s use of lead for the early versions of the Helmet series was a practical solution to casting his own work. Lead could be melted at a relatively low temperature, from sections of piping, and cast outdoors. Later, Moore cast these same sculptures in bronze to make them less vulnerable to damage. But again, there was an alternative reading. Moore described the original versions as ‘more expressive because lead has a kind of poisonous quality; you feel that if you licked it you might die’. ₄

Helmet (1950) is a maquette for the first numbered sculpture in the series. It has a more open, simplified form from the front, while the back has two pointed apertures and a series of slits, suggesting vents. Echoing this, the inner form is both pointed and curved, containing its own sharp slit. To the top are two circular holes. The catalogue for the Wallace Collection exhibition related the overall shape of this sculpture, with its prominent circular air vents, to the German ‘coalscuttle’ helmet – the M1916 Stahlhelm, which was a sought-after souvenir for British troops in World War I. Moore would have seen such helmets during combat in 1917. ₅

Yet, unlike the larger version of Helmet Head No. 1, the maquette is unique and possesses a distinct history. Cast in 1950, it was chosen in 1952 by Moore and Fritz Eriksson (Head of the Swedish Arts Council) as part of a touring exhibition destined for a year-long tour of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Germany. An installation photograph shows the two maquettes for Helmet Head No. I and Helmet Head No. 2, side by side on a plinth. To the left is Moore’s stone Composition (1932), subsequently bought by the Tate, and to the right, Half-Figure (1929) in cast concrete, purchased by the British Council in 1948. On the walls, enlarged photographs of further works by Moore indicate the breadth of his practice as a sculptor. Sold to its only owner, Ann Zwinger, in the early 1950s, the maquette for Helmet Head No. 1 was in fact a substitution for a different lead sculpture, which was damaged in transit. The maquette’s base touchingly records this provenance, bearing both the British Council’s exhibition label and the handwritten dedication ‘To Ann Zwinger, from Henry Moore’.

₁ Moore, in Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), p. 214.
₂ Ibid.
₃ Andrew Causey, The Drawings of Henry Moore (Lund Humphries, 2010), p. 99.
₄ Moore, in Moore: Head-Helmet: An Exhibition to Celebrate the 150^th Anniversary of the Foundation of the University of Durham (Durham: DLI Museum and Arts Centre, 1982), p. 1
₅ Tobias Capwell & Hannah Higham, Henry Moore: The Helmet Heads (London: The Wallace Collection, 2019), p. 86.

Private Collection, USA, 1980

Osborne Samuel, London, 2011

Private Collection, UK

Alan Bowness, ed, ‘Henry Moore Complete Sculpture,’ Vol 2, London, 1986, no.344a, p.49

Acquired from the artist through the agency of Gustav Kahnweiler in the 1950s, and thence by descent; 

Christie’s, London, 30 April 1999, lot 137.

Private Collection, (acquired at the above sale)

Christies London, 24th June 2010, lot 345

Private collection, UK

A. Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture, vol. 2, Sculpture 1949-1954, London, 1986, no. 315 (another cast illustrated pl. 83).

F. Russoli & D. Mitchinson, Henry Moore Sculpture with Comments by the Artist, Barcelona, 1988, no. 27 (another cast illustrated p. 115)

The mother and child is a dominant theme in Moore’s oeuvre. Beginning in 1922 with his ‘earliest surviving independent carving’, Moore ‘had a long and productive career in which the mother and child figured prominently’ (G. Gelburd, intro., Mother and Child: The Art of Henry Moore, exh. cat., Hofstra University Museum, Hempstead, New York, 1987, p. 27). Moore’s sculptural representations of this subject in the 1950s were influenced by two events of the previous decade, a commission he received from St. Mathew’s Church in Northampton, England for a mother and child in 1943, and the birth of his own daughter Mary in 1946. These typically tender, intimate portrayals of maternal love contrast dramatically with this bronze which speaks of a more fraught relationship. This tension is articulated through the jagged head of the mother, her tight grip around the neck of the child who sucks rapaciously at the mother’s breast. One of the most striking and unusual examples of this theme, this sculpture has prompted many interpretations. In Roger Berthoud’s The Life of Henry Moore (London 1987, p. 198) it is suggested that ‘Moore was alarmed at the sight of Mary feeding at Irina’s breast’. The artist himself commented: ‘I wanted it to seem as though the child was trying to devour its parent, as though the parent, the mother, had to hold the child at arm’s length’ (A. Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Aldershot, 2002, p. 278).

