Patrick Humphreys

Henry Moore in his maquette studio at Hoglands, Perry Green,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 19:35:00 +0100

Henry Moore in his maquette studio at Hoglands, Perry Green, 1963.

Moore’s maquette studio at Hoglands (his final home at Perry Green, Much Hadham, next door to what is now The Henry Moore Foundation) testifies eloquently to the influence of found objects and organic forms on his work. One of the unexpected boons of moving to Hoglands was that its garden turned out to be rich in buried animal bones. The studio contains everything from tiny birds’ skulls to the skull of an elephant, via bones from the Sunday joint and curiously shaped stoned or driftwood—anything, indeed, that struck the sculptor as having a natural form that could feed his own formal language. Often, the attraction took the form of a kind of recognition: a sea-eroded pebble could look uncannily like ‘a Henry Moore’.

—Ian Dejardin, 2004

Henry Moore, Three Standing Figures, 1947–8, Battersea Park,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 19:20:43 +0100

Henry Moore, Three Standing Figures, 1947–8, Battersea Park, Wandsworth. Darley Dale stone.

Henry Moore with casts of Family Group, 1948–9, in his studio at...

Wed, 22 May 2013 19:08:02 +0100

Henry Moore with casts of Family Group, 1948–9, in his studio at Hoglands, Perry Green, 1954.

Photo by Ida Kar.

Henry Moore with Upright Internal/External Figure, 1953–4, in...

Wed, 22 May 2013 19:00:00 +0100

Henry Moore with Upright Internal/External Figure, 1953–4, in his studio at Hoglands, Perry Green.

Henry Moore with his daughter Mary in his studio at Hoglands,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:54:00 +0100

Henry Moore with his daughter Mary in his studio at Hoglands, Perry Green, Easter 1951.

Henry Moore with his daughter Mary in his studio at Hoglands,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:51:58 +0100

Henry Moore with his daughter Mary in his studio at Hoglands, Perry Green, with a working model for Upright Internal/External Form, 1951, in the foreground.

Henry Moore, Family Group, 1948–9. Bronze.

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:35:00 +0100

Henry Moore, Family Group, 1948–9. Bronze.

Henry Moore, Family Group, 1944. Terracotta. The family group...

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:33:41 +0100

Henry Moore, Family Group, 1944. Terracotta.

The family group ideas were all generated by drawings; and that was perhaps because the whole family group idea was so close to one as a person; we were just going to have our first child, Mary, and it was an obsession.

—Henry Moore

Henry Moore, Madonna and Child, 1943–4, St Matthew’s...

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:27:24 +0100

Henry Moore, Madonna and Child, 1943–4, St Matthew’s Church, Northampton. Brown Hornton stone.

Henry Moore’s Perry Green home Hoglands with Bird Basket,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:55:52 +0100

Henry Moore’s Perry Green home Hoglands with Bird Basket, 1939, and Jean-François Millet, La baratteuse, c. 1952–5.

Outbreak of war forced Moore to evacuate his cottage in Kent. The bombing of his Hampstead studio in 1940 led to his move to Hoglands, in the Hertfordshire hamlet of Perry Green, which remained his home for the rest of his life.

…

With Moore’s move to Perry Green, Bird Basket also found a new home. Although he stopped depicting the sculpture in his drawings, the work reappears in numerous photographs of the artist at home, as testament to the affinity of modern, and indeed all, art forms with daily life. In fact, Bird Basket is one of only a few pieces of his own work that Moore chose to live with … These could be found among artworks from many non-Western cultures as well as found objects, and paintings by artists such as Cézanne, Courbet and Degas. Usually Bird Basket was displayed alongside a twisted, gnarled vine on a side table with Millet’s black crayon drawing La Baratteuse hanging above. The careful juxtaposition of such disparate objects, each with forms echoed in others, can be seen to summarize Moore’s personal vision of continuity and affirmation of life and nature.

—Anita Feldman Bennet, 2004

Henry Moore at work in his studio at 11a Parkhill Road, Belsize...

Wed, 22 May 2013 17:35:00 +0100

Henry Moore at work in his studio at 11a Parkhill Road, Belsize Park, c. 1932.

Henry Moore’s studio at 11a Parkhill Road, Belsize Park,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:55:00 +0100

Henry Moore’s studio at 11a Parkhill Road, Belsize Park, showing Mother and Child, 1932, and Girl, 1932.

Henry Moore with Mother and Child, 1932. From very early on I...

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:38:00 +0100

Henry Moore with Mother and Child, 1932.

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 suppose it could be explained as a ‘Mother’ complex.

—Henry Moore

Henry and Irina Moore at The Glack, near Deal, Kent, 1931. In...

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:26:59 +0100

Henry and Irina Moore at The Glack, near Deal, Kent, 1931.

In the autumn of 1926 Irina enrolled as a student-painter at the Royal College of Art where Henry had been teaching in the Sculpture School since 1924. However, they did not meet until the autumn term of 1928 when Henry saw her and decided to ask her to a college dance. He also invited her to go and watch him carving his first public commission on the facade of the London Transport Headquarters at 55 Broadway, close to St James’s Park; Irina remembered being very impressed seeing Henry carving while standing on high scaffolding but what impressed her more was the bitterly cold weather—she thought she had not been so cold since leaving Russia [where she was born in 1907].

—Ann Garrould, 2004

Ivon Hitchens, Irina Moore, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben...

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:39:00 +0100

Ivon Hitchens, Irina Moore, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Mary Jenkins on holiday at Happisburgh beach, Norfolk, 1931.

we [Ben Nicholson and the Moores] sometimes went on holidays together—I remember there was a summer holiday, maybe the summer of 1930, when a group of us spent a fortnight at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast … I remember it was very good weather, and it was there that we found ironstone pebbles which are hard enough and also soft enough to carve. Some were beautifully simplified shapes.

—Henry Moore

Henry Moore with Reclining Figure, 1929, and Mask, 1930, in the...

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:26:00 +0100

Henry Moore with Reclining Figure, 1929, and Mask, 1930, in the background.

From the very beginning the reclining figure has been my main theme.

…

The vital thing for an artist is to have a subject that allows [him] 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.

—Henry Moore

Henry Moore, study for a wall light, c. 1930. Terracotta.

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:57:00 +0100

Henry Moore, study for a wall light, c. 1930. Terracotta.

Henry Moore, The West Wind, 1928–9, 55 Broadway, Westminster,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:52:00 +0100

Henry Moore, The West Wind, 1928–9, 55 Broadway, Westminster, London. Portland stone relief eighty feet above ground on the seventh storey.

I completed the carving on a scaffolding platform where there was only about three feet to stand on, and at first I was alarmed. It was so high up. But when I got down and looked at it from the ground, I realised that the figure’s navel couldn’t be seen properly. This was terrible, because the umbilical area is absolutely central to me—the cord attaches you to your mother, after all. By this time the scaffolding had been dismantled, so I went up again in a cradle, winching it up myself from side to side until I reached the carving. But once there, I found I couldn’t carve properly. Every time I struck a blow, the cradle shot back from the figure. So in the end I got out some charcoal and shaded the navel in … the cradle zigzagged all over the place on the return journey as well. [Jacob] Epstein watched me. After I’d come down he said: ‘I wouldn’t have done that for all the money in the world.’

—Henry Moore

Henry Moore, Seated Figure, 1924. Hopton Wood stone.

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:46:00 +0100

Henry Moore, Seated Figure, 1924. Hopton Wood stone.

Henry Moore while a student at the Royal College of Art, c....

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:42:00 +0100

Henry Moore while a student at the Royal College of Art, c. 1923–4.