Henry Moore's Sheep Sketchbook

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Family Group(1950) by Henry Moore, located at the Barclay School in Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom; Henry Moore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Moore was born in Castleford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, to Mary (née Baker) and Raymond Spencer Moore. His father was of Irish descent and became pit deputy (responsible for safety) and then under-manager of the Wheldale colliery in Castleford. He was an autodidact with an interest in music and literature. Determined that his sons would not work in the mines, he saw formal education as the route to their advancement. [1] Henry was the seventh of eight children in a family that often struggled with poverty. He attended infant and elementary schools in Castleford, where he began modelling in clay and carving in wood. He professed to have decided to become a sculptor when he was eleven after hearing of Michelangelo's achievements at a Sunday School reading. [2] Exposed to everything the Yorkshire climate can throw at it … part of Barbara Hepworth’s The Family of Man. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian Moore received an ex-grant serviceman in 1919, following a brief spell of teaching and serving in the Civil Service Rifles unit during World War I, and attended Leeds School of Art, establishing himself as the academy’s first sculpting student. Barbara Hepworth met him there and had a big impact on him. During his stay, he spent a lot of time in the British Museum researching its ethnographic collection, which influenced his later monumental representational pieces. By now, Lilley and I are on another hill. She tells me about coming to this spot in the spring, underneath glowering late-winter clouds, and seeing one of their most renowned Moore sculptures, Three Piece Reclining Figure No 1, silhouetted starkly against the skyline. “I’ve been here for so long, but I’d never seen it look like that before,” she says quietly. “It looked like a different sculpture. I almost didn’t recognise it. How amazing is that?”

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When World War II broke out, Moore was compelled to leave his teaching position and receive a commission as a war illustrator. During this period, Henry Moore’s drawings depicted Londoners hiding from bombing raids on subway platforms. He described being stunned by the sight of the humans sprawled along with the platform, which seemed almost like cocoons or sleeping creatures. Moore’s home was destroyed in 1940, so he and his family relocated to a farmhouse near Perry Green, United Kingdom, where he worked and lived for the remainder of his busy career. Moore returned again and again to the reclining figure, initially inspired by the early Mexican Chacmool sculptures he saw at the British Museum in the 1920s. The subject re-occurs throughout his career with infinite variations of form and line, here the use of drapery to accentuate the shape and continuous line of the body. The helmet … became a recording of things inside other things. The mystery of semiobscurity where one can only half distinguish something. In the helmet you do not quite know what is inside. ₂ By the 1970s, Henry Moore’s artwork was being shown in over 40 exhibitions a year, and he was one of the planet’s most successful and profitable living creatives.

Moore, in Moore: Head-Helmet: An Exhibition to Celebrate the 150 th Anniversary of the Foundation of the University of Durham (Durham: DLI Museum and Arts Centre, 1982), p. 1 The Henry Moore Sculpture Centre in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, opened in 1974. It comprises the world's largest public collection of Moore's work, most of it donated by him between 1971 and 1974. Moore's Three Way Piece No. 2 (The Archer) has also been on display in Nathan Phillips Square at Toronto City Hall since 1966. [80] United States [ edit ]Moore died on 31 August 1986 at his home in Perry Green. His body was interred at the churchyard of St Thomas's Church. [51] The Art Gallery of Ontario's Henry Moore collection is the largest public collection of his works in the world