Interviewed for the current Henry Moore exhibition at Tate Britain, Mary Moore, who was seven when her father created the work, had her own insight in how this sculpture came into being: ‘The mother’s head is very jagged and I wonder if that isn’t because, in the fifties, my father thought he would experiment with having a bronze foundry in our garden. You can melt bronze at quite a low temperature so they managed to, with an enormous pair of bellows, have a furnace in the garden, and they cast quite a few pieces, small pieces, and they cast the maquette for this particular piece. When the bronze comes out, often there are jagged edges left from the mould, and I think that the jagged edges on the head of the mother of this particular maquette, when it was cast, he decided to leave them in a more extreme form. Normally you might file something like that off, but I think that he felt that that happenstance, that circumstance, added to the meaning of the piece.’

Another cast owned by the Tate Gallery, London.

Galerie Beyeler, Basel (acquired
from the artist in 1970)
Fischer Fine Art, London
Albert White Gallery, Toronto (1974)
Private Collection, Montreal
Private Collection, Vienna
Berkely Square Gallery, London, 2005
Private Collection, UK

lan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings, Sculpture 1955-64, London, 1965, vol. III, no. 397, illustrations of another cast pls. 3 and 4
Herbert Read, Henry Moore, A Study of his Life and Work, London, 1965, no. 185, illustration of another cast p. 200
Robert Melville, Henry Moore Sculpture and Drawings 1921-1969, London, 1970, illustrations of another cast pls. 497 and 499
Alan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings, Sculpture 1955-64, London, 1986, vol. III, no. 397, illustration of another cast; illustrations of another cast pls. 16 and 17

Paris, Orangerie des Tuileries, Henry Moore, Sculpture et dessins, 1977, no. 86, illustrated in the catalogue

The Artist

Marina & Willy Staehelin-Peyer Collection, USA (Acquired directly from the artist) 

 Private Collection, UK

Alan Bowness, ed.’ Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture, 1955-64, Vol.3, London, 1965, no:412, ill. of another example p.30. pls 38 & 39

Hakone Open-Air Museum, Japan (permanent collection)

In a letter to Dr. Staehelin, Moore describes the casting of his recently finished piece, ‘Draped Reclining Woman’.‘ I am going to have it cast in Berlin, as I have been given the name of a very good bronze foundary which can cast it without delay … Of course I shall have to go to Berlin myself to see the cast as it gets near completion, so that I am sure that it is well done and entirely satisfactory’ (Henry Moore, unpublished letter to Dr. Staehelin, December 5, 1958)

Henry Moore Archive: Drapery played a very important part in the shelter drawings I made in 1940 and 1941 and what I began to learn then about its function as form gave me the intention, sometime or other, to use drapery in sculpture in a more realistic way than I had ever tried to use it in my carved sculpture. And my first visit to Greece in 1951 perhaps helped to strengthen this intention . . . Drapery can emphasise the tension in a figure, for where the form pushes outwards, such as on the shoulders, the thighs, the breasts, etc., it can be pulled tight across the form (almost like a bandage), and by contrast with the crumpled slackness of the drapery which lies between the salient points, the pressure from inside is intensified . . . Drapery can also, by its direction over the form, make more obvious the section, that is, show shape. It need not be just a decorative addition, but can serve to stress the sculptural idea of the figure.

Henry Moore quoted from Sculpture in the Open Air: A Talk by Henry Moore on his Sculpture and its Placing in Open-Air Sites, edited by Robert Melville and recorded by the British Council 1955; typescript, copy in HMF library

Acquired directly from the artist
Private collection, Maryland
By descent

A. Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture 1955-1964, Vol. 3, London, 2005, no. 473, p. 46 (another cast illustrated p. 47).

A cast from the edition is owned by MOMA, USA and The Kröller Müller, The Netherlands.

“I did the first sculpture in two pieces almost without intending to. But after I’d done it, then the second one became a conscious idea. I realised what an advantage a separated two-piece composition could have in relating figures to landscape. 

