Henry Moore

Leicester Galleries, London 
Sale: Sotheby's, London, 26th April 1961, lot 20
Marlborough Fine Art, London (purchased at the above sale)
Mrs David Crackanthorpe (sale: Sotheby's, London, 3rd April 1963, lot 145)
Piccadilly Gallery, London (purchased at the above sale)
Alice Harris, USA
Acquired by the grandfather of the present owner circa 1986

London, Leicester Galleries, Exhibitions of living Irish Art, new sculpture and drawings by Henry Moore, 1946, no. 73
London, Brook Street Gallery, Henry Moore: Watercolours, drawings, lithographs, 1969, no. 8
London, Royal Academy of the Arts, Henry Moore, 1988, no. 26
Salzburg, Galerie Welz, Henry Moore, Bronzen und Graphik, 1994, no. 29, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Ann Garrould (ed.), Henry Moore. Complete Drawings 1940-49, London, 2001, vol. III, no. AG 42.186, illustrated p. 167

Executed on cream wove paper. The sheet is affixed to a mount at each of the four corners. There are eight artist's pin holes to the extreme corners of the sheet. There is a two cm vertical repair to the top right edges of the sheet and a minor nick to the bottom extreme left corner. Otherwise this work is overall very good condition.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The subject of the reclining figure is probably the single most iconic image of Henry Moore’s œuvre. He would continually rework the motif in both his drawings and his sculptural works, repositioning, dividing and abstracting the body so only its elemental nature remained intact. As the artist himself explained, "There are three fundamental poses of the human figure.  One is standing, the other is seated, and the third is lying down....  But of the three poses, the reclining figure gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially.  The seated figure has to have something to sit on.  You can't free it from its pedestal.  A reclining figure can recline on any surface.  It is free and stable at the same time… Also, it has repose.  And it suits me ─ if you know what I mean"  (quoted in Henry Moore, The Reclining Figure, Columbus Museum of Art (exhibition catalogue), 1984, p. 26).

As a result of the difficulties of acquiring the materials he required for his large scale sculptures, The war years saw Moore using drawing much more frequently as his chosen mode of expression and Moore spent his nights sketching the occupants of the make-shift shelters in London’s underground stations. However, his mind still clearly was drawn to sculpture, and the present work reveals how he continued to conceive ideas for future works during this period. The figures have a distinct sculptural quality, created by the solid modelling of their limbs and the ‘two-way sectional technique’, employing line alone along and round the bodies to suggest volume, which he had been using since the 1930s and came to fully master during the this decade. Executed in 1942, the three reclining figures in the Ideas for Wood Carving demonstrate the extent to which Moore pushed the limits of the human form, manipulating the elements of the bodies to acculturate their angularity. As Christa Lichtenstern writes,  ‘The reclining figure […] formed a kind of vessel into which Moore poured his most important poetic, compositional, formal and spatial discoveries. The farthest-reaching developments in his art are thus reflected in such figures.’ (C. Lichtenstern, Henry Moore: Work – Theory – Impact, London, 2008, p. 95).

The present work is related to sculpture which was finally realised on a monumental scale in elm wood between 1945-46. Reclining Figure - which is based upon the uppermost figure in this drawing - retains much of the striking construction of Moore’s original conception of the work, and for the artist ‘had great drama, with its big beating heart like a great pumping station’ (quoted in Ann Garrould (ed.), Henry Moore. Complete Drawings 1940-49, London, 2001, vol. III, p. 152).