It was during the 1930s that Henry Moore (1898-1986) began to experiment with mediums other than sculpture, with his sketches reflecting the continuing evolution of his artistic expression. Moore’s works on paper anticipate many of the themes and motifs that were central to his monumental sculptures, including reclining figures and mother and child, and came to be an integral feature of his artistic process. Moore’s Studies of Reclining Figures (1940), Coalmine Sketchbook (1942), and ‘Shelter Drawings’ depict a range of subterranean figures within which the influence of his later sculptures and drawings are clearly visible. Inspired by observation as well as imagination, it was in his capacity as an official war artist from 1941 that Moore’s works became widely identified and admired. In his drawings and subsequent sculptures of this period he rendered figures that acknowledged the nation’s need for tenderness and healing with the inception of the Madonna and Child series.

Moore’s legacy is, in common with his subjects, enduring. In his sculptures he celebrated the motifs of mother and child and the family group in ways that remain highly emotive in their reference to the nurturing bonds of familial life, whilst his reclining figures remind us of the association between the human body and the landscape. His sketches employ a type of line work suggestive of skeletal form and mass through which we see Moore’s skill at blurring the boundaries between the mediums of paper and sculpture with his experimentation of iconic forms mapped out intimately in multiple figures.