[Moore] walked over to Reclining Figure No. II, put his hands on the knees and the breasts. ‘Knees and breasts are mountains,’ he said. ‘Once these two parts become separated, you don’t expect it to be a naturalistic figure; therefore, you can more justifiably make it like a landscape or a rock.’ ₁

Moore apparently separated the reclining figure almost without intention. Once done, however, he realised the potential of the act. Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 1 (1959), enlarged from a maquette not dissimilar to the one illustrated here, was sited by William Keswick on his estate at Glenkiln in Scotland, where it could be seen isolated on the horizon. None of the sculptures Keswick positioned was visible from the house, or from one another. As Moore commented, ‘They are far apart. Not in sight of each other. Half a mile apart – or more. They possess their environment.’ ²

The landscape of rock and moor is a plausible location, too, for Two Piece Reclining Figure: Maquette No. 1 (1960). Presented as two discrete sections, it suggests a boulder split into parts related by form and texture. Both are square yet irregular, geometric yet organic: deep vertical grooves recur in each, recalling a fault in the rock. Whether the piece is imagined as abstract or as a figure – much as rocks in the landscape accrue the names of people or objects from their distinctive shapes – is in the viewer’s eye.

₁ Carlton Lake, ‘Henry Moore’s World’, Atlantic Monthly (January 1962), p. 44; quoted in Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), p. 288.

² Moore, interviewed in Art and Artists (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956), p. 104–7; quoted in Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, p. 282.   

The artist
Private collection New York
Berkeley Square Gallery, London, 1994
Private Collection, UK (since 1994)

Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings, 1955-1964, vol. 3, London, 1986, no. 463a, illustration of another cast pp. 98-99

David Mitchinson, ed., Celebrating Henry Moore, Works from the Collection of the Henry Moore Foundation, London, 1998, no. 192, illustration of another cast n.p.

Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts, Henry Moore, April 1969 – January 1970, no. 2, another cast exhibited: this exhibition travelled to Bratislava, Mirbach Palace & Palffy Palace, June 1969 – January 1970; and Prague, Central Bohemian Gallery, September 1993- January 1970.
Lefevre Gallery, London, 1986 (another cast)
Manchester, Castlefield Gallery, Henry Moore: an Exhibition of Sculptures and Graphics, January – February 1987, no. 2, another cast exhibited.
Chandigarh, Government Museum and Art Gallery, Henry Moore, India 1987, October 1987, no. 1, another cast exhibited: this exhibition travelled to Bombay, Jehangir Art Galery, October – November 1986; Baroda, MS University Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery, November 1987; Bhopal, Roopankar Bharat Bhavan, December 1987; Madras, Lalit Kala Academi, January 1988; Bangalore, Chitrakala Parishath, February 1988; Calcutta, Birla Academi, March 1988; and Jaipur, Lalit Kala Academi, April 1988.
Marlborough Gallery, London, 1988 (another cast)
Pforzheim, Reuchlinhaus, Henry Moore: Ethos und Form, July – August 1994, no. 3, another cast exhibited: this exhibition travelled to Bad Homburg, Sinclair-Haus, September – November 1994.
Krakow, BWA Gallery, Henry Moore: A Retrospective, March – May 1995, no. 88, another cast exhibited: this exhibition travelled to Warsaw, Centre for Contemporary Art, May – July 1995.
Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Henry Moore Sculture Designi Incisioni Arazzi, August – November 1995, no. 88, another cast exhibited.
2017, The Light Box, Woking, Henry Moore: Sculpting from Nature
2018, Poland: Henry Moore:  The Power of Nature

Plaster for this bronze is in the collection of the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham, UK. The plaster was made in 1960, the bronze edition was cast in 1984.

The maquette for the sculpture dates back to 1960 and the genesis for it is a piece of flint from Moore’s extensive collection of found objects which covered the shelves of the maquette studio. He has moulded in plaster a head and upper torso onto the flint and the rare circular base contributes to a flamboyant and somewhat playful composition, surely to be seen in the round. Poignantly the enlargement of the 1983 working model was underway when Moore died in 1986 and present day visitors to the studios can still see the giant blocks, some cut, some marked up ready for the saw, frozen in time.

