Henry Moore is best known for his monumental bronze and stone sculptures. He pioneered a new vision for modern sculpture, studying art of the past and taking classical subjects and poses and revolutionising them. Moore was mainly inspired by the human body and natural forms, focusing intently on the subject matter of mother and child, reclining figures, and how internal and external forms intersect. By the 1930s, Moore had made his name and established himself as a leading avant-garde sculptor.

Recumbent Figure, 1938, explores a prominent theme in the canon of art history, the reclining female nude. This small bronze recalls Moore’s larger stone sculpture of the same name. It was created as a maquette, a technique only adopted in 1935 by Moore as the need to conceptually visualise his sculptures became increasingly important. Moore’s larger Recumbent Figure was a site-specific sculpture, created for the terrace of architect Serge Chermayeff’s modernist villa, Bentley Wood in East Sussex. The curves and mounds of the body recall the undulating landscape of the surrounding south downs, with caves and tunnels isolating and at the same time linking parts of the body. The abstract nature of the form is what sets this apart, the only defining feature that tells us this is a woman are her breasts, which cantilever over a tunnel of negative space. The sculpture not only interacts with its surroundings but also with the viewer, the head sculpted so it could appear to be facing you from multiple perspectives.

In addition to this maquette, eight others were created in preparation for his final sculpture, which is now in the collection of TATE.