A universal subject throughout all of art history, the family unit defined Henry Moore’s output for much of his career. Conceived at the end of the Second World War, the present sculpture engendered a sense of hope and stability for the future. While themes of maternity appeared in his pre-Columbia-inspired work as early as the 1920s (see fig. 1), it wasn’t until the mid-1930s that a proposal from German architect and Bauhaus school founder Walter Gropius catalyzed the Family Group forms we know today. With Maxwell Fry, Gropius designed the Impington Village College near Cambridge in 1935-36 with the hopes of creating a secondary school which would also cater to the entire family and act as a focal point for the community at large (see fig. 2). Such "village colleges" were the brainchild of Henry Morris, the Chief Education Officer for Cambridgeshire County Council. In this context, Gropius asked Moore to complete a sculpture befitting the new building.

Of his conversation about the commission with Morris, Moore later recounted: “We talked and discussed it, and I think from that time dates my idea for the family as a subject for sculpture. Instead of just building a school, he was going to make a centre for the whole life of the surrounding villages, and we hit upon this idea of the family being the unit that we were aiming at” (quoted in Farewell Night, Welcome Day, BBC broadcast, 4 January 1963, reprinted in Alan Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Aldershot, 2002, p. 89).

“Later the war came and I heard no more about it until, about 1944, Henry Morris told me that he now thought he could get enough money together for the sculpture if I would still like to think of doing it. I said yes, because the idea right from the start had appealed to me and I began drawings in note book form of family groups. From these note book drawings I made a number of small maquettes, a dozen or more” (the artist in a letter to Dorothy Miller, 31 January 1951, quote in ibid., p. 273).

From that point onward, Moore filled nearly two entire sketchbooks with ideas depicting families in various poses (see fig. 3) and in the mid-1940s created at least fourteen small maquettes of family groups, ten of which were later cast in bronze. Morris, however, ultimately failed to secure the funds and support needed to carry out Moore’s commission and the sculpture for the village school at Impington was never realized. Years later, two of the original models were enlarged to near life-size, one for the Barclay Secondary School in Stevenage, Hertfordshire in 1947 (see fig. 4) and another in 1954–55 for the town of Harlow.

In the context of the 1940s, the closeness of the family nucleus resonates in Moore’s work as an ‘official war artist’–it was on descending into an underground station one night during a bombing raid that he was struck by the clusters of parents and their children huddled together taking shelter along the train platforms. The importance of family took on an increasingly personal significance in 1946 when his wife Irina at last gave birth to their daughter Mary (see fig. 5) after a series of earlier miscarriages.

Conceived in 1944 and executed in a series of nine plus one artist’s proof, this cast of Family Group comes to auction for the very first time. Other examples of this form belong to the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.