Peter Osborne

Berkeley Square Gallery, London

Private Collection, UK (since 1995)

Alan Bowness, Ed., Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture, Volume 4, Sculpture and Drawings 1964-73, London, 1999, no. 505

Henry Moore Foundation (permanent collection), gifted by Irina Moore, 1977

2000-2001 Moore in China, a touring exhibition organised by the Henry Moore Foundation: Bejing, Guangzhou & Shanghai.

Bronze edition of 9 plus 1, cast in 1963

Gold edition of 3 (casting date unknown)

Annely Juda Fine Art, London (acquired from the artist in 1971)
Private Collection (Acquired from the above, 1971)

Osborne Samuel, London

A. Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings, 1964-73, London, 1977, no. 597 (another cast illustrated, p. 57).

Maquette for Square Form with Cut (1969) is a sculpture in its own right, beautifully conceived and realised. Softly patinated, its intimate scale draws the viewer close, to experience first its weight and compactness, then its gentle tilt, encouraging light to gleam upon and enhance its contours. The most satisfying aspect of the maquette is its completeness: despite the cut and void, its surfaces are seamless, its proportions inviting the hand to reach into the centre and lift it. Thus it is intriguing to follow its transformation into one of Moore’s largest sculptures.

Not long after completing the maquette, Moore began to plan an exhibition for the Forte di Belvedere, a sixteenth-century fortress overlooking the city of Florence. Using maquettes and photographs, he envisaged the layout. In the case of Square Form with Cut, he installed first a working model in polystyrene, then a full-sized version in polystyrene and plaster, assembled on-site at the Forte di Belvedere. The final version, 5.45m high and weighing 180 tonnes, was carved from white Italian marble, cut into sixty horizontal sections to facilitate transport and lifting, by crane, over the ramparts. In images of the finished work in 1972, superbly photographed by David Finn against the skyline of Florence and its distant mountains, the ribbing of these sections can just be seen, adding a rhythmic texture and stratification to the sculpture. Moore made versions of the intermediate-sized working model in concrete, fibreglass and black marble. Each has its own aptness, while the maquette, as fons et origo, represents the idea’s unelaborated essence: the vital germ of the idea.

Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London.
Private Collection USA, 1971, acquired from the above
Private Collection, UK

A. Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings, 1964-73, London, 1977, p. 56, no. 604 (another cast illustrated, p. 57).

Monumental versions of Two Piece Reclining Figure: Points are in Kew Gardens, London; The Hofgarten, Dusseldorf; and Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. 

The plaster model is at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

I found that form and space are one and the same thing. You can’t understand space without understanding form.

For example, in order to understand form in its complete three-dimensional reality you must understand the space that it would displace if it were taken away. You can’t measure a space without measuring from one point to another. The heavens have space that we can understand because there are points – the stars and sun – that are different distances away from each other. In the same way we can only see space in a landscape by relating the foreground and middle distance to the far distance. To understand the distance from my thumb to my forefinger needs exactly the same understanding as distances in landscape.

Alan Wilkinson (ed), ‘Henry Moore, Writings and Conversations,’ published by Lund Humphries, 2002, p.206

Gallery Kokaido, Roppongi, Japan

Private Collection, Japan

Osborne Samuel, London

Alan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture, 1964-73, vol.4, London, 1977, no.635, illustration of another example, p.63 and plates 194-5

David Finn, Henry Moore: Sculpture and the Environment, London, 1977, illustration of the larger version, pp.438, 439.

Susan Compton, Henry Moore, New York, 1988, no. 189, illustration of another example, p.265

Henry Moore, Fondation Pierre Fianadda, Martigny, 1989, illustration of another cast, p.94

Henry Moore at Castello Sforesco, Milan, 1989, illustration of another cast, p. 74

Casts of ‘Hill Arches’ are at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and in front of the Karlskirche, Vienna.

The authenticity of this bronze has been confirmed by the Henry  Moore Foundation.

The work was designed by Moore for placement at the edge of a meadow on his property at Much Hadham, England. 

