HENRY MOORE | Maquette for Seated Woman

Waddington Galleries, London
Irving Galleries, Palm Beach
Acquired from the above

Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore Sculpture and Drawings, Sculpture 1955-64, vol. 3, London, 1965, no. 434, illustrated p. 26

Attractive nutty brown patina. The figure is slightly loose from the bench element. Some dirt in the deepest crevices. One nailhead spot of verdigree behind the proper right arm. Some minor rubbing to the patina to the figure's breasts and stomach. Otherwise fine. The sculpture is in very good condition.
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The human figure was Henry Moore’s abiding passion and the primary subject of his art. Maquette for Seated Woman, conceived in 1956, is model of one of his most important works, belonging to a series of sculptures of women that Moore created in the 1950s that occupy a key position in his oeuvre. The seated figure as a theme emerged as part of Moore’s commission to make a sculpture to sit outside UNESCO’s headquarters. The project presented Moore with a particular sculptural conundrum that he initially tried to solve using his usual configurations of family groups or solo female figures. While he found the eventual solution in the highly abstracted form of a reclining female figure, numerous maquettes show that he had seriously considered using a seated figure such as the present work.

Discussing Seated Woman, Moore recalled a memory of his own mother: “Seated Woman, particularly her back view, kept reminding me of my mother, whose back I used to rub as a boy when she was suffering from rheumatism. She had a strong, solid figure, and I remember, as I massaged her with some embarrassment, the sensation it gave me going across her shoulder blades and then down and across the backbone. I had the sense of an expanse of flatness yet within it a hard projection of bone” (quoted in Will Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, London, 1960, p. 329).