HENRY MOORE | SMALL SHELL MOTHER AND CHILD

This sculpture reflects Moore’s interest in medieval armor while referencing his most important motif: that of mother and child. The artist explained the inception of his interest in the shell form: "The idea of one form inside another form may owe some of its incipient beginnings to my interest at one stage when I discovered armour. I spent many hours in the Wallace Collection, in London, looking at armour. Now armour is an outside shell like the shell of a snail which is there to protect the more vulnerable forms inside, as it is in human armour which is hard and put on to protect the soft body. This has led sometimes to the idea of the Mother and Child where the outer form, the mother, is protecting the inner form, the child, like a mother does protect her child" (quoted in Alan Wilkinson, Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Berkeley, 2002, pp. 213-214).