Hill Arches (1973) was conceived by Moore for a particular site in fields he had recently purchased, adjacent to his studio at Perry Green in Hertfordshire. The earlier excavation of gravel had created an artificial mound outlined prominently on the horizon. Drawing from ideas rooted as far back as the 1930s, Moore created first a plaster maquette, constructed from interlocking forms: three ‘stirrup’ shapes, and an oval. Although abstract, the composition contains within it a sense of sheltering, the arches reading alternatively as a mother’s limbs, the oval as a child.

To isolate the structure against the horizon is to fix its viewpoint, however powerfully: the arches frame segments of the sky and the passing drama of cloud and light. On a smaller scale, the working model emphasises the sculpture’s quality of containment and protectiveness. Arched forms are seen to overlap, when circumnavigated, ready to prevent the oval from rolling free. (Ronald Gray, encountering Hill Arches outside the Serpentine, detected ‘a male and female figure poised like springs in a trap to crack down on each other and on the child-like shape between them.’)₁ Within the tallest arch is a circle, suggesting a head, or mouth, but also mysteriously admitting light. Perfectly envisaged  for landscape, the form may be read equally as landscape itself.

₁ Ronald Gray, ‘Henry Moore: Sculptor and Humanist’, The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1980), p. 156.

Casts of ‘Hill Arches’ are at the National Galleryof Australia, Canberra, Fitzwilliam Museum,Cambridge and in front of the Karlskirche,Vienna.

The artist
Weintraub Gallery, New York
Jeffrey Loria, New York
Private collection, California

A. Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture 1974-80 , London, 1994, vol. V, no. 698 (illustrated)

2000-01 Bejing/Guangzhou/Shanghai, Moore in China (cast 0/8)

Edition of 9

A cast of this bronze is held at Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Fukushima, Japan. Another is held by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

The original plaster and a bronze cast is held at the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham, UK

Notes: ‘The ‘Mother and Child’ idea is one of my two or three obsessions, one of my inexhaustible subjects. This may have something to do with the fact that the ‘Madonna and Child’ was so important in the art of the past and that one loves the old masters and has learned so much from them… But the subject itself is eternal and unending, with so many sculptural possibilities in it – a small form in relation to a big form protecting the small one, and so on. It is such a rich subject, both humanly and compositionally, that I will always go on using it.’ Henry Moore quoted in Henry Moore Drawings 1969-79 , Pace Wildenstein Gallery, New York, 1979, p.29. Henry Moore’s obsession with the Mother and Child theme was rooted in his desire to step beyond the overt meaning of the composition to engage with broader and more innovative sculptural possibilities. The repetition of such a common trope frees it of its overt meaning allowing the sculptor, as Moore himself noted, ‘to invent a completely new form idea.’ (Henry Moore, quoted in J. Russell, Henry Moore , London, 1968, p. 28).

By this repeated engagement with the theme each new iteration brought new discoveries, building to an extraordinarily fertile period in the 1970s. As the critic John Berger observed, ‘The last period of Moore’s working life – and notably the years when he was in his late 70s or over 80 – was of an incomparable richness. Here he joins the company of Titian or Matisse in the sense that his life’s work becomes cumulative: his last works an apogee’ (J. Berger, ‘A Sense of Touch’, The Guardian , 21 September 1989, pp. 25, 47, quoted in Bacon Moore , p. 13).

The Mother and Child theme can be traced back to a sculpture made while Moore was still a student at the Royal College of Art, London. That sculpture shows the totemic, angular influence of Pre-Colombian carvings studied at the British Museum, reflective of Moore’s exploration of ideas outside the Western canon and a search for primal form. He returned frequently to the theme, by turns abstract and expressive, through the 1920s and 1930s, and most significantly during the war years. The most significant expression comes in the 1943 commission for a Madonna and Child for the church of St Matthew, Northampton, although the specifically religious context seems a little incongruous in view of the universality of the theme.

Throughout, the theme of mother and child refers not just to the parental relationship but to an expression of fundamental concepts of fertility and creation, of birth and life, and to Moore’s exploration of the essential rhythms of nature. Fascinatingly, this search folds in on itself in the sculptor’s own practice, as he himself breathes life into his models. Perhaps not surprisingly, these ideas crystalised with the birth of Moore’s own daughter Mary, named for his mother, in May 1946, which launched an even more profound campaign of exploration. This found expression in the lively sequence of Mother and Child groups of the early 1950s, such as Variation of Rocking Chair 2 , which look forward to the arrangement of for Mother and Child: Arms .

