Henry Moore

Sale: Christie's, New York, May 16, 1990, lot 452
Acquired at the above sale

David Sylvester, ed., Henry Moore Sculpture and Drawings 1921-1948, vol. 1, London, 1969, no. 243, p. 15

Green patina. A few spots of rubbing to the patina at extreme lower corners of base and on figure's right elbow and right knee and top of the head. Some surface dirt in the deeper crevices, otherwise fine. Work is in very good condition.
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Moore studied sculpture at Leeds School of Art (now Leeds College of Art) in 1919, after leaving the British army at the end of World War I. When speaking about a subject he depicted many times throughout his artistic career, he stated, “From the very beginning the reclining figure has been my main theme. The first one I made was around 1924, and probably more than half of my sculptures since then have been reclining figures” (quoted in John Hedgecoe, ed., Henry Moore, London, 1968, p. 151). Originally inspired by both Cycladic and Aztec sculpture, Moore embraced primitivism and abstraction when sculpting many reclining figures throughout his oeuvre. The present work displays his shift towards English romanticism, which he explored for a brief period after World War II. This clothed figure depicts Moore’s explorations of depth and solidity in his sculptural works. While most of his reclining figures previously were nudes, Moore has given solidity to the present work by carving clothing it in a form-fitting dress. He has used the delicate drapes of the dress to hint at the corporeal form, rather than focusing on depicting the body itself.

The present work is the sketch model for Memorial Figure, a stone memorial to Christopher Martin, a dear friend of the artist who had died in 1944 of TB after ten years as head of the Arts Department at Dartington Hall in Devon (see fig. 2). It was commissioned by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, the New York heiress and Yorkshireman who had created at Dartington a community embracing light industry, agriculture, education and the arts, with a fourteenth-century manor house as its focal point. Moore’s initial contact was through Kenneth Clark and Philip Hendy whom he had assisted in a Dartington-backed inquiry into the prospects for the arts in Britain. “The fifty-six-inch-long Memorial Figure, as it was called, is perhaps the most serene and elegiac piece of Moore's entire career, perfectly balanced and harmonious from the unusually detailed head with its far-seeing gaze down through the rhythmically handled drapery and up to the sharply raised hill of the right knee. The position of the figure has something in common with the Leeds Reclining Figure of 1929, with its Chacmool parentage, but the mood could scarcely be more different. Seen in situ, the Dartington figure is the more poignant for the striking beauty of its surroundings, especially when viewed against the background of a giant Scots fir which frames the grassed and terraced tiltyard and the austerely handsome Hall. As George Wingfield Digby nicely observed, it ‘seems to lie in the womb of time with quiet assurance'. Thirty years have given the Hornton stone a patina of lichen growths, and there has been some erosion caused by rain dripping from the overhanging trees. Happily there are no scars from an incident in 1968 when someone drew in eyes and a cigarette” (Roger Berthoud, The Life of Henry Moore, New York, 1987, n.p.).