Celebrated 20th century artist, Henry Moore, in front of one of his sculptures.
Henry Moore was a British artist who rose to prominence in the late 1920s and early ‘30s with his sensuous and organic abstract sculptures. He achieved immense global success throughout his lifetime, and he is now regarded as one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century.
However, Moore was also a talented draughtsman, and drawing and printmaking came to be an important part of his artistic practice. Moore’s prints now account for 66% of his work sold at auction, and they usually fetch between £500 and £1,000, with a significant number reaching up to £5,000.
Unlike some artists, Moore never separated himself from his work, believing that “an artist uses experiences he’s had in life.” As such, it’s interesting to know some facts about his life when considering his extraordinary artwork. Below is a list of five things you might not have known about Henry Moore.
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He Came From A Humble Background
Henry Moore was born in 1898 in Castleford, a small mining village in Yorkshire. He was the seventh of eight children, and the family lived in a small terraced house. His father worked in the mines and instilled the importance of education into his children when they were young. Henry Moore’s artistic talent was recognised when he was still a child, and it’s said that when he was 11, he decided he would become a sculptor after hearing about Michaelangelo.
His Most Expensive Print Sold For £150,000
Two Standing Figures is a screenprint in colours from 1949, and it’s one of Moore’s earliest prints. For the first part of his career, the artist focused on sculpting, and it was only later in his life that he really started to experiment with printmaking. As he grew older and the physicality of sculpting began to get harder, printmaking became an increasingly significant part of Moore’s practice; some of the prints made in the last years of his life (including Stone Reclining Figure and Mother and Child) are now among the most popular in today’s market. The Two Standing Figures print set a new record for the artist when it was sold by Christie’s in December 2021 for £150,000, a staggering five times more than its top estimate.
Two Standing Figures sold by Christie’s in 2021
He Was Influenced By Landscapes
In 1940, Henry Moore and his wife Irina left blitz-damaged London for a former farmhouse in rural Hertfordshire, where they would remain for the rest of the artist’s life. This landscape (and that of his childhood in Yorkshire) inspired much of Moore’s work, with the gently undulating lines and smooth curves of his sculptures recalling the hills and dips of the landscape surrounding him. The Sheep portfolio is a prime example of this, as it was based on the bucolic view over fields from the window of the artist’s studio.
Moore was also known to collect objects like stones, pieces of wood, fossils, and shells so he could study and draw them in an attempt to understand “nature’s principles of form and rhythm.” Among his collection, Moore had an elephant skull which had been given to him in 1966; he called it “the most impressive item in my ‘library’ of natural forms”, and it led him to create the beautifully intricate Elephant Skull prints.
London During the Blitz of World War II
He Explored The Maternal Bond
A huge amount of Henry Moore’s work explores the relationship between parents and children, and, more specifically, the link between mother and child. Many of his famous sculptures are abstracted mother-and-child figures, inspired partly by his relationship with his own mother, but also by the many sculptures he’d encountered whilst studying art; as he said, the mother-child bond “has been a universal theme from the beginning of time, and some of the earliest sculptures we’ve found from the Neolithic Age are of a Mother and Child.”
Moore’s interest in the motif was reinforced by the birth of his own daughter, Mary, in 1946 which, he said, “re invoked in my sculpture my Mother and Child theme. A new experience can bring to the surface something deep in one’s mind.” It was a theme which he continued to explore until the end of his life; his Mother and Child prints, for instance, were created in 1983 but not published until after his own death in 1986, though they are regularly among his best-selling prints at auction.
He Is Well-Known For His Reclining Figures
Alongside the mother and child theme, Moore is famous for his many works involving reclined figures (especially women). Not only did he like the practicality and freedom of creating reclining figures as opposed to those standing or sitting, but he also appreciated the fact that these figures have been a constant in art since antiquity.
Many of Moore’s best-known sculptures involve reclining figures, though it was also something he often explored in his printmaking, including in Stone Reclining Figure, created just a few years before his own death. In many ways, the motif of the reclining figure allowed Moore to, as he said, “try out all kinds of formal ideas”; in his own words, “the subject matter is given. It’s settled for you, and you know it and like it, so… within the subject … you are free to invent a completely new form-idea.”
Henry Moore Reclinging Figure Sculpture.