Gail Gelburd expands on the significance to Moore of the relationship between the mother and child theme and artistic practice: “Moore continuously found new ways of exploring the theme so that the imagery could take on meaning beyond the aesthetics of its form. The development of the mother and child imagery reveals that Moore’s involvement in this theme reaches beyond maternity to an inquiry into birth and creativity. The theme of the mother and child, the mother giving birth, the child struggling to emerge from the maternal womb, is like the stone giving birth to the form, the form struggling to emerge from the block of stone” ( Mother and Child, The Art of Henry Moore , exh. cat., Hofstra University Museum, Hempstead, New York, 1987, p. 37). In the present work, the mother figure rocks back on her hips almost into the pose of that other great Moore theme the Reclining Figure . Her legs thrusting forward under drapery echo the form of rolling hills, the outlines at once maternal and geological, the forms worn as smooth as an alluvial pebble, or a river landscape. The web of limbs linking mother and child cocoons the womb-like negative space between the two figures. The angularity of the limbs emphasises the contrast between the movement of the child and the stability of the mother, between creator and progeny. The forward thrust of the infant draws the two heads almost on to the same level, closing the circle based in the swooping curves of the mother’s lap. This struggle between dependent forms sets up a tension, elegantly resolved between the two figures (evident even in his maquettes), the interlocking forms creating an interplay of differing scales which had long been a feature of both Moore’s figurative and more abstract sculpture.

The importance of this recurrent theme in Moore’ s work is internationally recognised and celebrated; other editions of Mother and Child: Arms can be found in institutions such as the Henry Moore Foundation in the UK, the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia and the Prefectural Museum of Modern Art in Japan.

Private Collection, London

Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore Complete Sculpture 1980-1986, vol. 5, London, 1986, no. 723, p. 34-35 & pls. 124 & 125.

The classic sculpture Reclining Figure – Bone Skirt, is one of Moore’ s most recognisable and iconic figures. This is the working model for a marble sculpture which was owned by his daughter Mary and was subsequently reworked as a monumental carving in travertine marble dating from 1978. At the time Moore was spending the summers at a villa he had built near the Carrara quarries in Italy. Moore observed in 1931: “The human figure is what interests me deeply, but I have found principles of form and rhythm from the study of natural objects such as pebbles, rocks, bones, trees, plants … bones have marvellous structural strength and hard tenseness of form, subtle transition of one shape into the next…”

Moore returned again and again to the reclining figure, initially inspired by the early Mexican Chacmool sculptures he saw at the British Museum in the 1920s. The subject re-occurs throughout his career with infinite variations of form and line, here the use of drapery to accentuate the shape and continuous line of the body.

I want to be quite free of having to find a ‘ reason’ for doing the Reclining Figures, and freer still of having to find a ‘ meaning’ for them. The vital thing for an artist is to have a subject that allows to try out all kinds of formal ideas – things that he doesn’ t yet know about for certain but wants to experiment with, as Cézanne did in his ‘ Bathers’ series. In my case the reclining figure provides chances of that sort. The subject-matter is given. It’ s settled for you, and you know it and like it, so that within it, within the subject that you’ ve done a dozen times before, you are free to invent a completely new form-idea.

Henry Moore quoted in John Russell, Henry Moore , Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London 1968, p.28

Private Collection
Jeffrey Loria, New York
Kent Fine Art, New York
Private Collection US (purchased from the above 1986)
Private Collection, UK

Osborne Samuel, London

A. Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture: 1974-80, Vol. 5, London, 1983, pp. 42-43, no. 765

Dimensions include the artist’s bronze base.

