“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.