Henry Moore

Marlborough-Godard Gallery, Toronto
Acquired from the above circa the 1960s 

Will Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, London, 1960, no. 175, illustration of another cast p. 230
Ionel Jianou, Henry Moore, Paris, 1968, no. 401, illustration of another cast p. 81
Robert Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1921-1969, New York, 1971, nos. 523 & 528, illustration of another cast n.p.
Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture, 1955-64, vol. 3, London, 1986, no. 421, illustrations of another cast p. 24 & pl. 39a
John Hedgecoe, A Monumental Vision, The Sculpture of Henry Moore, London, 1998, no. 388, illustration of another cast p. 222

The work is in excellent condition. The surface features a mottled dark brown and golden brown patina. Light surface dirt and minor accretion is visible in the deeper crevices of the figures. Otherwise good.
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Henry Moore described his creative process to Warren Forma in 1964: “I have an idea, or an idea comes to me, and then I find the material to make it in, and to do that, the ideas that I may be concerned with, I’ll produce several maquettes–sketches in plaster–not much bigger than one’s hand, certainly small enough to hold in one’s hand, so that you can turn them around as you shape them and work on them without having to get up and walk around them, and you have a complete grasp of their shape from all around the whole time. If the form, the idea that you’re doing is much bigger than that, then to see what it’s like on the other side, you have to get up, walk around it, and this restricts your imagining and grasping what it’s like as you can when it’s small. But all the time that I am doing this small model, in my mind it isn’t the small model that I’m doing, it’s the big sculpture that I intend to do. It’s as though one were drawing in a little sketchbook a tiny little sketch for a monument, or a tiny little drawing might be on the back of an envelope, but in your mind would be the equestrian statue that is over life-size. In the same way, these little plaster maquettes that I make, to me, are all big sculptures" (Warren Forma, Five British Sculptors, Work and Talk, New York, 1964, n.p.).

The inspiration for the present work derives from Moore’s commissioned projects from the 1950s, one for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and the other for the Time-Life Building in London. Both projects provided an architectural backdrop for the sculptors work. The challenge of relating a sculptural figure to its architectural surroundings continued to fascinate Moore for the remainder of the decade. He produced several sculptures including the present work which combine the human and architectonic forms.