The other version of this composition is called Mother and Child Rubenesque andMoore is alluding to the ample maternal form, as depicted by artists such asRubens and Cezanne.Cezanne’s figures had a monumentality about them that I liked. In his ‘Bathers’,the figures were very sculptural in the sense of being big blocks and not a lot ofsurface detail about them. They are indeed monumental but this doesn’t mean fat.It is difficult to explain this difference but you can recognise the strength. This isquality which you see only if you are sensitive to it. It’s to do with the full realisationof the three-dimensional form.Alan Wilkinson (ed), ‘Henry Moore, Writings and Conversations,’ published byLund Humphries, 2002, p.146

The artist

Private Collection, USA

Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore Complete Sculpture, 1955-1964, vol. 5, London, 1986, no. 779, p.182

Height includes the artist’s bronze base

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 
Private Collection, Australia, 1980’s
Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Alan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Sculptures and Drawings, Sculpture 1980-86, Volume 6 , Lund Humphries, London, 1999, cat.no.791
John Hedgecoe, The Sculpture of Henry Moore , published by Collins & Brown, 1998, no. 669, p. 242

“From very early on I have had an obsession with the Mother and Child theme. It has been a universal theme from the beginning of time and some of the earliest sculptures we’ve found from the Neolithic Age are of a Mother and Child. I discovered, when drawing, I could turn every little scribble, blot or smudge into a Mother and Child.” ₁

Moore’s words, well known as they are, still prompt thought. As a young artist in the 1920s, he spent hours studying the collections of the British Museum in London and Musée de l’Homme in Paris. His drawings make clear the impact of these discoveries as well the agility with which he was able to transform his themes: moulding, caressing, even on occasions harrying his material. What emerges is one of the most profound studies, in the twentieth century, of a single subject: the mother and child.

A cursory selection, from across Moore’s career, demonstrates this breadth. A heavy-set, somewhat foursquare Mother and Child (1924–5), carved from green Hornton stone, contrasts with a translucent alabaster Suckling Child (1930), which tenderly fragments and abstracts from the human form. From the next decades we might choose Moore’s serenely Northampton Madonna and Child (1943–4), a Mother and Child (1952) in which a ravenous-beaked child is restrained at arm’s length, and the tiny, almost toy-like Mother and Child: Wheels (1962). If the 1960s proved relatively sparse, the 1970s saw a regathering of momentum as well as a scattering of Moore’s approach: from sculptural picture frames, reliefs and egg forms to homages – recalling Pisano, Rubens, ‘Paleo’ and the ‘Gothic’.

The distinction between the ‘mother and child’ and ‘Madonna and Child’ is significant. When Moore was approached to create the Northampton Madonna and Child (1943–4), he was initially hesitant as to whether he could produce a religious rather than secular work of art:

It’s not easy to describe in words what this difference is, except by saying in general terms that the ‘Madonna and Child’ should have an austerity and a nobility, and some touch of grandeur (even hieratic aloofness) which is missing in the everyday ‘Mother and Child’ idea.₂    

Exploring the idea, Moore produced a series of maquettes. The proposed context and medium required a certain solemnity, reflected, in the chosen version, by the weight of drapery around the Madonna’s knees, and the breadth of her capacious lap, as she shelters the child. As Moore wrote, ‘I have tried to give a sense of complete easiness and repose, as though the Madonna could stay in that position for ever (as, being in stone, she will have to do)’. ₃

Such immobility provides a useful measure against which to compare studies of the mother and child unconnected to a religious context. Perhaps the greatest change, as Moore moved from the 1970s into the 1980s, would be an increased sense of intimacy and domesticity. Neither mother nor child is required to remain still. A child scrambles over its mother’s reclining figure, or balances on her knees, arms reaching towards her breast. In the drawings, Moore depicts the mother from behind, gently rocking the child, as it turns, or rests its head on her shoulder. These are informal poses, for which the most obvious precedent is Moore’s series of rocking chair sculptures, from the late 1940s to 1950.

Maquette for Curved Mother and Child (1980) continues this rocking theme. The mother’s body tilts as she cradles and rocks the child, such that her arms and the child’s outstretched limbs intertwine. The mother’s legs are cocooned in a closely fitting dress, emphasising the counterbalancing twist of her torso. A similar curve characterises the form of Seated Mother and Child: Thin (1980), where the child is supported upright on the mother’s hip. In Maquette for Curved Mother and Child, however, the arc is present in every aspect of its composition: from the mother’s neck to her spine and legs – even the child’s loose-limbed body – each element twisting in a slightly different direction. Moore’s maquette was enlarged in 1983, gaining in stylization if perhaps losing the immediacy of this diminutive version.

Moore acknowledged the impact that life may exert on an artist’s work, and how the birth of his daughter, in 1946, ‘re-invoked’ for him the mother and child theme. ₄ If this is the case, the fresh approach of the later works may indeed have resulted from the birth of his grandchild, in 1977. Maquette for Curved Mother and Child captures a joyous, carefree moment, witnessed as if at close hand.

₁ Moore, in Henry Spencer Moore, photographed and edited by John Hedgecoe (London: Thomas Nelson, 1968), p. 213.
₂ Moore, in Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), p. 267.
₃ Ibid.
₄ See Moore, in Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, p. 66.

The Artist, May 1981, from whom acquired by
Private Collection, New Zealand
Private Collection, U.K.
With Berkeley Square Gallery, London, 2003, where purchased by
Private Collection, U.K. by whom gifted to the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.
Osborne Samuel, London (Formerly Berkeley Square Gallery)

Alan Bowness, Henry Moore: Volume 6, Complete Sculpture, 1980-86, London, 1999, p.37, cat.no.790 (ill.b&w., another cast)

Rome, Vigna Antoniana, Henry Moore, 1981
Ravenna, Moore, Sculture, disegni e grafica, 1986 no.13 (illustrated)

Height excludes base.

A cast is owned by the Henry Moore Foundation, Perry Green, UK

The Artist
Private Collection, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Private Collection, New York (and sold: Sotheby’s, New York, November 13, 1996, lot 314)
Private Collection, London (acquired at the above sale)
Jeanne Frank Gallery, New York
Private Collection (Acquired from the above on March 17, 1997)
Private Collection, London

Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture, 1980-1986, vol. 6, London, 1988, p. 51, no. 789, illustration of another cast pl. 38

Dimensions include the artist’s bronze base

A cast from the edition is owned by the The Yale Center for British Art, USA

Reviewing Moore’s eightieth-birthday exhibition at Fischer Fine Art, which juxtaposed recent sculptures with those from the 1920s and ’30s, John Glaves-Smith drew attention to the persistence of the rounded female figures. Even in the interwar period, when women – deprived of calories, then taking up tennis and hockey – strove for the boyishly svelte silhouette of the ‘flapper’, Moore’s figures remained ample, replete with curves. ₁ The most salient exception would be his post-war Mother and Child (1953), a tense pairing in which the child appears to peck, ravenously, at its mother’s breast. In this composition, the mother strains away from the child, her waist attenuated, her head serrated in defence.

Mother and Child Round Form (1980) demonstrates the persistence of Moore’s monumental vision. The female figure is non-sexualised, seeming to exist only in relation to the child, whom she regards intently. The composition centres on the child, its mother arguably providing little more than a context: a support. To this end, the female figure is largely devoid of non-essential detail. There is the merest indication of breasts, and hands to clasp. Legs, lacking purpose, are truncated, while weight sediments towards the cushion of the mother’s lap. The effect is far from stolid, however. As almost invariably with the subject of mother and child, Moore imbues the composition with timelessness and universality.

₁ John Glaves-Smith, ‘Exhibitions: Henry Moore’, Art Monthly (September 1978), p. 19.

Private Collection, USA
Osborne Samuel, London

A. Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture: 1980-86, Vol. 6, London, 1988, p. 38, no. 803, another cast illustrated.

Flinstones, pebbles, shells and driftwood have all helped me to start off ideas but far more important to me has been the human figure and its inner skeleton structure. You can feel that a bone has had some sort of use in its life; it has experienced tensions, has supported weights and has actually performed an organic function, which a pebble has not done at all. In themselves pebbles are dead forms, their shape is accidental and merely to copy them would not in itself create a sculptural form. It is what I see in them that gives them their significance.

Henry Moore

Marlborough Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above in June 1983
Private collection

Henry Moore, 85th Birthday Exhibition: stone carvings, bronze sculptures, drawings (exhibition catalogue), Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1986, illustration of another cast p. 66
Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore Complete Sculpture 1980-1986, vol. 6, London, 1986, no. 873, illustrations of another cast p. 54 & pl. 114

Dimensions include artist’s bronze base

A cast from the edition is owned by YaleCenter for British Art

Private Collection, Canada

Alan Bowness, ‘Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture Vol 6, 1980-86’, Lund Humphries, London, 1988, no. 898, illus. pp.56-57, pl.111